The apex of Filipino nationalist school of history: Teodoro Agoncillo, Renato Constantino, and Horacio de la Costa S.J. revisited, 1956-1972 PDF

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第 26 回フィリピン研究会全国フォーラム The apex of Filipino nationalist school of history: Teodoro Agoncillo, Renato Constantino, and Horacio de la Costa S.J. revisited, 1956-1972 Luis Zuriel P. Domingo1 University of Santo Tomas Graduate School Senator Claro M. Recto was the first to formally outline the contours o...

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第 26 回フィリピン研究会全国フォーラム

The apex of Filipino nationalist school of history: Teodoro Agoncillo, Renato Constantino, and Horacio de la Costa S.J. revisited, 1956-1972 Luis Zuriel P. Domingo1 University of Santo Tomas Graduate School

Senator Claro M. Recto was the first to formally outline the contours of Filipino nationalism when he lobbied in Congress the 1956 Rizal Bill. The said bill mandated students to study the life and works of Filipino hero José Rizal, providing students the opportunity to revisit the period where the concept of a Filipino nation first developed. Radical intellectuals and nationalist academics, however, saw this Recto breakthrough as germinal to decolonize or reshape the concept of Filipino nation and identity subjugated in colonial-oriented historiography and historicism, but this feat ardently trajected to an unanticipated resurgence of nationalism. The period of the 1950s to the 1970s was dominated by three prominent ‘nationalist’ historians: Teodoro Agoncillo, Renato Constantino, and Horacio de la Costa, S.J. This paper hopes to explore how they reinterpreted the study of Philippine history, the positives it contributed to the development of postwar nationalist thought, likewise, highlight the negatives it produced. Teodoro Agoncillo, Renato Constantino, Horacio de la Costa, nationalism, decolonization Introduction The Philippines was granted by the United States independence in 1946. This granting of independence, however, was tied to neo-imperialist policies that put the Philippines in a disadvantageous position. The United States tied War Rehabilitation assistance with the Bell Trade Act. The granting of independence also included the signing of the Military Bases Agreement. From the point of view of the Filipino nationalist, The Philippines, though granted independence, remained under the influence and control of the United States. The question of real and full independence remained uncertain. The Bell Trade Act, for example, granted U.S. citizens and businesses the rights to Philippine natural resources in parity of those of Filipino citizens. The Bell Trade Act also included unequal provisions that gave the U.S. control over the Philippines’ monetary and exchange policy (Golay 1969; Doronilla 1992). The situation worsens when the USbacked government of President Manuel Roxas and his allies in Congress barred members of the Democratic Alliance (DA). The DA, a coalition of Filipino nationalists and rural peasants who won six seats in Congress, was accused of alleged electoral fraud. They were only allowed to sit in Congress after a plebiscite of the parity rights amendment. The disappointment of these nationalist and peasant representatives forced them to retreat, reinforce, and resume fighting in the mountains of Central Luzon through armed rebellion (Kerkvliet 1977; Simbulan 2007).2 While armed rebellion is waged in the countryside; a veteran statesman, Claro M. Recto, led the attacks on the role of the U.S. in Philippine affairs beginning in 1952. Recto argued that 1

Luis Zuriel P. Domingo is a Master of Arts, major in History student at the University of Santo Tomas in Manila, Philippines. This paper was presented at the 26th Young Scholars’ Conference on Philippine Studies in Japan, held in Kanazawa, Ishikawa Prefecture on July 17 to 18, 2021. 2 Filipino guerillas who fought during the Second World War aligned themselves with the Marxist-Leninist 1930s Partido Komunista ng Pilipinas (PKP). The Hukbong Bayan Laban Hapon (People’s Army Against the Japanese) extended their fighting in 1946 as the armed wing of the PKP, Hukbong Mapagpalaya ng Bayan (People’s Liberation Army).

