Students of English

To the Pharisees, RE: #Occupy Wall Street

2011-10-31T00:33:00.004+08:00

By Mila D. Aguilar

Pharisees.

Your population hangs wretched with widespread unemployment and you claim:

Never in the history of the world has there been a system that alleviates human suffering, such as yours.

Your productivity has been down for decades and you jeer:

Never in the history of the world has there been a system that allows for human creativity, such as yours.

How many nations have you destroyed with your arrogance?

How many peoples have you decimated with your weapons?

How many histories have you mangled with your greed?

“All the believers were one in heart and mind. No one claimed that any of their possessions was their own, but they shared everything they had.” (Acts 4:32)

Never in the history of the world?

And you claim to be Biblical?

How could you ask:

“You assume that the wealthiest 1 percent giving up their wealth would solve the problem. How do you know that to be true?”

You have never heard of the rich young man?

“If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.” (Mt 19.21)

Who do you follow, with Ph.Ds after your names? Is it really Jesus?

Hypocrites.

You are given a narrow path to the lost, and you make a detour.

Who is your god? Is it God, or your country?

Who is your lord? Is it Jesus, or your 1 percent?

- October 30, 2011
10:30-11:16 pm

[Digital Painting by Tala Roque]

In Answer to James Soriano

2011-08-29T14:25:00.008+08:00

The Filipino is Multilingual

by Mila D. Aguilar

This is not to disparage James Soriano, a young man who may have learned German, but hasn’t yet seen the world in all its gritty detail. I wouldn’t quarrel with him, especially since I’m a very old woman of 62; but I would love for him to learn a thing or three about his country.

When I was born in 1949, my father, Jose V. Aguilar, was winding up what became known as the Sta. Barbara Language Experiment. Before I turned two months old, he had already proven through this experiment in a remote town in Iloilo, the island of Panay, that pupils who were taught in their mother tongue during the first two years of school learned better than those who were shocked into learning through the medium of English.

But that does not mean that I grew up entirely using my mother tongue, Hiligaynon. My father was wise enough to speak to me purely in English, while he bid my mother and siblings to speak to me purely in Hiligaynon.

Did I grow up confused? No. I grew up versatile in both languages. When I transferred to U.P. Diliman with my family at the age of four, I learned my Tagalog from playmates. By the time I reached Grade 1, I was speaking it fluently.

When, at the age of 25, I was assigned to the underground of Mindanao and consciously mingled with the urban poor, I learned Cebuano in a month. When I made a week-long foray into the hinterlands of Samar at the age of 34, shortly before I left my beloved movement, I was able to get the rudiments of Waray and would not have forgotten it had I stayed in Samar a bit longer.

I also know a smattering of Kapampangan and Ilokano from friends both within and without the underground.

The Filipino is multilingual. You can see that from 10 million Filipinos all around the world, learning the languages of their adopted countries so quickly, you could hardly hear them stuttering. And most of these Filipinos aren’t rich; they’re masa, domestic helpers, drivers, janitors, seamen, nurses with hungry mouths to feed.

As to whether they become grammatical or not is not the point. The point is, they could communicate with anyone in any language.

So what’s this “revelation” about living a princely life with English?

There is nothing new to it. During the Spanish times, the conquistadores herded the datus and their families into town centers and cut them off from their barangays, the better to prevent them from staging rebellions. They brainwashed those datu families into thinking they were a privileged lot by teaching them Spanish, among other things.

The datu families began to think they were princes, living a princely life using Espanggol.

No different from our “princes” today, who think they’re so lucky to be born privileged.

But then this shows that life today is no different from life centuries ago. We still have a privileged class bragging about how good they are in the language of the conquistador.

This is not to disparage James Soriano, a young man who may have learned German, but hasn’t yet seen the world in all its gritty detail. I wouldn’t quarrel with him, especially since I’m a very old woman of 62; but I would love for him to learn a thing or three about his country.

In English, because that is the language he understands. But I could very well switch to Filipino, which serendipitously combines all languages with Tagalog as base; or Hiligaynon, or Cebuano. But he wouldn’t understand.

I have written underground tracts in Tagalog and even tried to translate Bible verses into Filipino right on Facebook, so James can’t say that our languages are meant only for informal conversations. And has he heard U.P. professors teaching biology, physics and chemistry in Pilipino?

Truth is, English is not necessarily the language of connection, because a full three-quarters of the world don’t speak it anyway. One does not have to connect using English; one connects by communicating with the eyes using one’s Filipino smile. The language, whatever language that is, comes after.

That is what Filipinos all over the world, from Europe to Asia to the Middle East to Latin America to Africa, have discovered.

Oh yes -- I left out the U.S. That’s because it’s perhaps one of the few countries in the world left that is largely monolingual, and bilingual only among first and second generation immigrant families. That they’re teaching second languages like Spanish now is a recognition not only of their Latin American migration problem but of their scientific finding that monolingualism makes for a dumb population.

No, English is not a universal language, I teach in TESOL. Does God, who rules the universe, and the multiverses as well, speak in English? Of course not. He speaks to you Spirit to spirit, in any language you can accept with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength.

At most, English is the language of world commerce. If that is what the upper classes of Philippine society need it for, then so be it. Let them deal with Japanese and Chinese CEOs in English.

But let me tell you what happened to this language of commerce in the 1950s, after my father had so painstakingly shown, through his Sta. Barbara Experiment, that the mother tongue is a better medium of instruction for efficient learning in Grades 1 and 2.

A man named Clifford Prator, from the University of California in Los Angeles, came up calling vehemently for a return to English as the medium of instruction on all levels in Philippine schools. His reason was, in a word, in my view, something like: Ah basta! English is superior.

Subsequently, my father’s findings were twisted statistically to show that, indeed, his findings were wrong: English was really the better medium of instruction on all levels.

I’m sure these same tactics are being used and will be used again and again to push the superiority of the English language in the Philippine scene, including and especially in the Constitution.

Sige, go ahead. Meantime, I will use the language of the reconquistador to shout down its proponents.

So have I connected?

Apir!

N.B.: It appears (no pun intended) that James Soriano's teacher has since retracted for him. Please see https://www.facebook.com/notes/jonathan-capulas-balsamo/mula-sa-guro-sa-filipino-ni-james-soriano/10150264797591269 for that.

The original essay by James Soriano is here, after the Manila Bulletin withdrew it from its website: http://blogwatch.tv/2011/08/language-learning-identity-privilege-by-james-soriano/

How to Become an Honest Bureaucrat

2011-07-19T08:06:00.007+08:00

Wilhelm G. Ortaliz: He Grew Orchids

By Mila D. Aguilar

[From Good Morning Philippines, Vol. 1 No. 10]

How does one stay honest as a government bureaucrat? Wilhelm G. Ortaliz’ answer seems to have been to grow orchids. With the campaign against corruption in government as well as in the private sector under way, officials may want to look into his solution.

Ortaliz, fondly called Willie by family and friends, got to a position as high as Assistant Minister of the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) under Roberto Ongpin. However, he refused to be appointed permanently in government, preferring to finally become a consultant to Philippine Export Zone Authority (PEZA) head Lilia De Lima, though he was a CESO -- a Career Executive Service Officer. In government parlance, that means he could not be booted out of government unless under grave circumstances such as a criminal or serious administrative case.

Willie was so fond of orchids that he became Vice President of the Philippine Orchid Society. This was not his only advocacy, however. He was also a Board Director of The One Algon Place Foundation, an advanced behavioral health facility dedicated to the cure of addiction to drugs, alcohol, sex, and even computer games.

But no, he wasn’t addicted to orchids.

How he came to love orchids

The only boy among five siblings, Willy had been his mother’s assistant in her small orchid-laden yard in Iloilo, commanded to fetch this and fetch that, water this and water that in lieu of play. As a boy he sort of resented the idea, not knowing that he would later fall in love with it.

Willie’s mother had not graduated from high school because she had gotten married early to a military man, who later retired as an army captain. That made her concerned about her children’s education; she made sure almost all of them, particularly her only son, graduated from the University of the Philippines in Diliman. And he did in 1966, as a consistent scholar of the National Science Development Board (NSDB), with a B.S. in Chemistry. He even went on to get his M.B.A. also from U.P. Diliman after he had obtained his M.S. Chem from Ateneo.

Though he didn’t exactly relish his role in his mother’s garden, in college he “accidentally stumbled into a Philippine Orchid Show in the site where Harrison Plaza now stands” -- as he himself writes. It was here that he met the doyen of the Ponce Enriles, who was also into orchids. However, he noticed that orchids were at that time a prerogative of the rich. Filipina airline stewardesses would bring them into the Philippines at the behest of the rich, who would then grow them exclusively in their gardens. That gave Willie the dream to grow orchids not to hobnob with the rich nor to get rich, but, he told his sister -- so that “time will come when these orchids will be for the common tao.”

Poor as he was, Willie was amiable. He soon made friends with the doyen whom he would come to call Mama Ponce Enrile as well as the other wealthy ladies who knew all about growing the flowers. After his mother, he got his life’s lessons on orchids from them. Later, he would even write about his saga with this family of flowers in his self-deprecating way, proceeding from phalaenopsis to cattleyas to dendrobiums to teret-vandas and then, he writes, “to something else” he does not quite name.

Where he grew them

Since Willie wasn’t wealthy, he grew his first orchids in the compound that his parents had transferred to from Iloilo so that his mother could supervise her children’s college education. But orchids need the morning sun, and his family’s house faced the afternoon sun, so he had to transfer them to the garden of the Lung Center in Quezon City. At that time, the Lung Center was renting out some of its open spaces. Since the hospital executive director then, Dr. Calixto A. Zaldivar Jr., an Ilonggo from Antique and a friend of a family friend, also liked plants, Willie’s orchids were able to stay at the Lung Center for a long time.

But Dr. Zaldivar had to leave the Lung Center at some point, and his replacement did not renew Willie’s contract anymore. Again, Willie was blessed with an offer. A Mr. Tañedo, who owned unused property in Fairview, offered it to Willie’s orchids for free! He even allowed Willie to put up a house there, the only proviso being that Willie would have to pay the taxes on land and improvements.

It was a good deal, and so Willie stayed on at Fairview for 10 years, up to his death from illness on February 26, 2011.

And he became Willie the gift-giver

At this point you would be asking, so what did Willie’s orchids have to do with being an honest public servant?

Well, let’s put it this way: Willie’s father had taught him and his sisters the value of honesty. Their father told them time and again, “Safeguard the family name because it’s the only thing that you can bring to your grave.”

From the time Willie graduated from U.P., he was already employed in government, first by Ting Paterno in the Economic Development Foundation, then at DTI, as assistant minister in charge of such powerful bodies as the Iron and Steel Authority. Once, he received a Betamax at home; the Betamax was accompanied by a calling card. He immediately returned the “gift,” saying he wasn’t interested, but if the donor was serious, to please replace it with two ceiling fans and two floor fans for the Elementary Laboratory of the Philippine Normal College, which he knew to be a hothouse.

“Gifts” that were brought to his office, on the other hand, were raffled off and distributed to indigents.

Anthropologists would tell us that gift-giving was practiced by tribal chieftains from way back to affirm and confirm their power over another tribe. The one who gave the greater gift was deemed to have the greater power over the other.

Willie turned around this gift-giving syndrome by giving gifts himself. Not out of pocket, but out of his orchids, which he grew by the sweat of his brow. For birthdays, he made corsages cradled in beautiful boxes that he fashioned himself. For weddings, he supplied not only corsages, but all the flowers needed going up to the altar. In every office affair, he would stand out with his contribution of orchids to the occasion. Once he even arranged floating flowers with candles in a swimming pool for a Chinese friend in Forbes Park!

Not content with that, for Christmas he would give away his special ensaymada, which he himself kneaded and baked using a total of two sacks of flour!

What can be more valuable, and therefore more powerful, than gifts proffered using one’s labor of love?

Willie’s elder sister Cynthia Ortaliz-Ranada once took over his Lung Center orchids just before they were transferred to Fairview. All those who saw them wanted to buy some, but he would never sell. So finally, just before the transfer, he relented -- he gave his sister the authority to sell them for a brief two days. “Bahala ka na,” he told her.

She sold P25,000 worth of orchids in two days.

That was how much they were worth if he had deigned to become an orchid businessman. But it was not his calling. His calling was to give them away free, cum labor on flower arrangement for corsages worth as much as P350 each.

So his friendships lasted beyond death

And so Wilhelm Ganzon Ortaliz survived the government bureaucracy unscathed, his head held high, the admiration for him abounding. It was in these circumstances that he met Rudin and Annie Gonzales, whose business was trading in steel at the time Willie was in the Iron and Steel Authority. He did not ask anything from them, nor did they offer anything to him. Instead, he even helped them establish The One Algon Place Foundation, a healing center for the behaviorally disabled, taking time out every weekend he was available to brainstorm on the idea in Barangay Mamatid, Cabuyao, Laguna, where the center is based. Willie’s orchids are there now for all to see.

As to why they are there now is a story in itself. While Willy lay sick at the Kidney Center not wanting to be visited, Annie and Rudin showed up, wanting to take care of him. He tried to shove them off, but Rudin protested vociferously, refusing to forego the privilege of taking care of him even just for a day.

Before he died, Willy mentioned to his sister Cynthia that he wanted to let go of some of his orchids when he recovered. So Cynthia thought of the large Algon property in Cabuyao. On February 26, as he lay comatose at St. Luke’s, she showed the orchids to Annie at Fairview. They then proceeded to St. Luke’s to visit him. Annie distinctly heard Willie say he wanted Algon to have his orchids, comatose as he was. He died soon after.

Today, the organization Willie helped establish, The One Algon Place Foundation, is on its way to well-deserved fame in the field of behavioral sciences. In honor of Willie, it will launch a definitive biography of the man who defied corruption in the government bureaucracy -- by growing orchids. It’s a biography worth waiting for.

In Response to Merlie's Seas

2011-07-09T22:06:00.004+08:00

Someday is Here

(For Merlie Alunan)

By Mila D. Aguilar

Somedayishere somedayishere somedayishere
It came in waves. Foul smells come in waves
Like the cars and the trucks on the highway
By my bedroom sounding like waves surging
Engulfing all sanity, insisting on the right to control
Your life and the babies unborn before and after you.

Somedayishere somedayishere somedayishere
The waters have been rising for years, skyscraper tall,
Rising and ebbing and rising again, smashing onto shores
Rushing down mountains while the earth under quakes
And sinks and ingests one third of humanity in its
Wake, in its wake without your even noticing it.

Somedayishere somedayishere somedayishere
The waters have turned bitter, who knows if it's gnawed
One third of the life in the ocean, and is Wormwood
Fukushima, and Chernobyl and Three Mile Island
And those two nuclear plants in Nebraska whose
Fate we can't fathom -- because they're hiding it?

Somedayishere somedayishere somedayishere
The locusts are already droning somewhere in
Afghanistan, stinging the Taliban and all else
With their scorpion tails, giving them five months to live
While their insides crumble, rumble and stumble
All over and they ask to die but death wouldn't take them.

Somedayishere somedayishere somedayishere
Even the elect are deceived, the trumpets have sounded
The trumpets have sounded into their ears, into
Their ears but they did not hear, they refused to hear
As fire, smoke and sulfur gutted their land while
Their nation sent fire, smoke and sulfur into other lands.

Somedayishere somedayishere somedayishere
We are merely in wait for the two hundred million
Drones will they be? What are the seven thunders
Will they march into Israel or fly by the by? And yet
As we watch, do we change? Do we clasp our Creator
By the hem of His skirt and ask to be taken up with Him

Not someday, it is here, but now, while we can.

- July 8, 2011
7:15 - 8:51 am

[The inspiration for the poem having been Merlie Alunan's "Sea Stories"]
[Images reference Revelation 5-10, Ezekiel 38-39]

Revillame Revisited, Part I of III

2011-05-19T15:30:00.008+08:00

A Portrait of Slow Transformation

By Mila D. Aguilar

Yes, "progressive" darlings, I went to see "Wil Time Bigtime" at its reopening inside ABC-5 on Saturday.

And that’s because I never agreed with your self-righteous rants about Willie Revillame, nor your total damnation of his episode with the hapless boy who macho-danced on his show.

Rather, I have always wondered what made Willie Revillame tick with the masses. These are the masses you are supposed to be loving, at least ideologically, but whom you have never really known. Because the masses you know are the indoctrinated ones, the ones we both call "organized," who do not gyrate or sing or laugh spontaneously.

I have been in search of those masses the past thirty years, and have found them. They are not the masses you know. They are the masses that Willie Revillame knows. He is a representative of those masses.

That is why I have been keeping tabs of Willie Revillame some years now. Not consistently, but closely enough to see that through the years, he has developed, even if by the painful little, shedding his grossness and crassness bit by bit.

My memory of his first suspension was when he, Randy Santiago and John Estrada joked very badly about some sexy vixen beside them, giggling like adolescents with their flies virtually open. Correct my remembrance of the event if I’m wrong.

