Colonial History, Noli Me Tangere, and Jody Blanco on the Farm
By Curie Sevilla (csevilla@stanford.edu)
The Race and Gender in the Iberian World Research Group, a Stanford Research Unit under the Division Literatures, Cultures, and Languages recently hosted a talk at Pigott Hall, Building 260, featuring Professor John (Jody) D. Blanco, associate professor of Comparative Literature, Spanish and Cultural Studies at UC San Diego (UCSD).
Prof. Blanco received his BA (with honors) from Arts and Ideas in the Residential College at University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and his MA and Ph.D. from the Department of Comparative Literature at UC Berkeley, California. His research interests concern the colonial roots of globalization between the 16th and 19th centuries. His courses at UCSD engage with themes in and through the study of Philippine, Latin American, Caribbean, and US minority literatures and cultures covering religious, political, and artistic aspects. He is the author of Frontier Constitutions: Christianity and Colonial Empire in the Nineteenth Century Philippines (UC Press 2009; University of the Philippines Press 2010); and the translator of Julio Ramos’s Divergent Modernities in Latin America: Culture and Politics in the Nineteenth Century.
Stanford Professor Lisa Surwillo and Ph.D. graduate student Tania Arabelle Flores invited our community to Prof. Blanco’s talk as he presented excerpts from his latest book, The Mission As Agent of Frontierization in the Colonial Philippines and Latin America. He expressed his enjoyment in meeting Stanford students and faculty and speaking in Professor Surwillo’s class about their reading of José Rizal’s Noli Me Tangere.
“It’s always a surprise for me to hear that faculty are teaching Rizal’s novel(s) in universities throughout the US, not to mention Latin America and Europe, and such a pleasure to know that his work translates well into many others,” he explains, “But of course, the biggest pleasure was meeting Fil-Am staff and students, which warmed my heart. After all, it is for other Pinoys that I write and teach, even if it’s available to anyone!”
We thank Prof. Blanco for sharing his expertise, and for answering a few questions about his talk and what this means to the Filipino American Community at Stanford and beyond.
Please tell us in a few words what your talk at Stanford was about.
My talk was called “The Mission as an Agent of Frontierization in the Spanish Colonial Philippines.” In it, I intend to drastically revise Philippine history as we understand it, by demonstrating how the religious missionaries, far from advancing the interests of the Spanish Crown and Hispanization more broadly, actually labored to arrest the encroachment of Spanish law (as well as institutions, language, and customs) in mission territory. This territory, which constituted most of the archipelago beyond Manila and several coastal towns between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, remained a frontier not in spite of the religious, but because of them. The main result of this action, these actions, was a state of legal and institutional anarchy that amounted to the rule of impunity or lawlessness on the one hand; and the substitution of law by Christianity as a form of ersatz law and order. The impossibility of effectively enforcing any kind of law also led to the somewhat liberal interpretation of Christianity by natives, which allowed them to preserve certain customs and develop new ones to resist both the religious and the Crown.
What key takeaways would you want our Fil-Am colleagues to know about this talk, and generally, about our history as a people?
One of the main takeaways that I hoped to communicate is the need to go back and read the works of our Philippine national heroes: José Rizal most importantly, but also Marcelo H. del Pilar. They understood the central role that the religious Orders played in preventing natives from access to the law, while also preventing political authority from extending throughout the archipelago. Even after their deaths, the religious managed to censor their works in education so that Filipinos never recognized the full extent of the havoc the religious Orders had wreaked. Another takeaway would be for Fil-Ams to understand the power of the past to shape the present.
How does knowledge of our Philippine colonial history contribute to our Filipino American identity?
The history of colonialism is embedded in the culture and society of our parents and ancestors. That includes not only the peculiar beliefs they profess, but also the monsters that haunt their imaginations. But how that contributes to our identity today will depend on the Filipino-American. Some of us don’t even know we are Filipino at all, because we have no sense of ourselves historically and in relation to the forces that shape Philippine society. To quote a famous phrase, “Ang hindi marunong lumingon sa pinanggalingan ay hindi makakarating sa paroroonan."(He who does not look back from where he came will never reach his destination.)
What can younger generations of Fil-Ams do to learn about our history as a people?
The first thing is to spend some time in the Philippines. Talk to people, read books, watch movies. One of the questions that kept coming up for me when I graduated from college and lived in the Philippines for a few years was: who are my parents? All the things I had assumed to be true about them turned out to be much more complicated. The more I learned about their lives, the more I learned about history.
What are the best primary and secondary sources to use when learning about Filipino and Filipino American history?
The best history of the Philippines was written by Onofre D. Corpuz, and it was called “The Roots of the Filipino Nation.’ I also go back to Renato Constantino’s histories (The Philippines: A Past Revisited and A Continuing Past) and essays (Dissent and Counter-Consciousness) for the provocative arguments he developed. But students of Philippine and Fil-Am history should always begin with Rizal’s essays, “The Philippines a Century Hence” and “On the Indolence of the Filipinos” as well as Marcelo H. del Pilar’s “Monastic Sovereignty in the Philippines.”
Aside from Jose Rizal, who are other notable Filipinos – authors or historical figures, from whom we can learn about our history?
My favorite novels were all written a decade or so after Philippine independence: Nick Joaquin’s Woman Who Had Two Navels, N.V.M. Gonzalez’s The Bamboo Dancers, and Kerima Polotan’s The Hand of the Enemy. They all had in common this sense of urgency of coming to terms with the past in order to chart a course for the future nation; and the fear that whatever they didn’t account for would be lost to memory forever. The cooptation of nationalism by the Marcos regime led to a collective amnesia that continues to this day. But there are so many great authors writing now! Even learning about Maria Ressa, our first Nobel Prize winner, offers a point of entry in our history.