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the special relationship between the Philippines and the U.S. will impede the nation’s economic development and independence (Constantino 1969). To fully strengthen the national consciousness of Filipinos and for Filipinos to have a grasp of the actual situation of the country, Recto lobbied in Congress the famous Rizal Bill of 1956. The said bill mandated students to study the life and works of Filipino hero José Rizal, providing students the opportunity to revisit the period where the concept of a Filipino nation first developed. In this paper, I would like to argue that some radical intellectuals and foremost nationalists saw this Recto breakthrough as germinal to decolonize or reshape the concept of Filipino nation and identity subjugated in colonial-oriented historiography and historicism. I would also like to stress that there was an unrecognized ‘national revolution’ that developed and matured from the mid-1950s to the late-1960s. Though the movements varied in approach, the spirit of the period was focused on the same ambition. From the long list of nationalist academics of the era, the period of the 1950s to the 1970s was dominated by three prominent ‘nationalist’ historians: Teodoro Agoncillo, Renato Constantino, and the Jesuit Horacio de la Costa, S.J. This paper comparatively explores how they have reinvented the study of Philippine history, the positives it contributed to the development of post-war nationalist thought, likewise, highlight the negatives it produced.3 The Filipino point of view “Our history under Spain and, for that matter, under the United States, must be rewritten to give way to a new interpretation,” writes Teodoro Agoncillo, “It must be inclusive to encompass within its fold the active role played by the Filipinos in carving out their destiny. It must be exclusive in the sense that matters not pertinent to the development of our policy [sic] should be ruthlessly deleted to make the role of the Filipinos positive,” (Hila 2001).4 It is clear that Agoncillo’s articulation of the Filipino point of view is a product of the colonizers’ biased interpretation of Filipino history. He recalled how Philippine history textbooks written by Americans referred to Filipino revolutionaries as “bandits” but for the Filipinos, they were certainly “heroes” (Hila 2001). It was at the University of the Philippines (U.P.) that Agoncillo launched his verbalization of the Filipino point of view. Before joining the U.P., Agoncillo started his career as a technical assistant in the Institute of National Language. During the Japanese occupation of the Philippines, he was writing Tagalog poems and literary reviews for bulletin and magazine publications although at the same time was collecting historical materials related to Philippine Revolution (Ileto 2011). He was teaching at the Far Eastern University in Manila when he joined the U.P. in 1958 but met with controversy because of his book The Revolt of the Masses: The Story of Bonifacio and the Katipunan. In 1956, The Revolt of the Masses was published in the U.P. College of Liberal Arts. The book was a winning entry of a Bonifacio biography contest in 1948. In fact, Agoncillo had no intention of joining the contest. It was only his friend Leopoldo Yabes who convinced him to write and join the biography contest. Agoncillo, according to Yabes, had collected a considerable number of 3

This work benefitted from a series of exchanges of ideas with Kyle Vergara of University of Santo Tomas Graduate School; Managing Editor of TALA: An Online Journal of History. All errors and opinions, however, are my own. 4 See Antonio C. Hila, The Historicism of Teodoro Agoncillo (Manila: UST Publishing House). Hila was a student and protégé of Agoncillo at the University of the Philippines. Hila was chairperson of the Department of History of De La Salle before joining Santo Tomas. Most academics who had studied and criticized Agoncillo failed to cite Hila’s illuminating work about Agoncillo’s Filipino viewpoint of re-writing and re-interpreting Filipino history. Hila’s book has provided more nuance on the nationalist historian’s collection of works.