That suspension, if I remember right, hardly tempered Willie’s attitude towards women, but it did temper his crassness, if only a bit.

Barely-clad women still dance sexily on his shows -- as they do in all viable entertainment extravaganzas -- but he has stopped looking at them lustily, at least in public. For me, this is a very big development both for Willie personally and in terms of his influence over the public at large, even if it happened over a long decade.

But what got me more interested in Willie was when he started to show his compassion for the masses. That was already manifest while he was at ABS-CBN in his tear-jerking interviews with his contestants. You know, if you’re truly in love with the people you pretend to espouse, you show it by the way you ask questions about their personal lives. If you are able to show your sincere interest, they respond to you with the truth -- the naked truth, which may seem vulgar at some points to you who are ensconced in your petty bourgeois ivory towers, but are enough to wrench the hearts of Willie’s masa viewers, who came from the same truth.

At ABS-CBN, however, the money relationship between Willie and the masa often came to the fore. There was even a time when some starlets sang to him something like “Money, Money, Money, Give Me Money and I’ll Give You Love.” You could tell from his face that the song hurt. It was as if the crass jokes he had made with Randy Santiago and John Estrada had come back to him karma-like in the form of a crass song about money. It was as if the reality of his relationship with his mother had struck him dead in his tracks.

At TV5, the money relationship was happily subsumed under his genuine feelings for the people. He still gave away gifts and prizes, and the masses still hankered for them, but the love relationship was on its way to some form of purification -- until, of course, the six-year-old Jan-Jan came onstage, and Willie’s old habit of sincerely trying to give his masses “saya at tuwa” got the better of him.

I don’t blame you for pouncing on that. I do suspect that the media fervor was whipped up in no small measure by parties interested in getting back audience lost during the hours he was on air, but I don’t blame those parties either; all is fair in profit-oriented love and war. But I do stare in wonderment at how none of you who style yourselves as “progressive” saw that Willie Revillame is a child of the class divide and should therefore become a subject of study if not sympathy, but not of utter revilement.

Have you ever tried to get authentic feedback from your un-indoctrinated maids, at the very least? They will tell you that they like Willie because “nakakatulong siya sa tao,” “nagbibigay siya ng saya.” And they will not understand why you have so willy-nilly attacked him.

But anyway, he’s back, to the consternation of the competition. His production team has tried to put together a more thoughtful show highlighted by a state of the art high-definition LED floor. They have integrated your high-brow requirement of a quiz portion at the end of the show. Hopefully that will educate your great unwashed -- your great unwashed, whose priority has, according to the latest studies, always been television, radio and newspapers whether they can afford it or not; in other words INFORMATION, belying your charge of ignorance on them.

Those, however, are not what I noted in my mind when I watched the reopening on Saturday.

What I noticed first and foremost was that the show started with a -- surprise -- prayer! The young man who prayed asked for guidance from the Lord God of heaven and earth. And his prayer, rather long by TV standards, ended with “in Jesus’ name, Amen”!

I asked Jay Montelibano, ABC-5 Managing Director of TV Productions, if this was a practice before the reopening, and he said Yes. Of course I have no one to verify his claim, but my main concern is Willie Revillame anyway. Did I see any change in Willie with regard to his spiritual wellbeing?

I certainly did. While Jay replied that Willie himself had been mentioning God before the reopening, it was my first time to notice. In fact, in the previous show, I was rather concerned that while more and more of his contestants referred to the Lord as their source of strength, he would not respond to them in any way. This time, however, the words came from the man himself.

Does this matter? Isn’t it all a show?

I would say Yes, it matters, and No, it wasn’t a show. The man is transparent -- more transparent than any of your “progressives” or even “saints.” It was his very transparency that got him into all that trouble with the sex jokes, with his 2010 endorsement of Manny Villar, with the Jan-Jan episode. So this time, his transparency speaks of his humbling; he is now, by his very comportment, awed by the God who causes his constant rise and fall; none of his seeming arrogance showed, at least last Saturday.

It was his transparency too that caused him to thank, among others, such Christians as Gary and Angeli Valenciano and Bro. Eddie Villanueva for their heartfelt greetings and concern for him.

It was his transparency that caused him to gush over being regaled to lunch or dinner by rich men and women -- he who came from the poor, he who once had no manners!

So has he totally changed once and for all?

I would like to say Yes, but I remember how long it has taken me to shed all my sins since I surrendered to Jesus Christ as my Lord and Master and was born again of the Holy Spirit. It took God ten years to sweep off the major cobwebs in my mind and another ten years to wash me further of my past. I’m now on my twenty-first year in His service, and He still has to squeeze me of my earthly habits a little bit more!

So now here’s the rub: At the Saturday reopening, Willie brought out a tiny elephant that he said had been given to him by Cristina Ponce-Enrile because it was “maswerte.”

That tiny elephant is indicative of the idols Willie still has to smash in his life. One of those idols is his relationship with his mother. Successful men (and maybe women too) usually have a troublesome relationship with their mothers. It took me sometime to get over my own, and my mother wasn’t even the problem; it was my own rebellion. I was more terrible to my son than my mother ever was to me. So I could imagine how Willie must feel about his mother.

As long as he doesn’t get over that, he will keep on making mistakes, and the competition will keep on pouncing on him.

But once he gets over it, once he has forgiven her fully, once he starts talking openly about her, about his dire poverty and how he grew up; in fact, once he starts to genuinely love a woman for what she is because she loves him for himself -- not his money, nor his talents --, he is certain to become the greatest entertainment host in Philippine history.

***
Part II: The Great Class Divide
Part III: What Then Should Be Done?

Revillame Revisited: Part II of III

2011-05-19T15:26:00.007+08:00

The Great Class Divide

By Mila D. Aguilar

Transformation is not an easy thing to understand if one tends to think statically.

It’s a slow process, especially if one is not willing to change. If can be hastened only by two types of surrender -- first and foremost, total surrender to the Jesus as one’s Lord and Master; and next, surrender of that particular aspect of one’s life that has to be changed.

One can, on the one hand, try one’s best to change a particular trait or habit by one’s lonesome, without Jesus. That makes for a totally bogged down process, a process that repeats its mistakes over and over again like a broken record without end. It’s why I couldn’t truly, totally change in that period of my life when I denied His existence.

One can, on the other hand, surrender to Jesus as one’s Lord and Master and yet not surrender a particular aspect of one’s life. That makes for a slowing down of the process of transformation. It’s why God took so long to change me.

The process of transformation has to be dialectical. God can change you, but you have to be willing to change. Being a respecter of persons, He won’t move until you ask Him.

But once you do with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength, you can be sure He’ll do wondrous things for you. For he can make the blind see and the deaf hear -- as long as they ask.

Has Willie asked? Has he surrendered to Jesus as His Lord and Master?

I don’t know; I haven’t met him personally. I can only tell that there has been some amount of change in the way he conducts his show, as outlined in the first part of this article. Those changes are indicative of some amount of transformation, but how deep the transformation is, we don’t know yet. As I suggested, he will have to surrender himself totally to God, as well as keep contending with certain areas of his past to fully surmount his conduct.

In the meantime, God must love him so much that He keeps shaking him with all manner of personal and professional crises. It looks to me like He really wants him to keep changing.

For the better.

Transformation is a process that a person or society undergoes for the better. The opposite of transformation is retrogression. While a great many individuals in our society have been transformed to some extent or other, our society in general has been retrogressing.

And that is the context in which we must place Willie Revillame, not to excuse him, but to objectify our sentiments regarding his misdemeanors.

Retrogression: The Social Context

History professor and National Historical Commission of the Philippines (NHCP) commissioner Ferdie Llanes has suggested that the solution to the problem of Willie Revillame is education. He is right. But before we get to the solution, let us identify the problem.

Those of you who went to primary and secondary public school in the Philippines before 1972 will remember that your classes opened at 7 am and ended at 4 pm. In other words, you spent a total of eight hours in school.

Each of your subjects lasted at least 45 minutes. Am I correct?

And the absolute maximum number of classmates you had was 40; 30, however, was the average.

For English, you had one 45-minute subject for Reading, as well as a separate 45-minute subject for Writing. In high school, another 45-minute subject, Composition, may even have been added. That made many of you rather good in English, and most of you at the very least passable.

For Tagalog, you had at least one 45-minute subject. It didn’t result in mastery of the language, but at least it taught you to distinguish between the two languages and your vernacular, if any.

Then you had three separate subjects of 45 minutes each: History, Geography, and Social Science.

Since they were three separate subjects, you were able to learn facts and figures from the history not only of the Philippines, but even of the United States. That was History.

You were able to memorize maps; you knew where Cotabato was even if you were from Ilocos Norte. And you even knew the relative location of New York! That was Geography.

You knew that in the olden times, before the Spaniards came, the tribes had aliping namamahay and aliping sagigilid. You knew that the tribes were called balanghay or barangay. You knew that each barangay had a datu. You even knew that the Native Americans, called American Indians at that time, were also tribal, and that they had a council of elders led by a chieftain. That was Social Studies.

In fact, many of you were so good that you became outstanding students at the University of the Philippines, bringing with you the names Arellano, Araullo, Ramon Magsaysay and other public high schools.

But do you know that things have changed drastically since, and pupils aren’t taught the way you were?

The retrogression of the Philippine educational system can be traced back to 1968 with the formation of the Presidential Commission to Survey Philippine Education, or PCSPE. The survey was funded by the World Bank. It was supposed to see how Philippine education could be improved.

The findings of the PCSPE were published under the title Education for National Development in 1970.

These findings recommended the use of public primary and secondary schools as training grounds for technical workers with middle level skills. This, PCSPE said, had to be done in the name of national development.

In order to achieve this aim, PCSPE further recommended that the time for teaching science and math be increased.

But in order to increase the time for teaching science and math, PCSPE recommended that the time for teaching Languages be decreased.

But that wasn’t enough. PCSPE also recommended that the three 45-minutes-each subjects of History, Geography and Social Studies be merged into ONE 45-minute subject.

The Philippine Congress at that time, being of a progressive nationalist bent, resoundingly objected to the PCSPE recommendations.
They deduced that the decrease of Language subjects would result in students who had no skill in science and math either -- for the teaching and learning of science and math necessitate language skills.

They smelled that the merging of History, Geography and Social Studies would result in students without a sense of history, national culture and nationhood.

They suspected that the only reason the World Bank wanted a massive training of technical workers with middle level skills was to feed the factories of foreign corporations with cheap labor.

Moreover, they knew that the sixties were a turbulent era of worldwide student revolts over the Vietnam War, and therefore the real intent of the PCSPE “Education for National Development” was to rid the curriculum of the liberal arts and humanities orientation that led students to revolt against the reigning order.

The recommendations of the World Bank, by the way, were not confined to the Philippines alone. They were imposed in various forms and degrees on all countries of the world, the United States and Europe included, where most student revolts had occurred.

So the PCSPE recommendations did not pass the scrutiny of Congress.

1972: Martial Law is Imposed

Then Marcos, with the apparent blessings of the U.S., imposed martial law on September 21, 1972.

A day or two later, he signed P.D. 6-A, known as the “Educational Development Decree of 1972,” its Objective #2 being: “Train the nation’s manpower in the middle level skill required for national development.”

Like all bills and laws, P.D. 6-A by itself sounds innocuous enough, with its great and glorious phrases and terms for national ek-ek -- except for its giveaway Objective #2.

But then, when the next school year came, all the recommendations of PCSPE began to be implemented. English became one subject, and History, Geography and Social Studies were merged into one subject called “Sibika.”

So all public school pupils who were born in 1967 and were age six in 1973 started to lose their mastery of the languages, their sense of history, their sense of geography, their sense of national culture, and their sense of nationhood.

These pupils graduated from public elementary school in 1979. They would step into high school the same year.

But while P.D. 6-A allotted ten years and included high school for the development of the iniquitous curriculum, it seemed that a decree wasn’t enough to cement martial law babies and the succeeding generations in its mire.

By 1978, Marcos was forced to form an Interim Batasan Pambansa, and by 1980, he was forced to cosmetically “lift” martial law. So, to further cement martial law babies and the succeeding generations in the mire, Edgardo Angara sponsored an Education Act, which became the Education Bill of 1982.

The Education Bill of 1982, like all bills and laws and P.D. 6-A as well, sounds innocuous enough, with its great and glorious phrases and terms for national ek-ek, except for its giveaway Objective #2 -- which, exactly like P.D. 6-A, states: “Train the nation’s manpower in the middle level skill required for national development.”

So the first generation trained purposely without a mastery of the languages, without a sense of history, without a sense of geography, without a sense of national culture, and without a sense of nationhood graduated from high school in 1983, and from college in 1987.

Those who graduated with an education degree in 1987 became the teachers of the succeeding generations of educational victims.

The next generation of teachers graduated in 2001.

But these two generations were not as hapless as the generation that followed them.

Further Retrogression: RBEC 2002

By the year 2002, despite the millions sent abroad as overseas contract workers starting in the early eighties and increased substantially as a matter of economic policy by the Cory administration after 1986, the education budget was getting smaller by ratio to the national debt and military spending.

Not enough money was allotted to build more classrooms and train more teachers, and the government was unwilling, unable and/or instructed not to spend more.

So Raul Roco thought of a brilliant idea: reduce the number of subjects to five starting with Grade 2 (four in Grade 1), with only 35 minutes allotted to each subject. The five subjects are: English, Pilipino, Science, Math, and Makabayan, which FURTHER squished the five subjects of P.E., M.S.E.P., E.K.A.W.P., and Sibika at Kultura into one!

“Makabayan,” with all its pretensions to the name, is actually physical education, practical arts, music and what not rolled into one.

It is “Et Al,” “Maka,” but definitely not for the bayan.

As a result of Roco’s RBEC, schools were able to hold not only one shift of classes but THREE -- one in the morning, one in the afternoon, and one in the evening.

Parents became happy with the arrangement, because then they could send or employ their young as child labor the rest of the day. These child laborers will be graduating from high school next year, 2012. In 2016 some of them will be college graduates.

Such is the educational situation up to this very date, May 17, 2011.

The hapless teacher majority, who had graduated after 1987 or worse, 2001, are hard-pressed to teach 80-100 students, 35 minutes taking up all of their time just to call the roll.

I know, because I talked to about a hundred of them taking their masteral and doctoral education courses at U.P. Diliman last week.

SO WHAT ABOUT WILLIE?

So what do all these have to do with Willie Revillame, you ask.

Nothing and everything. Willie may not even have gone to school; so secretive is he about his private life, we don’t know what grade he reached.

But certainly, the vast majority of his audience come from the ranks of these martial law babies.

They not only have no firm grasp of any language, no sense of history, no sense of geography, no conceptual sense of national culture, no studied sense of nationhood; they could, at this point, hardly read and write, having been given so little time in school to learn to do it.

None of them could be proud to have come from Arellano, Araullo or Ramon Magsaysay High School anymore.

Much as they would like to succeed in life, therefore -- and they do, they do, I can assure you -- they know, unless they are exceptionally bright and gifted, that they have nowhere to go except abroad, as domestics, drivers, dancers or prostitutes -- despite their diplomas.

In the meantime, while they cannot afford the fees, they are forced to live vagrant lives in the cities.

Their only salvation is jueteng, or the lotto, or some kind soul who would send them or their children through school if not employ them despite their delimited brains.

That kind soul can be Manny Villar, or Jojo Binay, or whatever other politician they could hang on to.

Or it could be Willie Revillame.

Otherwise, without that shot at jueteng, at lotto, without that kind soul who would look at them with empathy in his/her eyes and employ them or send their children to school, what choices are they left with?

They could pick pockets at Divisoria, slither into your houses or cars to steal, kidnap your children, carnap your vehicles, hold you hostage for a million or so, sell shabu.

But most of them still have enough of a fear in God to not want to do that.

So they hang on to Willie Revillame.

The Great Class Chasm

But you know, the most painful factoid in this desperate scenario is that those who had enough resources to go to private schools from elementary up did not suffer the same fate.

While they too were deprived of the separate subjects of History, Geography and Social Studies, they could, up to now, still go to school from 7 am to 4 pm.

If their school administrators are particularly progressive, these could even go around the strictures of “Sibika” and later, “Makabayan,” to infuse more national content into their curricula.

And there are still just a maximum of 30 of them per class.

So now, isn’t that great? The middle classes, the OFWs who earn a little extra to send at least one child to a private school, are saved!

The problem is, the majority are damned.

Where before 1972, the problem was between the rich and the poor, now it is between the rich, the middle classes, and the poor. The middle classes have lost all empathy for the poor, are ever more distant from them, and now treat them the way the rich always did -- like dirt.

That is your great class chasm today.

***
Part I: A Portrait of Slow Transformation
Part III: What Then Should Be Done?

Revillame Revisited: Part III of III

2011-05-19T15:23:00.008+08:00

What Then Should be Done?

By Mila D. Aguilar

A political genius once advised me: “Take the long view.”

Though that political genius has long since been reviled, I have never forgotten his advice.

Taking the long view enables us to see solutions instead of just problems.

It enables us to zoom out of ourselves so that we may see us interacting with our fellows, the situations that surround us and our fellows, the world around our respective situations, and even the multiverses that envelop our world.

If we are able to admit that the multiverse is composed not only of matter but also of spirit, of thought, of energy, of diwa, we might even see the wars in the heavenlies that are being waged at the same time as and in parallel with our wars on earth.

At the very least, it could bring us away from our preoccupation with the minutiae of character assassination and its tendency to divide the nation.

So, having taken the long view away from the seeming nuisance that is Willie Revillame, let us look into the solutions to our vast, and some do think hopeless, social problems.

1. Extend Class Hours, not School Years

When I spoke as a member of a panel of three at the College of Education last week, the hundred masteral and doctoral public school teachers who were there heartily agreed that 35 minutes is too short a period for them to teach anything.

They agreed even more heartily to my proposition that the solution to the problem of shortened class hours was to build more classrooms and employ more teachers.

And they roundly agreed with my stand that as a nation incredibly endowed with natural resources, in fact with a budget that enables the corrupt to pocket 40 percent of it, we CAN afford to build more classrooms and employ more teachers.

The question merely redounds to a matter of policy, of thrust, of POLITICAL WILL AND NATIONAL RESOLVE.

But then, of course, forces greater than us will conspire against such a move.

These may be the same imperial forces that conspired to bring about the PCSPE in the first place.

They may be the same forces that have conspired for decades, indeed centuries, to keep our masses down on their knees, begging for alms.

They may be the same forces that would extend school years, rather than class hours, compounding the problem rather than solving it.

We need to struggle against such forces.

Indeed, we need to pray for God to break them apart and bind them up, so that they can do us no more harm.

2. Restore History, Geography & Social Studies in all Grade Levels

This will be an even greater struggle than the first.

No empire would want to see a people already disarmed gaining back their sense of history, culture and nationhood.

But we have to struggle and pray for it, because otherwise we will soon be lost as a people, our riches taken over by others who through their own folly have depleted their natural and human resources.

3. Promote Mastery of Knowledge through Mother Tongue-Based Multilingual Education (MTB-MLE)

MTB-MLE is education that starts with the use of the student’s first language as medium of instruction, with the graduated introduction of second languages as subjects.

It has already been introduced by DepEd in a memo to all schools and is being implemented with the able help of the U.P. College of Education and other institutions and non-governmental organizations of language learning.

Studies have shown -- including my father’s pioneering Iloilo Experiment way back in 1948 -- that pupils learn faster, better and more when their own language is used as the medium of instruction.

But full and effective implementation of MTB-MLE will not succeed unless class hours are extended. Otherwise, MTB-MLE will fail, contributing merely a more effective method of teaching but heavily burdened by the constraints of time.

Learning is cumulative, and time is of the essence in cumulating knowledge and skills to achieve learning.

But with the extension of class hours as well as the revival of History, Geography and Social Studies in the curriculum, MTB-MLE will be a perfect fit.

That is, once we have gotten rid, through struggle and prayer, of the forces that would enchain us.

4. Build Entrepreneurship into the Curriculum & Establish Entrepreneurial High Schools

For more than a decade I have been so vocal against our culture of dependency, I have even attempted to trace it historically and offer a solution to it.

That solution is entrepreneurship. I am exceedingly glad to see networks like ABS-CBN and GMA7 picking up the advocacy through shows that push it.

More and more NGOs and foundations are organizing the poor in various localities around the skill of entrepreneurship, sometimes calling it by its time-worn name, livelihood, but infusing into these projects the necessary skills of management, accounting and marketing.

Those shows and organizing efforts are laudable and worthy of the highest awards, but are not enough.

To hasten the process of smashing the culture of dependency, we need to establish Entrepreneurial High Schools.

The Entrepreneurial High School will be one in which math is geared to adding, subtracting, dividing and multiplying products and payment for products, science to discovering laws and principles that go into the invention of products, history to uncovering our pre-Hispanic weaving, smelting and trading gifts (and how these gifts were contorted and distorted by the Spaniards and Americans), geography and social studies to studying markets, and languages to talking and writing about ourselves as a people and the products of our minds and hands.

If some congressman or senator is willing to sponsor a bill to establish Entrepreneurial High Schools all over the country, I will help him/her write and push it. These high schools will be the entrepreneurial equivalent of our present Philippine Science High Schools, only hopefully they won’t turn out more doctors, lawyers and military men than entrepreneurs (I’m afraid our science high schools do, more than scientist-inventors).

But even this may not be enough.

Public elementary schools, AFTER extending class hours and reinstating History, Geography and Social Studies, may have to pick up the cudgels by building entrepreneurship into the curriculum as early as Grade 1.

This way, we develop children who are ever ready to produce, market and benefit from their own goods, rather than children who are ever ready, at their parents’ urging, to go begging in the streets.

SO WHAT ABOUT WILLIE?

The issue of begging in the streets and in television studios will begin to beg the question once we have instituted the above remedies.

But in the meantime, we are faced with an enormous social problem.

I would have continued to nonchalantly rant and rail against the culture of dependency had I not, in the past months, been increasingly apprised of the rampant and ever more horrible crimes around us.

It’s bad enough to know that your son’s partner’s iPhone 3GS was snatched in Divisoria while she was talking right into it. The snatching came from behind, she wasn’t even scratched, but the audacity of the crime leaves you with a painful realization about the society you love.

It’s bad enough to learn that your nearest neighbors have been robbed from the side and back of their houses, their iron window grilles jacked or sawed off. Though you yourself are under the protection of your Lord’s angels, you tend to shiver at the thought.

But it’s terrible to know that some young pastor’s neighbor’s son in Bagong Silang was snatched from school, then found dead and unstitched, his organs gone, his parents sent a note saying, “Pasensya na talaga, kelangan lang namin mabuhay.”

And the young pastor knows of at least 10 similar cases both in his neighborhood and in Cavite, police remonstrances notwithstanding -- all done to people AS POOR AS their wrongdoers.

I am at a period in my life when God is passing each and every deeply held or hidden belief in front of my eyes and telling me, “You are wrong. Recant.”

Much as I have always hated charity but pressed as I am by the abominable crimes I see growing around me, not touching me, true, since I am under God’s protection, but injuring, maiming and killing many others -- how can I not start to believe in charity?

When charity is perhaps the only way for these hapless people to get out of their poverty traps, given the powerful forces that have held those traps shut for decades, even centuries?

My innate humaneness prevents me from wanting to slough off the population of the poor to solve their problems.

So I have had to come to the painful conclusion that, prior to the complete solutions we need to struggle against all odds for, there is no other way to save the poor from the crimes that engulf them either as victims or doers except: Charity.

At least some poor -- one soul, one family at a time.

Long before I came to this Bildungsroman, this coming-of-age at 62, our people have been doing charity through the practice of bayanihan -- helping each other, carrying each other’s houses when needed.

In the 1920s, some pioneering young Filipino women put up the Gota de Leche -- which means drop of milk -- an institution dedicated to the proposition that rich women would continuously provide goat’s milk to poor women who had nothing to feed their babies.

In our times, there are entertainers like Willie Revillame who, despite all their bad habits, want sorely to snatch the poor around them from the fate that they themselves suffered early in life, and know no other way to do that than to give them money or secret scholarships.

I honestly wish now that I too had the resources to be as generous as they.

Not all of us may have to come to this point, just as not all of us may want to struggle against the odds for equality of education for the poor; but the call to charity, I believe now, is as legitimate as any.

And charity is nothing but love, so the fifth call must necessarily and simply be:

5. Love your neighbor as you love yourself.

***
Part I: A Portrait of Slow Transformation
Part II: The Great Class Divide

Flowers and a Poem for...the Murdered?

2010-11-20T00:33:00.008+08:00

Flowers for Leonard Co
by Mila D. Aguilar

Never was one for
Phyla and chordata
Stomata and stigma
But yes, stigmata
That's what drew me.

If you had been
My teacher earlier on
Perhaps I would have
Loved Biology
Or Botany, at least.

But I guess
You were younger.
And we never met.
And now you're gone
With the offer of

These flowers
Which I cannot name.
Would
Your murderers
Knew them better

You'd have been spared.

- November 19,2010
10:00 - 10:15 p.m.

Looking at the RH Bill Objectively

2010-10-02T21:30:00.005+08:00

by Mila D. Aguilar

The recent ruckus raised regarding the Reproductive Health Bill, whatever its variation or version, has confused the issue to the delight of its invisible original proponents. To bring the issue back on its feet, firm on the ground it actually stands on, may I humbly show the following figures from the old revered CIA World Factbook, which recently received a beautiful makeover AND 2010 estimates as well.

The first figure is our population: 97,976,603 by July 2010 estimates.

You might howl: terrible! But wait, here’s another one for your delectation: our total land area is: 298,170 sq km.

If you use your math, that would mean 328.59 people PER SQUARE KILOMETER, or 3,043.27 SQUARE METERS for every Filipino.

Does it look like we’re jostling each other out of space?

Of course, population control proponents can very well say we will, if we don’t make our people stop doing babies.

Let’s look at another figure, then:

The CIA World Factbook, latest version, says that our population growth rate is 1.957% (2010 est.). In the chart of national population growth rates, we are number 63.

The country with the highest growth rate is the United Arab Emirates, with 3.69% -- 2.74% above ours. There are 12 countries in the 3% and up category.

Countries 13-62, 49 in all before us, are in the category of 2 to just below 3%.

We are the first country in the category just below 2%. In our category of 1.96% (Philippines)-1.05% (Argentina), there are a total of 65 countries.

In the category of 1% (Seychelles) - .01% (Norfolk Island), there are a total of 71 countries.

In the category of NIL growth, 0 to -7.8, there are a total of 36 countries.

In other words, out of a total of 233 nations of the world, 107, or almost 46% -- approaching half of the countries of the world -- are in danger of not reproducing at all!

On the other hand, only 62 out of 233 nations or 26.6%, less than a third of the nations of the world, may be said to be over-reproducing.

The rest of the world, 65 countries in all or 27.89%, are in a more comfortable margin of reproducing just enough manpower to take over its future! We are in that batch, albeit with the highest population growth rate -- in that batch.

Couldn’t that be another way of looking at world population data with the latest CIA figures?

Now here are even more shocking figures:

Our birth rate is 26.01 births/1,000 population (2010 est.) We are number 64 there. But do you know what our infant mortality rate is? It’s 20.56 deaths/1,000 live births, of which we are number 102 in the world. So how many of those 26.01 births actually survive the world?

But let’s look at another, even more telling figure: our total fertility rate. Can you guess that the 2010 estimate of number of children born to every Filipino woman is:

3.23 children born/woman (2010 est.)?

Your guess was 6, right? No, it’s less than 4; it’s 3.23 children born per Filipino woman.

So what is all that ruckus about the Reproductive Health bill for? Do we even need it? Haven’t our horrorable senators and congressmen checked the CIA World Factbook yet? Has Carlos Celdran?

Reading _Room_ by Emma Donoghue

2010-08-04T15:19:00.008+08:00

by Mila D. Aguilar

If I've been silent for a day (on Facebook, that is), it's because I've been reading Room by Emma Donoghue, a novel about growing up as a child of a kidnapped young woman in a hermetically-sealed 11-by-11-foot room.

What got me interested in the book was the case of Elizabeth Fritzl, who had been kept for 24 years as a sex-slave in a dungeon in Austria by her father, emerging as a 42-year-old woman with seven children by him, one of whom died of illness after his gross neglect -- thereafter to be incinerated by him in a heating stove next to the dungeon.

I read and watched every bit of news about the Fritzls almost since the day it burst out in April of 2008 and am still on the lookout for whatever little piece of information I could get about the monster Josef Fritzl or his hapless though rescued daughter Elizabeth and six surviving children/grandchildren.

The book was touted at the conclusion of the Fritzl case as an offshoot of it.

Knowing all the juicy details about the Fritzl case, I got not a little disappointed with the novel. The beginning, and actually the whole perspective of the latter, is novel: it is told from the point of view of the child, who was born in the room and was taught by his mother, at five, how to escape from it and rescue her. He emerges as the novel's unknowing, unwilling and ever-unconscious hero -- superhero, in fact -- even leading her to her own closure by insisting on visiting the room for the last time.

It's a cute way of presenting a highly distressing, intriguing and gripping situation. He manages to escape from his captor, not having known anything about the outside world except what he had seen on TV in his five years in it, tell the police about his mother, and lead them, through a particularly alert and motherly police officer, to his mother, who has stayed in the Room waiting for the rescue.

The plot is well-done, gluing the reader to the novel up to the last sigh of relief, after all the goodbyes are done to every aspect of the tiny Room.

But presenting a situation from the eyes of a five-year-old child, no matter how proficiently, has its limitations.

The characters of the two other protagonists in the novel turn out flat in consequence. Old Nick, the kidnapper, who has kept Ma, Jack's mother, in the prison-room for seven years, cannot be elucidated. Of course, he is more like the kidnapper of Natasha Kampusch than Josef Fritzl, the other Austrian sex-slaver whom we never get to know because he killed himself upon his victim's escape. So perhaps we can forgive the lack of a rounded picture of Old Nick, though he for his part ends up in prison.

But Ma's sudden suicide attempt becomes as much of a conundrum to us as it is to Jack. It could very well happen in real life -- a 26-year-old mother who has brought up her son very well, teaching him not only to read and write but to do very good math as well as providing him with all the physical and vocal exercises she could within the limits of a hidden prison, could very well, after being rescued by him through her own plan, want to kill herself because of a bruising encounter with thoughtless media.

But then, taking into account her son's own narrative, it would seem that she almost deliberately planned the whole scenario for five years, waiting for the opportune moment for him to grow up. Why would she suddenly throw away all her efforts -- and her son's future -- just because of some media meddling?

It could be explained, of course -- as a sudden weakness in character built in even before her kidnapping -- but perhaps not from a little boy's viewpoint.

So what starts out as a cute device doesn't end up cute at all.

And we who know the Fritzl case begin to associate the novel with the true story.

In the true story, Felix, the youngest boy, is also five, and experiences the outside world in much the same way, with the same fascination and wonderment, and the same physical disabilities, described with just much more detail in the novel.

But in the true story, Elizabeth, the mother and incest victim, is heroic all the way. She is not known to have tried to kill herself after rescuing all her children from the clutches of her ogre of a father. And in the true story, we get a rather deep glimpse into the twisted psyche of Josef Fritzl besides.

What is the true story about, why is it so riveting?

It is able, in its most complicated true-to-life fashion, to portray the depths of depravity to which the human soul can descend, as well as the heights of hope, faith and love to which it can aspire.

Room cannot do that, not only because of the viewpoint it has chosen, but because the author herself, by all accounts (see her video), lacks the perspicacity and depth to see these dimensions.

So Room becomes exactly what she intended it to be -- a novel about child development, unfortunately comparable to the Fritzl and, to a minor extent, Kampusch stories because of the many elements she borrowed from both -- without acknowledging it, by the way, in her final book.

Which is a shame. Reading Room is like reading the novels of Paolo Coelho, which I could not for the life of me appreciate. Both make for extremely popular (because, I suspect, easy) reading. Both try but fail to make some meaningful literarily profound statement about life (though Coelho tries harder and literally does, in essay fashion -- in fact he's quoted rather widely on it).

And both will not, I am afraid, outlast this century.

So now let me go back to my Dostoevsky, which I've been trying to re-read without much success on my smartphone -- the same type of device I used to read, with ease, both Room and Coelho.

The Devil is Upon Us

2010-05-13T01:32:00.000+08:00

By Mila D. Aguilar

The devil is upon us
He thrives on harmless
Vegetables we keep
To create compost
For our hungry gardens.

The stink will invade
Your noses day to day
Stinging your skin
Developing dots
For microbes to feed on.

But that is not
The worst of it.
Ripe compost produces
Methane, which is odorless
And could kill you

Without your knowing it.
The trick is to
Throw open your windows
So God’s air could come in
And dissipate the gas.

But lock your doors
Lock your doors
For the devil could get you
By climbing the fence
He himself built.

Remember, the devil is with us
Sending warts upon us all.

- May 12, 2010
7:10 - 7:22 am

Answering Denise Levertov

2009-11-24T23:33:00.001+08:00

by Mila D. Aguilar

Here, Denise, they don't
Chop off heads by the day
They just waylay you
On some lonely byway
Or highway
As the case may be
Whether you're alone
Or with
A convoy of journalists
Meant to protect your
Filing of candidacy.
One, two, fifty killed
Numbers don't matter
It's the principle that counts:
The principle of power
Over people
Of family
Over fold.
We know
No other life
We are the walking dead
Straddling the centuries
Without remorse
Shouting ourselves hoarse:
Producing nothing.

- November 24, 2009
9:30 - 9:59 pm

Bulwagang Rizal

2009-09-09T23:32:00.001+08:00

Bulwagang Rizal
Originally uploaded by mila d aguilar

I HAVE

2009-04-01T19:02:00.000+08:00

By Mila D. Aguilar

I have seen you.
Yours is the robe
Glowing white in the sunlight
That I tried to clutch
As you rose to heaven.
But you left me.