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materials about the Philippine revolution during the Japanese occupation (Ileto 2011). Regrettably, the manuscript was barred for book publication in 1949. The Hukbalahap were waging armed resistance in the countryside. A rising tide of communist and nationalist ideologies were put under the watch of the government through the Congressional Committee on Un-Filipino Activities (CUFA). The period of late-1940s to early-1950s under the CUFA were paranoid of anything related to ideological spurs that may be of threat to the government. The timing was not good to publish a book about class struggle, militant nationalism, and revolution (Guerrero 1977; Hila 2001). So, it was kept in cold storage for eight long years before actual publication.5 The Revolt received a punitive uproar. It was criticized for anti-clerical remarks, use of class struggle framework, and failure to cite the contribution of Spain in the formation of the Philippines in the context of the origins and development of Filipino nationalism. Zafra (1956) would mention “new historic forces and conditions” that gave birth to such “underlying forces and influences which made the Revolution possible.” These forces and conditions are based on the Philippine colony’s opening to foreign trade, material and social progress, Spanish reforms, and the 1872 execution of three Filipino priests. The Catholic-cum-colonial bias of Zafra that produced his parochial understanding of the Philippine Revolution would be met with a series of counterarticles from Agoncillo titled “Four Girls and a Man”. Agoncillo (1956b) argued that to “include the good things the friars did in the Philippines would have meant that the revolution was a mistake.” His critics, as Agoncillo defined, only dragged their “religious faith in the discussion of history.” It looked like less of a scholarly critique but a fact-finding activity on arguments that do not sit well with the critics’ biases and moral beliefs. Agoncillo’s framework of class conflict and class struggle were also mauled as “unsatisfactory, unconvincing, and unscholarly” (Zafra 1956). Agoncillo, in response, would assert that his critics have misread his work and were narrow-minded in understanding his interpretations. The debate closed down with his critics having not provided historical evidence to refute his claims in the book (Agoncillo 1956b; Hila 2001). But interrogations on Agoncillo’s use of class conflict continued to be a controversial topic of discussion decades after its publication. Agoncillo’s characterization and interpretation of the “masses” would be blamed for its incoherency, thus criticized for its “conditioning factors” (Aguilar 2020). After all, history is never objective, “history is written by every generation. Every generation writes its own history using the same sources. The interpretations vary according to time,” (Ocampo 2011). This is true with the Revolt, despite its ambiguities, it remains a classic and a great contribution to Philippine [revolutionary] historiography. The Revolt was the first to outline the political, economic, and sociological condition of the late-nineteenth century Philippines in relation to a surge of national sentiment and ideology (Guerrero 1977; Ileto 2011; Curaming 2012). In those years, Agoncillo’s Revolt was controversial not because of the paradoxes it offered, but because it was too Marxist and too obsessed with the masses. As the period of the 1950s was still allergic to anything that could be connected to Marxism, socialism, and communism. Ramon Magsaysay just won the presidency through the help of the Central Intelligence Agency. Washington was still waging an

See Reynaldo Ileto, Reflections on Agoncillo’s The Revolt of the Masses and the Politics of History in Southeast Asian Studies, for a detailed account of The Revolt of the Masses. The surrounding controversy and its own history behind its writing in the 1940s and eventual publication in 1956 during Magsaysay’s presidency.

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ideological war with Moscow. Magsaysay, dubbed to champion the masses, persisted to be a fierce fighter of communism and closely tied to the Americans (Cullather 1993). The timing in 1956 was perfect for both Senator Recto and Agoncillo. Recto’s controversial Rizal Bill was signed into law and Agoncillo was beginning to pursue his articulation of a Filipino point of view of reinterpreting Philippine history. The Hukbahalap’s armed struggle ended in 1954. The controversy produced by the Revolt was only part of a series of history wars in the 1950s and the 1960s (Ileto 2010). The venue of nationalist struggle had shifted from militancy to assessing national awareness. Recto wanted to justify his nationalist stance through apprehension of nationalism according to social realities happening. Around this time, Recto is joined by Senators José P. Laurel and Lorenzo M. Tañada in pursuit of the nationalist dream. Agoncillo’s early years in U.P were moot. Ileto (2010) writing on Agoncillo, “recalls how in the early 1950s he and his group of academic rebels comprising Leopoldo Yabes, Ricardo Pascual, and Cesar Majul were battling narrow-mindedness […] in the U.P.” The Department of History of U.P. back then when Agoncillo joined was conservative and possess such colonial hangover. The U.P., after all, was founded by the Americans. Unintentionally, in the following years, Agoncillo and his cohorts’ works on Rizal, Bonifacio, and the Philippine revolution, provided new historical interpretations anchored on nationalist standpoints, would cast through a reawakening of national consciousness. Agoncillo and his cohorts’ mission complemented Recto’s vision. The Revolt would be followed by the publishing of Malolos: The Crisis of the Republic in 1960. The Malolos would spark yet another controversy. The Malolos served as the great sequel of the Revolt. In the book, Agoncillo, still writing in his Marxist framework that the Philippine Revolution is the handiwork of the masses (Hila 2001), would argue that the Revolution would be betrayed by the “Haves”. The “Haves” are Filipino middle-class to elite-class intellectuals who refused to support the first phase of the Revolution in 1896 but decided to join the second phase. Although they soon betrayed the masses by aligning themselves with the enemy to protect personal interest. While trusted by Aguinaldo’s government, Agoncillo showed that the “Haves” did not remain loyal to Aguinaldo: “The betrayal in the first epoch may be forgiven, but that of the second can not,” (Agoncillo 1960). Agoncillo, like in the Revolt then, capitalized on the issue of class struggle among ranks of the revolutionaries. Aguinaldo and Mabini, born out of masses upbringing, were seen by “Haves” as amateurs and inept to lead the revolution. At the end of the book, according to Agoncillo’s interpretation, Aguinaldo, Mabini, and the rest of the revolutionaries would turn out to be casualties of betrayal of the “Haves”. The Malolos did not receive substantial criticism compared to the Revolt.6 However, the questions raised by Agoncillo in the Malolos would be vital in shaping the succeeding scholarship related to the Philippine Revolution. Also, the arguments of Agoncillo in the Malolos would be supplementary later on to Renato Constantino’s articulation of the “ilustrado syndrome”. While the nationalist discourse on history was dominated by secular intellectuals and scholars from the U.P., a Jesuit historian from Ateneo de Manila, Fr. Horacio de la Costa, S.J. was