In the desert of my soul
You left me
To contend with myself
Till the day
I emerged from the battle
Yearning for you
And then you came
As I sat tired and forlorn
At the edge of my bed.

I could see the skirt
Of your white robe
As your hand touched
My head saying
You're doing fine, it's okay.
I have felt you.

I have heard you.
Not with a voice
But in a breath
Surpassing understanding
As I walked in a dream
Knowing others were
Walking with me.
And you said
In no uncertain terms
That this was how
It was going to be
In the march to Malacanang:
One fine day
We would all arise,
Fully aware,
And start treading
Separately
On your instructions.

I have smelled you
In myself, sweet with love
For your creation,
Exuding care and concern
For all of mankind
Without distinction.

I have tasted you
In my thirst. You
Are my living water.
You flowed into my palms
When first I received you
And confessed I
Was nothing without you.

You fill my mouth
My eyes
My ears
My nose
My skin.
Thereof
I know you. You

Are my God.

April 1, 2009
7:00 - 7:34 am

A Story Of Mothers

2009-02-22T16:39:00.003+08:00

By Mila D. Aguilar

My son once had a dog
Not too long ago.
Her name was Helga.
She was a Labrador
Lovable and well-fed.
When she had children,
Still young and bouncy,
My son sold them, eight in all,
Keeping only one, whom he named
Sheik. Sheik it was, when
He'd grown bigger than she,
That she playfully ran away with
One day, the gate having been
Left open. Distraught, only
My prayers and his wife's
And daughter's guiding him,
My son looked far and wide for them,
Tacking wanted posters
With their pictures on walls
And trees, announcing a reward
For their return. We found
The two separately
The week after, Sheik
By a restaurant, haggard
And unkempt, Helga
In a house trembling,
Refusing to eat -- her rescuer,
A kind old woman, said.
By all accounts both
Had managed by their size
To escape from violent men
In passing jeeps.

But at a price.
Each got home days apart
Not only sobered, but
Interminably sad, as if
They had finally discovered
What kind of world they lived in.
Sheik recovered slightly
After some months, drawn
Closer to his mother
Than he had ever been,
But Helga was never the same
Again. After a year, she
Started to bleed. My son's wife
Took her to a vet twice,
Subjecting her to surgery
For the dog had cancer,
She was told. But
It couldn't be helped. Helga
Grew so thin, her big bones
Stuck out, only her belly bulging.
She could hardly move.
I would see Sheik circling round her
All day, his head hanging,
His shoulders draped
Like a sad cloak around him.
He would smell the blood
Trickling out of her the way
Angels prophesy the death of men.

And so one day
We had to bury her.
But we could not bury Sheik's
Anguish. His eyes lost
All gleam forever, his gait lost
Its youth. He started to walk
Like an old man though he was but
Four years old. Like me, up to now
He must still be dreaming
Nightly about his mother,
How they'd walk together in fun
Under the canopy of heaven,
Floating above the folly
Of the world and mortal men,
Wondering why, of all the dead
In one's life, whether it be long
Or short, mothers are missed most.

February 22, 2009
7:35 - 9:05 am

This poem was written expressly for the February 22 memorial to Mommy Adang de la Torre at the Bantayog ng mga Bayani on Quezon Avenue and dedicated especially to Ed and Girlie as well as all those who regarded Mommy de la Torre as their own mother.

Walang Pakundangan

2009-01-02T22:08:00.002+08:00

Ni Mila D. Aguilar

A-dos na ng Enero
Nagpapaputok pa rin
Nang walang pakundangan
Mga bata sa lansangan.

Tulad ng kanilang
Matatanda sa Malacanang
Na isa-isang kinakarne
Lahat ng lumalaban.

Lumalabas na ang pulbura
Sa maliliit na butas
Sa gilid ng aking mga mata
Wala pa ring pakiramdam

Bata man o matanda
Sa kanilang kapwa.
Nakasusulasok ang amoy
Pambara sa hininga

Isip mo'y talagang balak nila
Ang makapatay
Ng kapitbahay.
Kung di nga lang ba, oo na,

Inosente itong sa isang banda
At sa kabila ay gahaman
Sa kaban ng bayan. Pero iho,
Sunud-sunuran lang ang kawalan

Sa gawi ng imbing kaharian.

a-2 by Enero, 2008
7-9 n.g.

Your Egypt Is No More

2008-10-17T12:02:00.001+08:00

By Mila D. Aguilar

Here you are,
Bowing before the pyramid
When Egypt is no more.
How many decades
Will the genuflection last?
Egypt is now
A relic of the past.

And yet He said
To not God anything
But Him. Bud, what
Are you trying to save
Of Egypt then? The meme?
And where to take it?
On what wall to beam?

Your Egypt's nothing
But library now. Go,
Leave it. Let God move
With His own plan.
If it's another Pharoah,
So be it, fight on
With Heaven in your hand.

October 16-17, 2008

In the wake of Typhoon Frank: Letter from Iloilo

2008-07-11T09:38:00.004+08:00

I am circulating as is, with her permission, a letter to my sister from Mila Damasco Aujero, a resident of Iloilo, together with the original Ilonggo it contains. I believe that, with a little work on any Filipino's part, the general sense of it can be understood. Not translating other Filipino languages into Tagalog is also a way of evolving Pilipino as a national language. Do write me if you feel I'm wrong.

God bless all!
Mila D. Aguilar

---

2008/7/10, to Delia D. Aguilar:

Dear Del,

Yes !" I cannot agwants the penetents of the kalibuts" expression is really true to the Ilonggos at this time after the calamity. Grabe gid ang pangabuhi namon diri......
since gasoline prices went up, it made a domino effect on everything...from jeepney fares to basic goods.Double gid ang mga prices ,maskin vegetables very scarce, rice also..
...ambot I just cannot describe ,wala pa ko ka experience sini since childhood where you can see everybody suffer,rich and poor....so many stories of survivors sa baha

...may nagatulala under psychiatric care(remember our classmate Elizabeth Pinosa,was-ag gid balay nila,everything gone,nagatulala na lang,incoherent,greatly affected gid....)
may ara nga nagalangot pa buot nila sa mga alahas nila nga wala na,the Jesenas wasak man balay nila and lost everything,subong nagatulala man.......Marilyn Ledesma
also na hospital gid kay non-stop ang hibi ya,naga hysterical pa. Haay damo naga buluang.......

.....may kaladlawan man nga stories like my co teacher at West, until the rooftop na ang baha sa balay nila,so the family has to swim to higher grounds ,sobra nga current sang water pagtakas ya wala na gali sya pants including panties naga "bomba" na sya she didn't notice .....Survival
lang ang sa ulo ya kuno.But now she can laugh telling us.

Damo patay more than a hundred.Many many cars nawasak
indi na mapuslan.Some brand new pa.

......may mga grim stories man,like the cashier of Iloilo Supermart, nagabaha na gin balik ya pa ang money ya sa kaha, na trap sya sang current,patay gid.
* may 2nd year HRM student lady nga tanan niya nga co-boarders ato na sa atop sang balay wala sya ka hingagaw
patay gid sya.
* may 22 years old guy nga patay inspite nga kabakod sang lawas ya.Balikbayan pa,bag o lang nag abot from the states.Daw maano ang family.
The water was 10 to 13 ft. high very strong pa ang current
ano abi agwanta mo?maskin good swimmer ka pa.

------So many are wondering what the meaning of all these.
They say perhaps the Illonggos are too comfortable and
complacent with their lives that they need reminders.
Patilawon man kuno mga Ilonggos.

It's a good thing wala kami iya casualty diri sa amon.Ang baha di up to the bust only.May 2nd story balay namon,ti wala kami iya ka swim like the others.However,at this time ubos gid wasak mga gamit,got no more ref,washing machine,two sala sets,gas range, halos everything.

.For 2 weeks no electricity.Up to now no water.Very expensive pa magbakal tubig,it's a precious thing at this
time .We learn to bathe sa isa ka balde lang.

Del, agwanta gid mo! The city gov't. has this slogan...
"Bangon,Iloilo.".....

Hope you have enough time to read this long letter.

Love,
MIL

Ka Bel

2008-05-24T22:33:00.008+08:00

by Mila D. Aguilar

Using too much of his head
He fell on it one day,
Blood oozing from the
Orifices he had used
To sense the world.

How I wish he had
Used more of his heart
Though he did,
Incontrovertibly he did.
It went to those

Who used their hands,
Like him, to yank
Steel bars out from stiffened,
Remorseless cement.
And that is why

His own arteries
Had hardened.
Would not have happened
Had he stirred that part
Of the heart

That ticks to heaven.
And yet he is forgiven
For he lived by the laws
Of the God he could not quite
Imagine.

- May 22, 2008
10:00 am-12:30 pm
On the way from Quezon City to Aurora Province,
remembering Romans 2:14-15

She’s done for

2008-02-19T12:40:00.004+08:00

She’s done for. It’s in the air. Everybody can feel it.

All except the clique that rules with her.

We don’t know how much more time it will take, but it won’t be long now.

In the face of such an event, what are we who are ordinary citizens supposed to do?

The answer is very simple: we should have registered our disgust over the present administration in the first place, long ago. There is still time to do so, but now the situation demands much more of us than just a registration of disgust.

We have to make it clear that we are not only saying No to Gloria; we have to shout, in our loudest voices, that we are saying NEVER to CORRUPTION – not never again, but NEVER, period.

For Gloria and her family, both official and ministerial, merely epitomize the rank corruption in our midst. They demonstrate to us the depths to which we have gone as a nation. They are the prime symbols of the pay-offs, the buy-outs, the suhol, the “hingi, hingi” that transpire everyday in our midst.

We cannot advance further as a nation if we do not unseat them.

At the same time, we all know that Gloria is not the end of corruption. Already, as history has shown time and again, deals are most likely being made to replace her. And we know that those who will most likely replace her will be just as corrupt, if not worse.

However, the prospect should not stop us from pushing for Gloria’s ouster; it should in fact urge us to go one step further after her ouster.

We cannot tire of the process of regime change, just because the regime that confronts us is not the ideal we strive for. On the contrary, with every regime change we must learn with better sense how to expunge the corruption in our midst.

Our mistake so far has been to think that corruption lies in our politics alone.

But the corruption lies not in our politics so much as in our economics (for politics is merely the external structure built on economics):

Our politicians can be blatantly corrupt because they cultivate a slew of dependents around them. These dependents are so abject that they could not object to whatever the politician does in their name.

Remove the dependents, and the politicians will be forced to deal instead with ideas for the betterment of the nation.

We have already proceeded a little farther away from charity – giving our people fish – to teaching them how to fish. Let us move even farther off, removing relations of dependency altogether by teaching our people how to market the fish – not only live fish but pickled, dried, or salted in attractively-designed packages, by the hundreds of thousands.

In order to remove relations of dependency between politicians and our people altogether, we cannot have just a few of these marketers of fish, even if they were to grow to be the biggest entrepreneurs. We have to have at least a million of them for a start, in fact an increasing number through the years.

For the politicians certainly have more than a million under their thumbs.

We should therefore demand, right now, from those who are poised to take over the Arroyo administration, a veritable program that will encourage an entrepreneurial mass movement. Those of them that carry one are those who understand the true nature of our problems, and therefore deserve our encouragement and support.

This entrepreneurial mass movement should push for and encourage both family and community enterprises using raw materials that are already found in the Philippines. All agencies of the government can and should be mobilized towards this goal.

Legislation in aid of the entrepreneurial mass movement should be instituted, among the most necessary of which are:

• The establishment of computerized one-stop registration shops in all towns and cities without the hassle of “suhol”;
• The minimization of registration fees and bureaucracy not only for small and medium, but large-scale entrepreneurs, whether foreign or local;
• Five-year tax incentives for small and medium-scale entrepreneurs, provided they are Filipino citizens;
• The establishment of entrepreneurial high schools modeled after the community schools of the late forties and early fifties, with parents, teachers and barrio/town officials working in concert with students in establishing small enterprises;
• The establishment of entrepreneurial communities all over the Philippines.

We must warn politicians, whether they are in power or waiting in the sidelines, that an entrepreneurial movement HAS started among the ranks at least of the middle classes and overseas Filipinos, and may get to the ranks of the masses soon enough. If they do not heed the signs of the times, they may get run over by this movement without their knowing it. The best way to survive is to recognize it as the long-term solution to the problem of corruption and poverty, and to be active in its implementation.

Now that we have a long-term positive alternative to the Arroyo administration, make your next move, Trapo.

And you too, ordinary citizen. ACT NOW, before it's too late.

Time to Act

2008-02-09T13:36:00.000+08:00

You may have heard about what is presently happening in the Philippines. Below, for your information, is an exchange that I'm sure is happening many times over right now, in the country and without. For full appreciation, you may want to read the second letter first.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Mila D. Aguilar
Date: Feb 9, 2008 12:46 PM

Dear Ben,

Amen and amen! But our recommendations and actions have to be not only concrete, but actual and physical. We can and should pray every step of the way, but God already answered what we should be doing long ago; he's been waiting for us to act.

The present situation calls for present action. If we do not act now, more and more of our people will think that corruption is the only way to go. If we do not show, by dislodging the corrupt from our midst, that corruption cannot and must not thrive, more and more of our people will feel that they too can get away with their petty sins. And as more and more of our people become corrupt, more and more of the honest will want to leave our country to the dogs and the foreigners.

We have to act now, and act fast, or our medium and long-term programs will come to naught.

Though we must not forget that the final answer is economic, we must remember that the present pressing problem is political. Once we have shown that corruption in the Philippines has been excised, no matter how roughly for now, we can go on with building our plural, responsible, and solidarity-based society.

Let me reiterate what I have advocated since 1999:

Corruption and poverty in our country feed on each other, but cannot survive once we have built a strong base of entrepreneurs. For once these entrepreneurs create wealth for the nation that can equal if not surpass the remittances of our hapless overseas Filipinos, poverty can be minimized. And once poverty has been minimized, corruption cannot thrive, for corruption thrives only on the dependency of the poor.

This is how concrete our medium and long-term program has to be. Some, like the Global Filipino Nation, can be even more specific: they are targeting the growth of medium-scale entrepreneurs. I, for my part personally, would rather spread the consciousness and practice of entrepreneurship among the masses through an entrepreneurial mass movement.

It's a chicken-or-egg situation, but the egg has been laid, and not only is it golden -- it can produce many more. Now it's time to go after the neck of that chicken.

Let us pray that the hand of God will guide us in our figurative neck-cutting.

God bless the Philippines!
Mila

On Feb 9, 2008 11:54 AM, Benjamin Quinones wrote:
Dear Claribel,

I received today through my mobile phone your text as follows: "Ben, What should be our response to these outrageous corruption scandals? Collective silence or collective action? -- Claribel David"

My mobile phone load is down to zero, I can't text you back, so I resorted to this email reply. First of all, I'd like to say I admire your courage in asking this question. Because the answer to your question is obvious from the way you framed it.

How can we keep silent when our future, especially our children's future is already compromised? How can we not take action when own country and people are looking for answers and alternatives to the existing bankrupt system, and part of that answer is in our hands? We have been advocating for a plural, responsible, and solidadrity-based society. We cannot dissociate that advocacy from what is currently transpiring in the country. Instead of folding down our banners and keeping silent, we should all the more intensify our advocacy. We cannot shirk from that social responsibility, we cannot turn our backs from the call to take a collective, constructive action.

But what kind of collective action? I believe in presenting the Filipino people a sustainable alternative. I believe in sharing with them a vision for the future that will move them to act for their own families, their communities, their country. I don't think people will respond to another short term palliative like the previous EDSA people's power action They are looking for something that will last, not only for themselves but most especially for their children and their children's children.

One of the reasons why I proposed a quarterly learning journey as a major agenda for our partners meeting in March 28 is to enable us to work together in a persistent move of rallying people to our cause for an other, solidarity-based society. We have a cause, we believe in sharing this cause to the Filipino masses, so that they will have the means and the collective will to overcome oppressive conditions. I'm sure our colleagues - Jun Simon, Pinky Cupino and her group, the Christian Businessmen's Forum Intl, EBEST and others will close ranks with us in this initiative. We should conduct the learning journey consistently as a means for mobilizing people towards an organized engagement of existing power structures in a constructive manner. The initiative we are taking is not necessarily risk-free. Every progressive move is risky.

We cannot change the scandalous situation in the country overnight. But we can commit to a persistent
collective action that could rally more and more people towards a plural, responsible, and solidarity-based society.

Blessings,
Ben

Arise, shine, for your light has come
and the glory of the Lord rises upon you.
Isaiah 60:1

--
When they hand you over, do not worry about how you are to speak or what you are to say; for what you are to say will be given to you at that time; for it is not you who speak, but the Spirit of your Father speaking through you. Brother will betray brother to death, and a father his child, and children will rise against parents and have them put to death; and you will be hated by all because of my name. But the one who endures to the end will be saved.

- Matthew 10:19-22

Vallorbe in real life

2007-08-19T03:14:00.000+08:00

The waters rage outside the caves of Vallorbe.

It Was the Caves of Vallorbe

2007-08-19T03:07:00.000+08:00

By Mila D. Aguilar

It was the caves of Vallorbe
Les grottes de Vallorbe
That did me in.

That did me in,
Les grottes de Vallorbe
The cold of

The beautiful caves
Of Vallorbe.
The icy handrails

Of the caves of Vallorbe.
I hardly noticed
As I trekked up and down

The steel steps
Des grottes de Vallorbe
Admiring the

Stalactites and stalagmites
The odd formations
That produced not

One precious stone
That my back had clogged
That my butt had clogged

With the steely cold
Of the caves of Vallorbe.
And it did me in,

That was what did me in,
The icy cold
Of the caves of Vallorbe.

Saturday, August 18, 2007
2:46:51 AM
Philippine Time
Written at the airport in Frankfurt on a two-hour stopover of the flight from Geneva to Manila.

The Filipino Speaks to NICA & the CIA

2007-01-23T14:26:00.000+08:00

(In memory of Prof. Jose Ma. Cui)
By Mila D. Aguilar

Killing them one by one,
You think you’re doing humanity a favor.
Not like Indonesia, after all,
A million in one swoop.

Here you’re targeting
The best of a generation: Just getting “commies”
Out of the loop, so that
You can mix your own soup.

Who was it that said
You can’t kill an idea by shooting it
Dead. And yet you just
May succeed, you evil weed.

Preparing for the coming
Of your Wicked One, the antinomy of mine.
Only remember you have but
Three and a half years

To spread your seed
And then your end will come for all time.
Oh, you’ll get your chance
Again, after a thousand

But the reversal will be
Compleat. So accept your defeat, beat a retreat,
Leave my world to me
And Him, who’s my eternity.

Tuesday, January 23, 2007
12:30-1:56 PM

In Excelsis Deo

2007-01-16T20:18:00.000+08:00

by Mila D. Aguilar

This woman’s playing chess
Without a tear.
After eating up all the pawns
She’s now targeting bishops
From the rear.
No storm, it seems,
Can stay her
Rather deadly,
Definitely
Ungodly career.

Why don’t the people
Arise, you ask.
So many lives wasted,
So much blood left out
In the sun to bask
Like dried meat seeking
Salt to stop the reeking.
Let me tell you one thing,
Dear, it’s not a simple,
Easy task.

You have been asked
To pray.
You have refused
On the excuse
Of forging broader fronts.
There is no way
This front can come together
Of its own accord.
If you’ll but see the greater power
This woman will not stay

Another hour.

October 4, 2006
11:03:59 AM - 12:55:06 PM

George and Macel

2006-07-07T12:28:00.000+08:00

On coming home from Geneva to talk to OFWs about creating wealth for the country through entrepreneurship, I am confronted with the murder of people I never knew. One pair of deaths strikes me particularly. Why do I grieve so for this couple? Is it they I cry over, or the country?

George and Macel
By Mila D. Aguilar

George and Macel were lovers
Four children between them.
They rode out into the night
To be shot down in broad daylight.

George and Macel were lovers of country.
They did what they could,
Peacefully. But they were mowed down,
In view of so many.

George and Macel were lovers of freedom.
Young, they never realized that
Martyrdom would be the sum
Of their quest for the Kingdom.

George and Macel were lovers of God.
Born at the end of dictatorship,
How could they see
They would die on the tail of it?

Friend, I never got to know
George and Macel. Were they
On the list you made
Of those to be wiped out?

July 7, 2006
11:05 AM-12:04 PM

--
Do not pollute the land where you are. Bloodshed pollutes the land, and atonement cannot be made for the land on which blood has been shed, except by the blood of the one who shed it. (says the Lord in Numbers 35:33)

HK-Macau Ferry Passengers

2006-04-25T15:41:00.000+08:00

Somewhere on this blog is a photo of Hong Kong that I took in 1996, before the turnover. Today, ten years later, the passengers on the TurboJet going to Macau for a Sunday vacation present a contrast, for whatever reason.

Which will you choose?

2006-03-09T23:08:00.000+08:00

Listen
By Mila D. Aguilar

Listen,
In the last days,
The forces of evil will be ranged against the forces of good.

They will win
One battle after another
You will even start to think they have won the war.

If you are
A weak-willed ninny,
They will take you by your guts and gobble you up like hot soup.

If you fight
Because you know what is right,
They will jail you, maim you, try their worst to murder you.

If you are
Without Lord and Savior,
Oh pity, pity, no one can come to your aid at the final moment.

What will you do?
Where will you go?
Which will you choose?

Will you
Choose to listen
Or continue, like those whose ears are plugged, to disobey?

March 9, 2006
11:17 PM

Old story, new poem, higher level of struggle

2006-02-20T03:57:00.000+08:00

It’s the Rot Antic
By Mila D. Aguilar

It’s the Rot Antic.

Rot of carrion.
Rot of corruption.
Rot of bodies
Under tons of slime and rock.
Under the weight of
Grime and muck.

ROT. Reign Of The.
Reign of the frozen grin
The thieving queen
The terror twins
Reign of the drones
Spying on our muted crones.

ANTIC. Antichrist.
Why wonder at the
Statistical lies
The brazen tricks
The felonious pricks
Following exactly nothing.

666. It’s the Rot Antic. It’s here to stick.

February 20, 2006
3:56 AM

The Muses

2006-01-30T20:29:00.000+08:00

The Muses at the College of Arts and Letters Faculty Center of the University of the Philippines are a sight to behold. Normally dark, they were partially under the late afternoon sun from the second floor after the book launching of Bien Lumbera. The acacia trees in the background mirror their movement.

Happy New Year?

2006-01-01T01:23:00.000+08:00

Haiku of the times

By Mila D. Aguilar

Tonight,
The fireworks lasted
Only thirty minutes.

January 1, 2006
1:07:12 AM

2005: The Last Days

2005-12-25T22:34:00.000+08:00

2005: The Last Days

ni Mila D. Aguilar
a.k.a. Clarita Roja

I.

Kagabi, may mga nagpaputok
Labintador lang naman
Pero ipinagtaka ko,
Dahil wala yata sa panahon.

Pagkalabas ko kinaumagahan
Naintindihan ko kung bakit.
Walang katao-tao sa daan.
Nagsisiksikan ang mga bus

Sa dalawang gilid ng EDSA,
Naghihintay ng mga pasaherong
Di dumarating.
Hawan ang kabilang parte

Ng nakatiwangwang na daan.
Sarado ang mga mall.
Alam na nilang ngayong araw
Walang magbibilihan,

Dahil sa mga linggong
Nakaraan, di rin karamihan
Ang nagpuntahan
Upang mamili, o magparaya man.

Masahol pa sa Biyernes Santo
Ang mga panahong ito.
Pasko na, Gloria, o!
Anong ginawa mo sa bayan ko?

II.

“What is real?
Asked the rabbit one day….”
Only my hair having been loved off,
My dear.* Otherwise,
What is real in a world
Manufactured by liars
In high places?
What is truth?

Are there more jobs?
Are the exports rising?
Are the investors investing?
Is the peso really rebounding?

Were there ever WMDs in Iraq?

The people know, but do not move,
As if they were waiting
For the stones to fall
Until not one is left on another.

The people know:
He will come on a cloud
But before that
One is already here
Who will claim to be Him,
He and she being it.

What is Truth?
Will you be able to stand firm
In the face of it?
Will you be able to stand before
The Son of Man, escaping
All that is about to happen,
Not a hair of your head perishing
As others are taken prisoners
To all the nations?**

What is truth
In the age of deception?

III.

Ngayong araw,
Panay pa rin ang paputok
Ng mga iskwater
Sa tabi-tabi.

Ibang klase silang
Magpaputok ngayon.
Di tulad ng dati,
Na masaya.

Ngayong taon,
May kahalong galit
Ang mga putok,
Para bagang sinasabing

Ito na lamang ang aming
Pagpaparausan
Tutal binigyan niyo kami
Ng kahirapan.

Walang ikababahala:
Labintador lang naman.
Ewan ko lang sa susunod na taon
Kung ano pa ang kayang makaon.

December 25, 2005
7:00 – 9:00 pm

* The question and answer are derived from Margery Williams’ poem entitled “What is Real?”
** This stanza and the two preceding it use the words of Luke 21, New International Version, almost exactly in some parts.

To N.O. USA

2005-11-01T00:06:00.000+08:00

An N.O., USA

By Sophie Bodegon

Sie haben die Windungen meiner Fluesse
gerade gelegt

das Wasser meiner Marsch
austroknen lassen

die Macht meiner Stroeme
eingesperrt.

Naja, bis Morgen
wenn Katrina kommt.

You are wondering why I have a German poem in my blog for English students. Sophie Bodegon, who founded Philippine News and Features, is currently Asia Secretary for United Evangelical Mission, working with the churches in the tsunami areas of North Sumatra, Nias, Mentawai and Sri Lanka. She wrote the poem, she says, while studying the German language in Germany, where she is currently based. I asked her to translate the poem for me into English, and she did:

To N.O., USA

You have
straightened the curves
of my streams
dried up
the waters of my marches
held captive
the power of my rivers

Oh well, till tomorrow
when Katrina comes.

A poem in any language, you see, is still a poem. If you've been my student in English 11 and listened to me well, you would know why this is a well-written poem.

After the Rain

2005-10-31T17:55:00.000+08:00

Some people wonder how I can be so hopeful in the midst of the morass in the land.

Tatiana, Sophie’s child

2005-09-25T06:27:00.000+08:00

Lavigny 9

By Mila D. Aguilar

There she was,
A mere 18 months,
Foraging on the ground
Below me,

Blond and green-eyed
With a sharp upturned nose
That promised to grow
Like her father’s.

She loved the pebbles
And would bring them up
To her mouth, till
I leaned down to

Look her in the eyes
With a knowing smile.
So she began to be
Interested in the nettles

But they were too spiky
For her small hands
Until she saw, among
The nettles, little

Elongated pieces
Brown with pale green
Patches. I too
Wondered what they were,

Like her. She picked
Them up to show to me.
I did not imagine them
To be as hard as they felt,

Until I looked up to see
They were the same color
As the trunk of the tree
Some feet away from me.

Bark, Tatiana, bark
Falling off the trees!
Bark falls off in autumn
Too, not only leaves!

As amazed at the
Discovery as the child
Was. I have always
Shied away from

Autumns, leaving
Before it comes
To full winter fruition,
But with the knowledge

Of the bark
Falling off like leaves
I think, awaiting 60,
I am ready now

For the dark of winter.

September 25, 2005
5:45-6:13 AM

Aubonne

2005-09-16T23:38:00.000+08:00

Aubonne is a brisk 30 minutes' walk from Lavigny through the outskirts of a village, then a forest, a river, and a hill. It is composed of two parts: the old town and the new town. I wasn't much interested in the new town. This seems to be the center of the old one.

Photo taken by mda

She sells Swiss watches

2005-09-09T23:29:00.000+08:00

Lavigny 8
For Sindiwe Magona, South African writer

by Mila D. Aguilar

She sells Swiss watches,
This woman reeded by age.
We had walked to Aubonne,
Two coloreds,
One black and one brown,
And found a shop selling
Watches, Swiss-made,
But cheap enough to wear
Without fear of getting
Arms snapped off.

The door was open,
There was nobody in,
So I called out
With the few French words
I know: "Bon jour!"
And she came out
With a smile that,
Though not ear to ear,
Was candid enough
Not to condescend.

I would not have bought
A watch for my gradddaughter
Or a Swiss knife for my son
Had she been other than
Unassuming. Do you accept
Credit cards, I asked,
And she said, "Oui oui,"
In the usual Swiss way.
So I chose my two gifts,
One after the other.

It was her manner of wrapping
That struck me and, I guess,
Bored my African companion
And translator, she with
Her native rhythmic sense.
I would not have understood
Yet would have accepted it,
Being Filipino, apt to take things
As they are, then leave all
To her Lord and Master.

I was a nurse, she said--
Wistfully, I imagined--
But my husband had two shops,
One in this house, the other
Across the street, so I had
To tend one--as she
Folded the wrapper
Ever so carefully
As if she were applying
Bandage on a wound.

After what seemed like an hour
She finally managed
To place her shop sticker
On the ribbons
With her finely gnarled
White hands.
I could have made
A short story out of it
But the image of her
Standing there,

Serious and honest,
Is good enough for me.

September 9, 2005
11:30-2:15 pm

Whether Weather

2005-09-08T23:01:00.000+08:00

Lavigny 7

by Mila D. Aguilar

Autumn's slow in coming to these parts.
One tree is turning red,
One other yellow green,
But most persist in their old color

Despite the onset of the chill.
Suisse is not unlike
Its washing machines
Their shortest cycle

A long 45 minutes
Gentle on any fabric,
Not apt to shear or tear.
I can remember New York

One summer, on Broadway
When I had to buy
Some synthetic jacket
In a bargain basement

Because the autumn wind
Had suddenly descended
Without warning.
And the brusque whoosh

Of their washing machines,
So massive, so utterly
Without compunction
Or civility.

Weather can be
A gauge of our humanity.

September 8, 2005
4:30-4:44 pm

Swiss Hibiscus

2005-09-08T18:59:00.000+08:00

Swiss Hibiscus
Photo taken by mila d aguilar.

Here is the Swiss gumamela I wrote about earlier.

She sells Swiss watches

2005-09-08T18:58:00.000+08:00

She sells Swiss watches
Photo taken by mila d aguilar.

The woman in this photo is a nurse, but she gave up her profession to sell watches and jewelry for her husband, who is also an optometrist and runs their other shop. Both shops are in Aubonne, only a street apart.

Church Steeple

2005-09-08T18:45:00.000+08:00

Church Steeple
Photo taken by mda.

The church steeple of Lavigny, like most other steeples in Switzerland, has a clock, one on each side, to make sure everybody knows the time.

Swiss Chalets

2005-09-08T18:42:00.000+08:00

Swiss Chalets
Photo taken by mda.

Just outside the Chateau de Lavigny are other houses, small but old, sometimes with tiny yards put to productive use in terms of flowering or table plants like tomatoes and pears. Every inch of ground yields something for the eyes if not the stomach.

The Churches of Switzerland

2005-09-08T18:18:00.000+08:00

Lavigny 6

by Mila D. Aguilar

The doors of the churches
Of Switzerland are closed
All day. No schedules tacked

On doors, as they are in
Shops in the villages.
Pastors come once a month,

Being in short supply.
The bells ring to tell time,
Signalling the start and

End of working day for
Farmers in the vineyards.
There are barely people

In the streets, even in
Junctions. So different
From my country, where the

Churches aren't big enough
For the teeming millions,
And so people gather

In the streets, geared to fight,
Tolling evil's end and
Telling the world about

The coming of the Light.

September 8, 2005
4:00-5:52 am

The reading at the Chateau

2005-09-07T23:56:00.000+08:00

The reading at the Chateau
Photo taken by mda.

Beate Rygiert, a German short story writer and novelist, was one of those who read their works at the "lectur" on September 4, held in the living room of the Chateau. Seated on the right is her husband, Daniel Oliver Bachmann, also a novelist. To the left, seated on the sofa, is Sophie Kandaouroff, the Chateau manager.

Man, her pair

2005-09-07T23:35:00.000+08:00

Man, her pair
Photo taken by mda.

A meter and a half away from the woman in the lower garden stands the bust of a man. They are surrounded by tall bushes which also serve as a fence around the large yard. In front of them are backless stone benches.

Woman in the Lower Garden

2005-09-07T23:31:00.000+08:00

Woman in the Lower Garden
Photo taken by mda.

On one end of the lower garden stands the bust of a woman with classic Greek features.

Chateau Trellis

2005-09-07T23:00:00.000+08:00

Chateau Trellis
Photo taken by mda.

The Chateau trellis is right next to the veranda. It goes down to the parking area and on to what used to be the servants' quarters, now the manager's home.

Chateau Veranda

2005-09-07T22:56:00.000+08:00

Chateau Veranda
Photo taken by mda.

The Chateau veranda is where the five to six resident writers eat dinner served by some of the best home chefs in Switzerland.

Bells and howitzers

2005-09-04T17:17:00.000+08:00

Lavigny 5

by Mila D. Aguilar

As the church bells
Toll the hour in Switzerland,
The village fountains
Flow their way.

Every hour on the hour
Signalling the start and end of day
And if you cannot hear
It rings again five minutes after

More insistently.
But the village fountains
Just go on and flow their way,
Eternally.

Towards August's end
The waters of Switzerland
Overflowed on Bern and Lucerne
Taking dozens to their death.

But the bells of Celigny
And Lavigny continued tolling
And the village fountains
Kept on flowing.

By September, some days after,
It was New Orleans.
A hurricane had struck her.
How many thousands died

In that disaster.
The bells of Celigny and Lavigny
Have kept on tolling,
The fountains still are flowing.