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The Revolt and Malolos would be classics in the study of the Philippine Revolution. The University of the Philippines Press would continue its printing and reissue a new edition with an added preface. Agoncillo died in 1985, some historians attempted to refute the arguments presented in the Revolt and Malolos like Glenn May’s Inventing a Hero (1997) and Resil Mojares’ Brains of the Nation (2006). See also Determining the Truth: The story of Andres Bonifacio, edited by Bernarditta Reyes Churchill (Manila: Philippine National Historical Society, 1997).

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the “Catholic voice” within this discourse of national-historical consciousness (Ileto 2010). After his doctorate in history at Harvard University, Fr. de la Costa returned to the Philippines. When he returned to Manila in 1953, the Hukbalahap rebellion was nearing defeat. As mentioned earlier, the struggle was being reassessed and shifted to a different arena. Around this period, Fr. de la Costa was teaching history at the Ateneo. Unlike Agoncillo, Fr. de la Costa, a Jesuit priest, never sympathized with the idea of communism or socialism as the solution for socio-economic liberation. Fr. de la Costa, however, recognizes the pressing problems why the Hukbahalap, a group of rural peasants and some nationalists, was waging war against the Philippine government (Ileto 2017). In the essay, Riding the Whirlwind, Fr. de la Costa reflects on the situation of Asia during the Cold War. “A whirlwind is sweeping over Asia; but the heart of it, like the center of a typhoon, is a vacuum,” writes Fr. de la Costa, he looks at the growing threat of communism that is harnessing the power of nascent revolutions in Asia. He cements his analysis by recognizing the efforts of Rizal and Sun Yat-sen, who fathered revolutions in the region before the advent of communism in Asia (de la Costa 1952). Fr. de la Costa’s analysis raises a query: is not communism was only adopted by Asian nations as an option to combat or achieve total emancipation from Western imperialism that was also sweeping Asia during the Cold War? Is not Rizal’s revolution interrupted by another Western nation? Fr. de la Costa offered a solution, “go to the masses, as the Communist have gone to the masses,” but the good father seemed half-hearted and leaves an open-ended theorization, “It is useless, besides being unjust to try to stop social change. That is not the issue. The issue is who is to control that change? Who is to direct it? Who is to ride the whirlwind?” (de la Costa 1952). But this was the beginning of Fr. de la Costa’s “later research into a revolutionary clergy and his much later embrace of liberation theology,” (Ileto 2017). Fr. de la Costa did not produce an opus like the Revolt or the Malolos, his Jesuit in the Philippines would be recognized as mere religious work (Ocampo 2011; Ileto 2017). Early in his career as a historian, it was shocking that despite his doctoral degree in history at the famous Harvard, Fr. de la Costa had criticized historians whose interpretations were anchored on Hegelian and Marxist frameworks. He mauled Agoncillo’s [revolutionary history] framework in his essay, “Three Lectures on History” published at the Philippine Historical Association’s (PHA) Historical Bulletin in 1960 (Ileto 2016). Though his works during his active years in the late-1950s to the late1960s would be substantial and critical in the development of the Filipino point of view and reinterpretation of Philippine history. Re-imagining the Philippine nation Renato Constantino, like Agoncillo, was another controversial figure of the period. Much of his writings were published in the mid to late-1960s preceding the sporadic campus strikes and rise of left-wing nationalist organizations. “Philippine history must be rewritten from the point of view of the Filipino,” Constantino writes, “The education of the Filipino must be a Filipino education.” Originally written in 1959, The Miseducation of the Filipino was published in the Weekly Graphic in 1966. The timing was also ripe for a brewing “revolution” in progressive campuses in Manila. Like Agoncillo, Constantino was concerned about decolonizing Filipino history. Constantino, however, was more pronounced in his enunciations toward an...