In Europe and America
Calamities are unusual.
In the Philippines,
We await our next.

Will it be
Political this time, we wonder.
Or shall an act of God
Finally stop her.

In Celigny and Lavigny
The bells keep tolling,
The fountains flowing.
But in the rest of the world

Both men and women
Have been sowing.

September 4, 2005
6:05-7:10 pm

Gumamela

2005-09-04T17:12:00.000+08:00

Lavigny 4

by Mila D. Aguilar

Hibiscus
is
Gumamela.

The tropical
Transformed

Curled
by
Cold

Pistil
Precisioned

No
longer
Nonchalant

Petals
Prim

Velvet
now
Veined.

Beauty
Becomes

Whatever
it
Surrender.

September 2, 2005
4:20 pm

Bush

2005-09-04T16:55:00.000+08:00

Lavigny 3

by Mila D. Aguilar

Nobody seems to like
Bush in these parts,
Especially not his
Fellow Americans.

But look at the hills,
How placidly they plunge
Into ravines and rivers
The paths, whether paved

Or unpaved, all
Neatly laid out.
Nobody seems to like
Bush in much of the world,

Not even in America.
Maybe more in America
Than in the rest of the world,
But most of those just

Standing aghast
At every darned blast
Of calomelic casuistry
And blind bigotry.

Meantime, nobody moves
But Whitman's blades of
Glass twinkling under
Moonless nights

While the owls of our souls
Hoot ominously
Day and night
In the forests of Switzerland.

August 30, 2005
3:52 pm

Winged things

2005-09-04T16:42:00.000+08:00

Lavigny 2

by Mila D. Aguilar

There are flies here too.
But they are longer,
With elongated wings
Covering elongated bodies.
They do not rub their forelegs
As much, and are not as quick
To fly off at the sight
Of a hand swatting.

The mosquitoes do not seem
To bite as much, at least not
Those who have had their
Dinner wine whether red or white.
You do not see them, tiny
As they are, except
Out in the forest,
Bunched too, but not
Hovering over heads.

But the mayas, ah, they are
Almost exactly the same.
Les moineaux, they call them,
A little fatter, perhaps, but not
Much bigger. They fly
Together, too, in small
Communities--cantons, you
May call them, or villages--
Barangays, if you will;
Feeding on scrap, or
Whatever you may
Throw their way.

For their nests they use
The sycamore trees
Remaining well-hidden until
Someone who knows them
Sees.

August 29, 2005
3:34 pm

My barangay

2005-09-04T16:32:00.000+08:00

Lavigny 1

by Mila D. Aguilar

This was not a place for kings.
Chateau does not mean castle.
A library certainly can be
Sumptuous, and so a living room,
Or a garden, a habit brought
By one British aristocrat's
Daughter clothed by

Yves St. Laurent
To these rolling hills.
But five rooms do not make
A castle, not even ten.
Look at the vineyards,
Never more than a hectare,
Patched by the roadside

With corn, or pear, or forest
Like the tribes of old
Confederated.
This is my Swiss canton
My barangay
My country led not ruled
My beloved land.

August 26, 2005
1:53 pm

And now the poems

2005-09-04T16:28:00.000+08:00

I wanted to upload seven photos but flickr got only four through, so now I'm forced to insert the poems I've written so far at the Chateau de Lavigny.

There are five. Enjoy!

Lamp & Lake Geneve

2005-09-03T18:14:00.000+08:00

Lamp & Lake Geneve by Mila D Aguilar
Originally uploaded by mda.

Another corner of the garden looks down on vineyards and, over the horizon, Lake Geneve, with the Alps beyond it.

Woman of the Chateau

2005-09-03T18:02:00.000+08:00

Chateau Woman by Mila D Aguilar
Originally uploaded by mda.

On one side of the garden, beneath an arch of sculptured bushes, stands a half-bodied woman of exquisite beauty, the lower part of her torso but a pedestal.

Chateau Garden

2005-09-03T16:05:00.000+08:00

Chateau Garden by Mila D Aguilar
Originally uploaded by mda.

But the garden takes all the beauty.

Chateau Front

2005-09-03T16:02:00.000+08:00

Chateau Front by Mila D Aguilar
Originally uploaded by mda.

You enter the Chateau de Lavigny through an unassuming frontage.

Photos from Switzerland

2005-08-30T23:59:00.000+08:00

I am now in Switzerland, at the Chateau de Lavigny, for a three-week international writers' residence. With me are five other writers from around the world, among them Sindiwe Magona of South Africa, a novelist; Xuxi of Hongkong, another novelist; Beate Riegert and Daniel Bachmann of Germany, both novelists; and Andrew Zawacki of the United States, a poet. In the next few posts I will be downloading the photos I have taken here so far, both for your delectation as well as for my own disk security. (What if I lose them all of a sudden without having printed them out? That would be a disaster.)

The poems will come later.

Analysis

2005-07-14T20:18:00.000+08:00

Today’s Struggle

By Mila D. Aguilar

---------------------------
"Therefore you, O son of man, say to the house of Israel: 'Thus you say, "If our transgressions and our sins lie upon us, and we pine away in them, how can we then live?" '

"Say to them: 'As I live,' says the Lord God, 'I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but that the wicked turn from his way and live. Turn, turn from your evil ways! For why should you die, O house of Israel?'

"If the wicked restores the pledge, gives back what he has stolen, and walks in the statutes of life without committing iniquity, he shall surely live; he shall not die.

"None of his sins which he has committed shall be remembered against him; he has done what is lawful and right; he shall surely live.

Eze 33:10-11, 15-16
---------------------------

Many will be surprised at the combination of my title and quoted verse, thinking them at odds with each other. I will proceed to demonstrate, however, that at this juncture of Philippine history, they jibe perfectly.

This is not to say that the present point of contention, the Madame of the land, is about to or can still change. Politically, she is already a goner; whether her inner character can still make that momentous turn is apparently belied by reported movements in the Palace, at the airport, and in Hong Kong. The truth of these reports, however, is not for us to judge, in the same way that it would be unjust to judge the state of the Madame’s soul. All we can say for sure is that politically, she is a goner, and it is only a matter of time before she bids us goodbye, in her uniquely ineluctable manner—still sounding highly insincere.

Since the end of this particular drama is a foregone conclusion, we should therefore start turning our attention to the greater problem, the nation. Why can’t we have enough of the Marcoses, the Eraps, the Glorias? Why, indeed, do we even have to put up with a Cory? Or, for that matter, a Ramos? If they cannot express and advance the aspirations of the people, how then can we live? More appropriately, “if our transgressions and sins lie upon us, and we pine away in them, how can we then live?”

The Biblical answer is very simple, but the answer in terms of everyday reality bytes, of everyday living, indeed, of everyday struggle, is much more complex. In the end, however, both will amount to the same thing: “If the wicked restores the pledge…he shall surely live.”

Between the question (“How can we then live?”) and the answer (“If the wicked restores the pledge…”), what lies between? To resolve this, we have to look back at the past. What are the “transgressions and…sins [that] lie upon us,” and why have we been “pining away in them” for so long?

The co-optation of the datus

The truth is that we have a history to overcome, and in order to overcome it, we have to see it correctly, first and foremost.

When the Spaniards came upon the separate tribes in the islands that they eventually came to call the Philippines, the most common leaders of these tribes were not sultans, but datus. Sultanates, structures which approached the level of organization of Spain’s own fiefdoms, had been put up in Islamized areas like Sulu and the southwestern parts of Mindanao, as well as, a trice before the Spaniards came, in Manila. In most areas of the archipelago, however, barangays, those small communities of only a few scores of families, were led by datus, who owned no great armies nor ruled no high princes of their own.

These were the datus whom the Spaniards co-opted and made to live in the town centers, in the municipios, there to be unobtrusively guarded against potential rebellion. As it turned out, save for the failed Tondo conspiracy and communities in unreachable or hostile mountainous areas such as the Cordilleras, most datus were co-opted rather easily, their sons and daughters eventually becoming favored in Hispanicentric society with their mestizo progeny. The datus, given the gift of becoming tax collectors by the Spaniards, would learn to survive among the Spanish elite by pinching from the public bin the reales they needed for their private pleasures.

It was this corrupted, diminished datu class that became the base of the principalia, as well as, through the miracle of mestizoization, the ilustrados. This native, Hispanized elite carried down to the next centuries our Spanish colonial legacy not only of feudalism and patriarchalism, but also of corruption.

Feudalism and corruption are in reality twin evils, especially in a colonized society in which the elite could survive only by dipping into the public bin because the colonial lord has already taken away much of the fruit of the land. Corruption in the public arena copies the practices of feudalism in the private arena: since the landlord merely sits while waiting for the fruit of the land to arrive at his dinner table, the government official also sits, waiting for the moneys of the land to arrive at his desk drawer.

The continued rule of the datus

When the Americans took over, they did not remove the ilustrados whose ancestors had made it a habit for three centuries to plow into the public bin. Instead, they placed them in the highest “elected” positions in the land.

To their credit, however, they did train young men and women from the lower classes to take over senior and junior positions in the bureaucracy. The training that these young men and women got as pensionados in the United States was steeped in the honesty bestowed on George Washington, mythically or not, and that may be why they came back serious in the business of running government. But more than that, the basic reason these young men and women became honest civil servants is that they generally came from classes which had not been thoroughly co-opted by the Spaniards, and therefore still held on to the native principles of hiya and katapatan.

Due to the presence of these young men and women who eventually grew old in the bureaucracy, we are wont to think that our government, before Marcos, was as clean as immaculate. That is not entirely true. What is truer is that the bureaucracy remained, for several decades, clean enough to cover up the stealthy little robberies of our upper-class elected officials.

It is also true that these robberies were very little compared to the robberies conducted by our officials today, who are capable of robbing the people blind whether they be elected or not, whether they be in the upper or lower rungs of the bureaucracy or not.

But the robberies of yesteryears, small as they may have been compared to what we see today, were robberies nonetheless.

Marcos, a datu

Marcos was a local datu before he became a congressman. He it was who, in breaking the barriers of the imagination in robbery, broke the barriers of upper-class robbery. In involving bright young minds from the middle class in his administration, whether as officials or as cronies, he lowered the stakes for robbery-in-band. With the proliferation of possibilities in the art of corruption, the population itself soon learned the art of corruption.

That is why many say that when democracy was restored in 1986, corruption was also democratized. The Filipino people had learned, by way of osmosis as well as journalistic declaration, that their leaders were corrupt; being an indigenously democratic people who had lived by consensus before the coming of the Spaniards, why should they not be able to do what their leaders were doing?

Marcos’ breaking of the barriers of corruption also facilitated another phenomenon: after martial law, the old ruling class, whose wealth had been based on feudal property, ill-gotten perhaps through one or two centuries of corruption but feudal nonetheless, found themselves with strange bedfellows in politics—they were joined now by sons and daughters of the professional middle class, sons and daughters who had themselves gotten rich quick through the auspices of cronyism but had no social backing in terms of land.

The “old” ruling class, as Cory’s kind must be called even if their wealth may have come out of a fluke in the Philippine Revolution, looked down on this new variety of the ruling class, though they were exactly the same not only in terms of skin color but of eyeglass color—they looked at the economy in exactly the same feudal way: that is, they sat and waited for the moneys of the land to come to their desk drawers. Only, the new ones were more active and obvious in their search for it, while Cory herself, like some of the presidents before her, may not have directly engaged in it, having been guilty of it only by proxy.

It was not, therefore, because Erap came from the masa that Cory’s kind abhorred him. He is, after all, the son of an engineer, and most of his brothers and sisters are professionals. It was because he had broken through the barriers of corruption, of which the old ruling class thinks they have the priority, the practice having been traditionally their sole privilege.

Land reform made matters worse for the expanded ruling class, which are now rightfully called ruling elites rather than one ruling elite. After land reform, which was dictated by the U.S. on Marcos (as well as Magsaysay before him) as an instrument for creating a cash economy and therefore a wider market in the countryside, as well as for stymieing peasant insurgencies, the traditional elite could not rely anymore on good old feudalism to feed their fancies. They had to look for newer sources of “income.” Since they were so used to sitting and waiting for the produce of the land to come to their tables, few of them thought of applying whatever capital they had accumulated on productive enterprise. Instead, they thought of the next best thing: to engage in bureaucratic enterprise—that is, sitting and waiting behind desks for the moneys to flow into their drawers.

This added to the current glut we see in electoral politics. Too many want to become politicos—it is the only way to earn, barring conscientious application of hard work in legitimate business. Not only the nouveau riche elite, but the traditional elite, want a piece of the pie.

Even the few of the traditional elite who are into big business mistakenly think that they need government in order to survive, and therefore dabble in it.

This is the circus we see now playing itself out before us: the Gloria camp representing the traditional elite (now you see why Cory has had to defend her, and is working out a replacement for her); the Erap camp representing the nouveau riche elite, with their billions earned not only from illegitimate sources but from the movie fiefdom (which, by the way, behaves very much like a feudal fiefdom, in the sense that the star sits and waits long hours to get into camera, earning millions, while everyone else works his butt off around him/her, earning a pittance).

It’s been a tug of war between the two elites, beginning with Edsa I and going on to Edsa II. That each time the traditional elite won is indicative of its continued strength. This continued strength is fueled by their allies in big business, which happen to be peopled by their kind. The problem is, while these few businesses depend on the masses even more than on government, their owners, like their cousins in politics, cannot get themselves to like their own customer base. It is this internal contradiction within the traditional elite that will spell their disaster after Gloria, if they choose not to shape up.

Their likely alternative of a puppet known to have been corrupt-to-the-core from the start will not help them any. They are on the way out, in the same way that Gloria is, because the semi-feudal order that used to nourish them is already crumbling. All the masses have to do to turn them to powder is to boycott their products.

But there is a third factor to the current situation; without this third factor, our story will not be complete.

The rising entrepreneurial class

Marcos, in his twenty-one year reign, did two other things that would turn the tide of history after his political demise in 1986: first, he shortened the 99-year lease on the U.S. military bases to a 25-year lease, renewable; and second, he opened the doors to the sending of overseas contract workers abroad, an act which was indefatigably carried through by Cory Aquino.

Let me discuss the second one first, because it is an internal development that can become a basis of thoroughgoing change, and the first one later, because it points to an external factor that could accommodate, or stunt, the second.

But first, we must be clear about the reasons for the OFW policy of both Marcos and Cory: not being productive, its head caught in the vise of foreign control and its tail snagged in the laziness of its ruling elites, the economy has been on a downward spin for decades, the only way to salvage it being to rely on the remittances of millions of Filipinos working their butts off abroad.

In its first one-and-a-half decades of encouragement, the OFW phenomenon produced a consumer-oriented local market. The families of OFWs spent their loved ones’ earnings on appliances and every imaginable consumable, so that when the OFWs got home, they were still as penniless as ever.

But one gets over consumption sooner or later. As expected, the Ilocanos were the first to overcome the urge. By the middle of the second decade, some of them were already starting to buy not only houses and lots, but farms, putting these to good productive use. On the other hand, most bought service vehicles, earning their daily bread from these when they had exhausted their contracts abroad.

There is a limit to one’s earning from service vehicles, however. The rapid spread of information technology in the 90s provided other ways of investing smaller amounts of capital on businesses that even young children of OFWs could engage in. The discovery of franchising opened up other venues of investment for those who had accumulated more capital, whether by being OFWs abroad or by having been children of less greedy jueteng lords or government officials or, for that matter, children of legitimately wealthy Chinese businessmen—or by just exercising plain ingenuity. The discovery that Filipinos eat a lot, and love dressing, opened up even more venues of investment to anyone who was willing to work darned hard to earn reasonably.

Today, there are a substantial number of these micro, small and medium-sized enterprises all over the Philippines. Their owners constitute the engine behind the movement against corruption in the bureaucracy. These owners know that without corruption, they would not have to slave to get their papers through city hall, the BIR, SEC, DTI, and other government agencies. They know that once unleashed, their wealth-creating energies could save the Philippines from economic disaster.

They also know that “E”-Vat may kill them.

Not yet quite a distinct, existent class, they are a rising entrepreneurial class nourished by the breasts of the middle and lower classes, waiting desperately to start walking on their own. They are the new and more robust seeds of the vaunted national bourgeoisie described by the Left in the 60s and 70s, a national bourgeoisie that did not quite survive the onslaught of foreign capital after the imposition of martial law.

Their beginnings, and strengthening, run parallel with the born again Christian phenomenon in the Philippines. Like the beginning of the OFW phenomenon, born again Christianity went through a revival in the 80s. By the 90s it was already starting to influence Catholics in their attitudes towards the Bible. With the advent of the 21st century, born again Christians were already starting to reach out to the Muslims, not necessarily to convert them, but to show them where Jesus—Issa Almasih—is in the Koran.

It is significant that born again Christians never thought of their belief in Jesus Christ as the Son of God as a religion, but as a personal relationship with their Savior. In so starting, they have been able to approximate in the Philippines the effects of the Reformation on Europe, releasing a great well-spring of hope within a crumbling semi-feudal order because it unleashes the energies of the most basic seeds of capitalism—almost, but not quite the same kind of nascent capitalism that the merchants brought to Europe centuries ago. In so starting, they were, in the 90s, able to rethink their initial closed-mindedness, thereby reaching out to the Philippines’ traditional religions, and lately, even to the agnostics and atheists of the Left, the power-prone of the military Right, and, most difficult of all, the unbelievers of the University of the Philippines.

Tenuous as the continued existence of the rising entrepreneurial class may be, therefore, having the born again Christian phenomenon as its ideological spearhead means its inevitable formation. Furthermore, even before its full formation, it has already found a leader in the person of Bro. Eddie Villanueva, himself a professor of entrepreneurship as well as entrepreneur. His concern for both OFWs and entrepreneurship, clearly and methodically expounded in his platform and program of government, drew both groups to his cause during the May 2004 elections, and will continue to draw them to him beyond Gloria.

As to whether this new OFW-entrepreneurial-born again Christian force will be able or even be willing to immediately unseat the traditional elite, however, is another matter. In the May 2004 elections, eschewing all tactics and strategies of traditional politics including the expenses (though not the wobbly machinery) of poll watching, they were roundly cheated of millions of votes, exactly how many millions only time, and God, will tell.

But who knows? The God of those who believe is an extremely powerful God. This optimism, this overwhelming sense of belief, is expressed in a recent missive written by Jeric Soriano, a born again Christian-entrepreneur who runs JCSFX Media, Inc.:

---------------------------
Listen, we need to stop preaching what the politicians are doing and start telling what God is doing! God said He is healing this land. We must start speaking about this country by faith instead of going around spouting bad news all the time. Of course, that will sound odd to most people. Some of them may even think we've slipped a few cogs. But that's nothing new.

Let me tell you something: One handful of believers who are listening to, trusting in, and speaking out the good news of God are more powerful than all the devils on earth. One handful of believers is more powerful than a whole army of unbelieving doomsayers. Their unbelief will not make the faith of God of no effect!

That's why you need to turn a deaf ear to the bad news and just start praising and thanking God for His deliverance. Every word of praise we speak releases faith in our heart.

Get determined. Take a firm stand that things are changing in this country. Settle it in your heart as you pray. Speak it out. Call it forth. God is healing the land!
---------------------------

The missive, harmless as it may sound, is in fact based on Nehemiah 6:1-16. At the time of the early Jewish diaspora, Nehemiah had built a wall to house the Jews who had returned to their land despite its having been overrun by foreign powers. Enemies of the Jews tried to discourage him by spreading the rumor that he was planning to become King of the Jews, and therefore, because of that, he was going to be killed. He, however, remained unfazed, and went on with his work, finishing the wall in 52 days. When the wall was finished, the tables were turned on the enemies of the Jews, for it was they who became disheartened, finally realizing that the wall was, after all, the work of God, not just Nehemiah.

As the passage from Nehemiah demonstrates, the language of born again Christians is not only a prayerful language; it is a language that integrates action into its prayer, and prayer in its action. Their models include not only David, who slew Goliath and became King after long years of pursuit by the power-protective Saul; they also include Paul, who was constantly in and out of prison, but never flagged in the evangelistic goals assigned to him by Jesus.

Today, born again Christians, who constitute not only fellowship-based, religion-less Christians but born again Protestants and Catholics alike, and at this very moment, even born again Muslims, cut through at least 20 percent of the Filipino population, whether in the Philippines or abroad. Among them are a substantial number of micro, small, and medium-sized as well as millions of would-be entrepreneurs who hold fast to their Bible’s promises of prosperity and blessed nationhood.

Perhaps it is not so much the millions Bro. Eddie Villanueva is capable of calling forth that bothers Gloria, as Tony Abaya enunciated in a June 23 column entitled “Who’s Afraid of Bro. Eddie?”, but this overwhelming faith and confidence in a righteous God.

That is, if she herself believes.

The external factor

There is an external factor to Philippine society, however, as there was even in pre-colonial times due to the inordinately hospitable nature of the people, and that factor always has to be taken into consideration in any study of the ongoing Philippine crisis, especially today, in the light of the global situation.

That factor is the United States.

When Marcos cut the 99-year lease of the U.S. military bases to 25 years renewable, not even the United States guessed that nationalists would get to the Senate by 1991 and vote not to renew the lease. They thought they had ensured as far back as 1983, before the assassination of Ninoy Aquino, that the powers of these nationalist legislators would be clipped. Dragging their feet while making the motions of moving out of the main bases, they were finally jolted out of them by a deus ex machina: Pinatubo revolted, erupting right before their eyes. They packed up fast, and left.

But the Philippines remained the apple of their eyes, not so much for sentimental reasons, but because the apple was shown in the late 90s, through their sophisticated satellites, to contain more than the riches they had ever suspected it to have, riches that they never even had, or had exhausted in their greed.

When Erap was in power, they therefore foisted the Visiting Forces Agreement on him—all they could manage in the meantime.

The pressures have been mounting since due to the floundering American dollar, aggravated as its fall has been by the US misadventure in Iraq. So what to do with the Philippines? The options have already been laid out, planned for and partially implemented well in advance, but subsequent events will tell whether any of them can prosper.

One thing is certain, though: the US government has not taken kindly to Gloria’s flirtations with China. When she goes, therefore, it will be good riddance to her.

Whom will they support in her place? Any one of the pretenders will do, including the most corrupt, because, in the present configuration of Philippine society, a configuration which started at the end of the 19th century when America became interested in the Philippines, anyone who comes to power must contend with the United States. Unless Filipinos are able to develop their own national capital, they will not be able to get out of that configuration. The traditional elite with their feudal superciliousness, best exemplified by Gloria, will not let today’s millions of potential small capitalists do it for the country, mistakenly thinking they can continue their centuries-old dalliance with whoever is in power in the world. The nouveau riche, flabby at the knees like Erap, dead as FPJ, and movie-bound as Susan, would not know how to do it, used as they are to making money some other way. The entrepreneurial class is still rising, and can be easily killed off by a measure like the “E”-Vat.

Unless, of course, the righteous prayers of born again Christians rise up to the heavens and produce a miracle, breaking up the traditional elite so that the big corporations join in the crusade to develop small capitalism, for their own eventual greater gain; pushing the nouveau riche to productive enterprise, more productive than the present service enterprises of Guia Gomez and Laarni Enriquez; convincing the Left that economic production is necessary in the protracted struggle to the socialist stage; inducing the US to leave national capitalism well enough alone, because if they are ever able to take Mindanao, which they covet because that is where the main resources lie, they wouldn’t want to feed, clothe and shelter 16 million dependents; and mobilizing the masses to take hold of their destiny by creating their own wealth, thereby acquiring a voice in the economic and political affairs of the nation.

A pipe dream. The only way the wicked can restore the pledge. But as Christian prayer-points, entirely possible, especially under a revolutionary transition government that truly understands the basic problems of the nation, and how these problems can be overcome, one by one.

July 7, 2005

Hong Kong before turnover

2005-07-08T19:23:00.000+08:00

I took this photo in Hong Kong in 1996, before the turnover. Notice the people all walking at a forward slant. That is how active Hong Kong was, and is up to now.

Today's Poem

2005-06-25T09:13:00.000+08:00

Strictly Politics
(For Pia Hontiveros)

by Mila D. Aguilar

Listen to the apologist
As he speaks,
Wriggling his way out of
Her closet, like a worm.

Look at the two black blotches
On what could have been
His cheeks, acned
By years of excess

Sweets and tar having
Eaten up his teeth,
The better to hiss
His sibilant sounds

His eyes shifting left
And right, his darkness
No match to the
Handsome men and host

Facing his venom
As he sneers at the
Sheer logic of the
Clean man of God.

In my garden
The mariposa has not visited
My mother's santol tree
For years.

No big colorful butterflies
Here anymore,
Only the small ones
Who flit about fast

And then disappear.
This summer
The santol fell to the ground
In their dozens,

Leaving us little to eat.
Something in the air
Dwarfs all beauty around me.
Something in the heat

Smothers the truth.
I wish for the rain,
Though it be too far between
To wash off the scum.

June 25, 2005
5:30-6:15 am

N.B.:

Mila D. Aguilar was also known as Clarita Roja when she was underground for thirteen years during the period of Martial Law.

She had chosen the name Clarita Roja, which means "clear red," thinking it to signify the red of communism. Little did she know then that it also means the blood of Jesus Christ, who died on the cross to redeem mankind from its sins.

Clarita Roja it was who wrote such books of poetry as The Mass Line and Dare to Struggle, Dare to Win.

When she emerged as Mila D. Aguilar again, this time in prison, she came up with three more books, one published in San Francisco (Pall Hanging Over Manila, 1984), another in New York (A Comrade is as Precious as a Rice Seedling, 1984, 1985 and 1987), still another in Manila by the Free Mila D. Aguilar Committee (Why Cage Pigeons?, 1984).

Almost all her poems, including those she wrote from age 15, were collected in a volume published by the University of the Philippines Press in 1996 (Journey: An Autobiography in Verse).

Her latest collection, still unpublished, is entitled Chronicle of a Life Foretold: 110 Poems (1995-2004). This poem, as well as five others, is not included in that collection.

How many short stories?

2005-06-12T20:25:00.000+08:00

Break-Up Stories
5 short shorts

by Lilledeshan Bose

I. Oh, what a night

The last time I saw trees shaping strips of moonlight into curves, I was ten.
We--my sisters, my yaya, bunches of kinchay, strawberries and jars and jars of peanut brittle--are bundled up in a car, parked outside my father's house.
My father is outside, reading a letter just handed to him by my mother, who is getting into the car.

She slams the door, adjusts the rearview mirror, and asks, "Who has to go to the bathroom?" My sister starts crying, but no one answers, so my mom starts to drive away.

When I look back at my father, he is tearing the letter up into tiny pieces. They're carried across the moonlit strips, until we turn into a curve, and then I can't see anymore.

II. Christine

Everybody has a girlfriend named Christine. Chris, Kristy, Tin-Tin, Ina Christina, Tina, Kat, Trina.

They’re freshly powdered and Nenucoed, long hair ponytailed, books held tightly to their chests. To pick things up they never bent down crassly by the waist but discreetly buckled at the knee, tucking the hair behind their ears.

These Christines have flowers and chocolates from you, teddy bears and pursed lip kisses are all you give. You practice enunciating your "I love you" s with a Christina.

You ride at the back of a pick-up to the beach, counting streetlights like stars as you whiz past with Chris. At a party, you get so drunk that Tin-tin has to take you home in a cab. Ina cuts class to bring you lunch if you are hungry in school. With Kat you ignore curfew and lie to your parents. With Tina, you learn to love.

In the times when you’re about to fall asleep, deep breathed and rested, a girl named Christina strokes your arm, smelling like cologne and bread.

But during the rainy season when the traffic at EDSA slows to a crawl, or when dusk gleams through night lights in pink and orange, you dream of a different woman.

Head thrown back, her laughter like dancing, asking you to join her in the rain.

III. Out to Sea

She took him out to sea, which was brown and curled up at the edges with seagrass. It wasn’t like she remembered; the sea looked less blue, the sky less infinite. His presence filled her vision so she could hardly see the view. The tide was receding and they walked in ankle-deep water. There were sea urchins and dead coral they had to watch out for.

When the water got deep enough they sat down facing each other, and he wrapped her legs around his body. He tried to fuck her in this position, but it didn’t work too well—it was noon, and it was as tight as the first time.

Facing the beach, she kept looking over his shoulder to watch out for people on the shore. When he finally cried out, "I love you, I love you," she stared at the twinkling waves, her eyes brimming with salt.

IV. Heartbeat

With other boys her heart would beat a fast drum pound dug-dug-dug-dug-dug not stopping for breaths in between. These boys she watched out for; looked for the tops of their heads in crowded rooms, waited for their calls.

She lived for their comings and goings—they made her heart beat-buzz through her veins like a telephone—ringing in her ears, the sound vibrating on her tongue.

Jose was different, though. When they were in bed together she hugged him to look over his shoulder, her heart resting against his. He said his "I love yous" a countless million times, and her heart slowed down with every declaration.

Some days he hugged her stomach, and tried to listen for her heartbeat. It was there—a slow thunk- thunk- thunk of hollow tin.

V. Questions.

My mother had her eyebrows tatooed on her face when it was uso, in the early eighties. They were perfectly placed, new moon thin above her eyes. As she grew older and her face started to droop, her eyebrows remained perfectly placed on her forehead—a few inches above her eyes that drooped down at the edges like an upside down smile, a few inches below the hairline that crept every year like higad.

With her eyebrows, she looked like she was always asking a question. Good morning, honey? She seemed to be wondering at me, when I woke up. Go fix your bed? Her mouth queried, in afternoons. I hate your father? She would exclaim after too much wine at night.

Leave me? She'd wail, when we were alone.

Copyright by Lilledeshan Bose. Previously published in The Philippine Free Press.

It's a story and it's short

2005-06-12T19:54:00.000+08:00

I am uploading the first two stories for English 10: First, in this post, "The Boy Called Juan Pusong," and second, in the subsequent post, "Break Up Stories" by Lilledeshan Bose. I had asked students to Google Lille's story, but one reported that he couldn't find it. True enough, it isn't there anymore.

The Boy Called Juan Pusong

Once there was a boy whose name was Juan Pusong. He was very mischievous.

One day he went to the fields to see the cows of the King. He thought of playing a prank on the king. He cut the tails of several cows and then drove the cows away. Then he stuck the tails in mud holes, with half of each tail sticking out of the mud.

Then he went to the King’s palace and told the King that many of his cows had jumped into the mud holes and drowned.

The King was very sad. He went to the fields to see his cows. When he saw the tails sticking out of the mud, he became even sadder.

But when he asked the people nearby he learned of Juan Pusong’s mischief. The King became angry. He ordered his men to put Juan Pusong in a cage. The following day the cage was to be thrown into the sea so that Juan Pusong would drown.

Early in the morning, Juan Pusong cried and cried. A man came along and asked, “Why do you cry, Juan? Why are you in that cage?”

Juan Pusong answered, “I am crying because the King is forcing me to marry his beautiful daughter but I don’t want to.”

The man thought that to marry the King’s daughter would make him a very lucky fellow. So the man suggested that they change places. The man put on Juan’s clothes and placed himself in the cage. Juan Pusong put on the man’s clothes and went home.

The following day, the King’s men came and carried the cage with the man in it and threw it into the sea.

The next day, Juan Pusong passed by the King’s palace. The King was surprised to see him. He thought that Juan Pusong had drowned the day before.

The King was about to put Juan Pusong in prison again. But Juan told the King that he had returned from the bottom of the sea. There he had seen the King’s dead parents and relatives. They were all very happy and they wanted the King to come for a visit and see their beautiful houses.

The King marveled at Juan’s story. He wished to see his parents and relatives in their beautiful houses. So he had himself put in a cage and ordered his men to throw the cage into the seas. And thus the silly king was drowned. And clever Juan Pusong became king in his place.

(Eugenio 369-70, as taken from Cebuano Folktales 2, ed. Erlinda K. Alburo)

Poem for the first semester

2005-06-08T15:42:00.000+08:00

Birds
by Mila D. Aguilar

I don't know the language
Of which they speak
As they fly busily about

After the rain.
I can't tell why
After some minutes

They stop
Going about their business.
Is it the wind rustling

Gently through the leaves?
Or are they done?
The skies may be gray,

But I share their joy
Over the coming and going
Of the rain, the way

The plants green and preen
Over the end
Of a long withering summer.

June 8, 2005
10:00-11:06 am

2005-03-23T20:28:00.000+08:00

I found this statue in the Arzobispado of Vigan. It's one of the most realistic depictions of Jesus' suffering on the cross that I have seen, carved right here in the Philippines centuries ago. A blessed Holy Week to all!

Pagoda Tree

2005-03-17T13:17:00.005+08:00

I would never attempt to translate a poem--any poem, not even mine. Look here, I first wrote a poem in Pilipino about the calachuchi, then wrote about it again in English. Some of the things the two poems say about the calachuchi may be the same, but the general thought is different. This is because the flow, the rhythm, the sound, of each language is so different. And poetry is first and foremost rhythm, sound, flow! My admiration goes for those who can translate poems well.

Pagoda Tree
By Mila D. Aguilar

The pagoda tree,
as they call it in English,
is our calachuchi,
the same name we give
to mistresses.

But how strange the name sounds.
Pagoda tree, I mean.
Towards the summer solstice,
It sheds its leaves
Revealing

A body made up of so many arms
Dancing their way to the skies
Their fingers growing
The purest freshest flowers
Heavenward.

This even in its old age.
I have seen it at 50 or so
Joints already gnarled
By so much twisting
Upwards
Still offering its flowers
With the daintiest of fingers.

Without sacrificing the grass.
Other plants could be grown
Below it
Because its leaves don't take
All the sun
And its roots not too much
Of land and water either.

Cut a branch and let it stand
On an inch of soil, then see
New roots grow
Out of the salved wound
Once dried up,
As long as a month after.
Its moisture keeps.

Yet for all that
It's not a pagoda tree to me.
It's still my lovely calachuchi.

March 16, 2005
10:35 pm

Calachuchi

2005-03-17T13:07:00.000+08:00

Why a poem in Pilipino on a blog for students of English? "Wait a while," as we Filipinos would say; you'll see the point soon enough.

Calachuchi
Ni Mila D. Aguilar

Bakit ang kalaguyo,
Tinatawag na calachuchi?

Sa kainitan ng taon,
Nawawalan ng dahon

Labas kaluluwa
Laking tuwa!

Habang tumatanda
Paikot lalo ang sanga

Sa mga kasukasuang
Maga na kung tingnan.

Pero masdan ang mga daliri
ng tinatawag na kiri

Gaano mang paikot ng katawan
Tuon pa ri'y kalangitan

Handog sa dulo ng mga ito
Mga bulaklak na purong-puro.

At mantakin mo,
Anuman ang itanim sa ilalim

Nitong puno,
Maging ito ma'y damo,

Tumutubo.
Hindi siya matakaw sa araw

Hindi siya mapanipsip
Ng lupang kinatatayuan.

Kung bakit ba tinawag na calachuchi
E iba naman ang kasalanan.

Marso 16, 2005

Vigan

2005-03-10T15:41:00.000+08:00

Vigan is a beautiful place. You can't find these ruins anymore if you went there today; I took the photo years ago, when I was there with some friends.

Teresa Casas' paper on the Batangas revolt

2005-03-10T15:19:00.000+08:00

Below find one of the best-written papers I got last semester.

-------------------------------------------------

The Batangas Revolt: Whose Revolutionary Feat?

by Ma. Teresa Salao Casas

The disparity between the elite and the masses has always been like the unquenchable flames of a raging fire; it simply burns more intense with time. Such conflict has left flickering flames in our country’s history, reflecting a timeless struggle between the haves and have-nots. Historical accounts would reveal that such a social rivalry is not limited to a fight for equality or freedom from prejudice, but extends to a competition in revolutionary history.

In Batangas, for instance, questions have been raised as to who wielded the mighty balisong in battle against the colonizers. Were the masses truly responsible for the revolution? Or was there another formidable force in Batangas that held its own might in the face of the Spaniards?

TRADITIONAL PERCEPTION

Renowned historians prefer the former. For many years, the concept of a mass-based revolution has appealed to many. People prefer the idea of a nation formed by the sweat and blood of the common people. The elite were presented as enemies who belittled the strength of the common people; they were portrayed as a mighty aggressor from whom the latter must gain freedom. Upper-class society was also depicted as traitors to their fellow citizens because of their condescending notion that the masses were incapable of a nationalistic movement and that only the educated could initiate reform for the country, thus explaining why they collaborated with the Americans (Agoncillo “Katipunan”).

Since historians lean towards the plight of the masses, Philippine history tags the Revolution against Spain as a “revolt of the masses” (Agoncillo “Revolt” 1) (Ileto 3-10). People have the common belief that impoverished provincials primarily led the Philippine Revolution. Historical texts claim that the Revolution was led by the uprising of lower-class society and that succeeding revolts were also powered by the masses.

Since the common man usually received the brunt of Spanish abuse particularly that of the friars, such a perception of the Revolution is understandable and much more convenient to believe. In Lian and Nasugbu of Batangas, peasants held uprisings against the friars who usurped their land and exacted taxes for occupying such land. The peasants refused to pay the amount demanded by the friars and attacked and plundered the houses of the Jesuit fathers in 1745 (Agoncillo “Revolt” 3). According to Dr. Jaime B. Veneracion, the 1745 Tagalog revolts that included that of Batangas were the most widespread revolts in the country. Such discontent was caused by the conversion of land from pastures to plantations where forced labor was thrust on the masses (Veneracion 103-105).

Teodoro Agoncillo, one of the advocates of the revolt of the masses idea, further states that the poor initiated the Revolution and constructed the idea of forming a sovereign nation, whereas the elite merely sought reform in the Propaganda movement. The masses were heavily taxed, had little livelihood opportunities, and were the objects of ridicule among friars. Because of this, they were ripe for the Revolution that was the goal of the secret Katipunan society. The elite joined the masses in the Revolution only when the former realized that the latter was succeeding in the battle against Spanish oppression where the former had not. Though their published writings awakened a patriotic fervor in many of the Filipinos, the ilustrados or the intellectual elite were unable to obtain the reform they sought (“Katipunan”).

In addition to this, it is normal to assume that the Revolutionary force in Batangas consisted mainly of lower class individuals, since the province’s elite made up only 4,500 to 6,000 individuals, or about one to two percent of the population. This is a considerably small number in relation to the hundreds of thousands of Batangueños who joined the battle. Even Glenn May acknowledges that there were only a few rich Batangueños in the province (19).
However, even if the elite were small in number, their participation in the Revolution was not minimal. Even Agoncillo admits that the wealthy engaged in the Revolution to become the “top bureaucrats of the revolutionary government and later of the Republic (“Katipunan”).

Another argument noteworthy to consider is the question regarding the reasons lower-class society participated in the Revolution. Widely accepted historical texts cite the masses as key actors in the Revolution because according to Reynaldo Ileto, they were aware that they were fighting for a “change in the nature of society” (Ileto according to May 51). They rebelled against foreign power and wished for freedom. However, he later expresses doubt over the masses’ perception of independence, and asks whether the peasants merely “blindly and irrationally reacted to oppressive conditions” (Ileto 5). May likewise indicates that the reason for the masses’ participation in the Revolutionary forces is highly questionable, and he claims that they took part in battles only because obligation to their wealthy patrons compelled them to do so (May 52). May uses Gen. Miguel Malvar of Batangas as an example and cites how his 75 men in the army were convinced to fight in the victorious reclaiming of Sto. Tomas and Lipa, and also Talisay, Batangas. May insinuates that it would have been impossible to form an army so quickly if Malvar had no tenants or retainers whom he could have mobilized immediately (May 50-52) (Ilustre 11).

Disagreement among historians regarding the greater prominence of either the elite or the masses connotes that, behind the belief of a mass-based struggle may lie a truth unrecognized by many. Disparity of conclusions on something as truthful as history must mean that something is amiss. Perhaps, in our country’s history, certain historical facts have remained cloaked by many years of scholarly denial.

THE CASE OF THE ELITE

Recent historical accounts, for instance, argue that the Revolution was not a revolt of the masses, but was a rebellion led by the affluent and influential as evidenced by the Revolution as it happened in Batangas. The Batangueño political and economic elite were the prime movers of the province’s Revolution; they were leaders in the army; they provided food, sustenance and “general support to the resistance forces” (May xii). To illustrate this, Teodoro Kalaw writes in his memoirs how the wealthy helped during the siege of the convent to which the Spaniards had withdrawn in 1897. The rich contributed their cattle, rice, and horses for the Filipino officials and forces at the time. The mansions of the wealthy were also used as bases in attacks of the Spanish garrison. One of those allocated for the occupation of Filipino forces was that of Señor Manuel Luz, who had one of the best stone structures in the town. (14-15).

Most of the educated individuals who were significant icons in the province’s political history belonged to rich and prominent families. Among those who obtained degrees in the University of Sto. Tomas were Lipeños Jose Luz, Sixto Roxas, Cipriano Calao, and Gregorio Catigbac, as well as Vicente Olmos and Pablo Borbon from Batangas City. A few other Batangueños like Galicano Apacible from Balayan, Gregorio Aguilera Solis, Lauro Dimayuga, and Baldomero Roxas from Lipa even went to Spain to pursue their studies. Once exposed to liberal ideas in Spain, some of these Batangueño elite like Solis and Dimayuga became propagandists (May 28-29).

Leaders of the Batangas Revolution also belonged to upper-class society. Among the most notable was Gen. Miguel Malvar who came from a political family in Sto. Tomas. Others were Arcadio Laurel who belonged to the Laurel clan of Talisay, Pedro Ruffy who was a one-time gobernadorcillo of Nasugbu, Santiago Rillo de Leon who was a gobernadorcillo of Tuy, and Ananias Diocno of the Diocnos in Taal (May 50).

One interesting point to consider is how the economic prosperity of Batangas affected the Revolution. Natives of the province believe that Batangas was one of the financial backers of the battles against the colonizers.

In relation to this, it is important to note that the province of Batangas was agriculturally and financially prosperous during the Spanish occupation. In fact, even before the Spanish arrived, Batangas was already economically wealthy. Taal, in particular, was a natural port to the outside world and to the lakeshore communities, thus making it the province’s center of commerce. It was the richest town in Batangas “until traders transferred businesses to Lipa and Tanauan because of the growing inland trade” (Yson 54).

In subsequent years, however, Lipa played a much more important role in the prosperity of the land of the barakong Batangueño. On the average, a doctor from Lipa would make more than P70,000 in fees alone. Calle Real, Lipa’s main road filled with many business establishments, was the town’s commercial center; it was, in fact, likened to present-day Manila (Kalaw 1). During the 1880s, Lipa had an annual income of P 4,000, 000 from the coffee industry alone. According to the Lipeño scientist Dr. Manuel Roxas, for about six months in 1886-1888, Lipa was the sole world supplier of coffee beans. This was because coffee plantations around the world were infected by a virus that killed virtually all the coffee plants globally (Katigbak “When Coffee Bloomed in Lipa”).

Money was flowing quickly and quite effortlessly into Lipa because of the coffee industry. Many businesses set up branches in Lipa to take advantage of the wealth the industry brought. People were so rich at the time that women would wear diamond buckles on their satin shoes and clothes with gold and silver accessories (Katigbak “Few There Were” 7, 85-86). Most women’s apparel was imported from France, Spain, and other European countries. Even the poor were not exempt from such ostentation. According to Retana, there was a poor woman in Lipa who wore diamonds worth six to eight thousand pesos during feast days (Katigbak “When Coffee Bloomed in Lipa”).

Now, how could have all this wealth aided the Revolution?

Fr. Tom Villafranca, one of Archbishop Gaudencio Rosales’ researchers of Batangas history, says that it could have been possible for the wealthy to contribute to the Katipunan in the province, but no existing written accounts could prove this (Villafranca). Kalaw notes in his memoirs, however, that during the strained years of the Revolution, the Lipa aristocrats were “in constant fear because several persons actually involved in the Katipunan, and many others under suspicion, were known to be their friends” (Aide-de-Camp 11). Even Agoncillo mentions that Andres Bonifacio sent his trusted men to wealthy individuals in order to persuade them to help the cause of the Katipunan, or join their society (“Katipunan”). Agoncillo did not mention, however, whether these wealthy individuals included those of Batangas.

Traditional sources claim, though, that the Katipunan was a purely mass-based society and that no elite or intellectual from Lipa joined it. Juanito Marquez, in particular, cites a few prominent lower-class individuals who were among the first members of the Katipunan in Lipa (Marquez 31) (Agoncillo 1). If Retana’s previous recount is to be believed, then even the poor were capable of contributing to the Katipunan whether in terms of manpower or financial aid. May nevertheless contends that the identified members of the Katipunan were not solely from the lower class; in fact, a few of the members Marquez cited were among the political elite if not notable families of the province. Prominent among those mentioned were Major Gregorio Leviste and Lieutenant Felix Leviste of the landed Leviste clan; these men were said to hold key positions in the Katipunan (Marquez 32) (Battle 39).

Glenn May even goes as far as to question the existence of the Katipunan lower-class society in Batangas; he claims that it cannot be proven that the Katipunan reached the province, but later concedes that neither can it be proven that it had not (Battle 39).

Such discrepancies in well-founded historical records and studies are enough to doubt the legitimacy of the belief of a solely mass-based Revolution. Upper-class society created an imprint in revolutionary history that was far from inconsequential and far from merely financial. Because the elite were educated and thus well equipped with liberal thoughts, they had powerful connections and means to manipulate the particulars of the battles for freedom. It was because of such education that the elite “were convinced of their capacity to rule, and were more likely to resist alien overlordship than the uneducated downtrodden masses” (May 30). Upper-class society knew that with the Spaniards out of political and economic power, the wealthy and educated would take the latter’s place in the country’s seat of power. It was for political, financial, and influential gain that the wealthy gambled their lives as well as their money, land, and possessions. Where the elite are believed by some to be the moving power behind the Batangas struggle, it is speculated that the masses were merely used as cannon fodder.

Nevertheless, from all these, the question of the nature of the Revolution remains undecided. Who really wielded the balisong to fend off foreign cruelty?

BALANCE OF REALITY

Evidence favors an elite-led Revolution; tradition holds firm to a revolt of the masses. But perhaps beneath the muddled facts and natives’ hearsay regarding the Revolution in Batangas, one thing has remained clear: the Batangueño role that marked the reclaiming of the province and the freedom of our country was not monopolized by a single force. Though scrutiny of historical truths and openness to what these reveal would confirm that the elite were the leading force behind the Revolution, Batangas could not have been regained were it not for the masses’ participation, however arguable the reasons for this. Likewise, the masses could not have reclaimed Batangas were it not for powerful leaders, most of whom were from the elite. The Batangueños of different social strata, but of similar patriotic spirit, together raised the balisong to severe the suffocating ties binding them to blind acquiescence to Spanish rule. The Revolution need not be the revolt of the masses nor of the elite alone; the Revolution was a Revolution because the elite and the masses played their respective roles in order to jointly yet differently put an end to Spanish oppression.

While the elite may have the canon, without the fodder, it will be a useless piece of equipment. Reductively, as the bow is to the arrow, so is the elite unto the masses; useless each without the other.

This is the balance of the reality of the Batangas Revolution.

WORKS CITED

Agoncillo, Teodoro A. “Katipunan: Army in the Shadows.” Filipino Heritage: The Making of a Nation. Ed. Alfredo Roces. Philippines: Lahing Pilipino Publishing Inc., 1978.

------------------------- The Revolt of the Masses. Quezon City: University of the Philippines, 1956.
[This book was responsible for the belief of a “revolt of the masses” and is one of the paper’s major sources for the foundations of such a belief.]

Ileto, Reynaldo C. Pasyon and Revolution: Popular Movements in the Philippines 1890-1910. Quezon Ciy: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1979.

Ilustre, Aurea G. Maikling Kasaysayan ng Lungsod at Probinsiya ng Batangas. Quezon City: Vibal Publishing Inc.,1991.

Kalaw,Teodoro M. Aide-de-Camp to Freedom. Trans. Maria Kalaw Katigbak. Manila: Teodoro M. Kalaw Society, Inc., 1965.

Katigbak, Maria Kalaw. Few there were (like my father). Manila: Teodoro
M. Kalaw Society Inc., 1974.

--------------------- “When Coffee Bloomed in Lipa.” Filipino Heritage: The Making of a Nation. Ed. Alfredo Roces. Philippines: Lahing Pilipino Publishing Inc., 1978.

Marquez, Juanito. “Lipa and the Philippine Revolution, 1896-1899.” MA Thesis. Ateneo de Manila University, 1969.

May, Glenn A. Battle for Batangas: a Philippine Province at War. Quezon City: New Day Publishers with permission from Yale University, 1993.

Veneracion, Jaime B. Agos ng Dugong Kayumanggi. Quezon City: Abiva Publishing House, Inc., 2000.

Villafranca, Fr. Bartolome. Personal Interview. Aug 2004.

Yson, Danny. The Birth, Growth and Demise of Kumintang: A Great Tagalog Nation in the 13th Century. Dannyson and Associates, 1997.

Mother and Child

2005-03-09T17:08:00.000+08:00

Digitally transformed, an idolatrous statue can become art. Guess what statue this piece of digital art came from.

Micah Patricia Rivera's paper on women

2005-03-09T16:53:00.000+08:00

Sorry, boys, but the best papers were about women, and most of the good papers were by women too! So what can we do.

This one is very well organized, so sit up and take notice.

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Filipino Women During the Spanish Colonial Era

by Micah Patricia Rivera

The roles of Filipino women have undergone numerous alterations because of the diverse ethos that penetrated the inherent Filipino customs through hundreds of years. During the three centuries of Spanish rule in the Philippines, the Filipino woman of influence and power was transformed concurrently with the conversion of the country’s social system into a male-dominated society. The shy, self-effacing and vulnerable image of a woman emerged as they were immortalized in literature by the writers of that era.

The incessant oppression of the Spaniards ignited various uprisings and awakened the patriotism of many Filipinas. Before long, women were seen playing crucial duties both in battle and behind the trenches, fighting for the liberty of their motherland.

A. Changes during Spanish Colonization

1. The Christianization of the Filipinos

The dawn of Spanish colonization paved the way for the introduction of Christianity in the Philippines. Spain brought with her not only the power of the sword but also the influence of the cross. It is widely recognized that one of the main objectives of Spain’s conquest was to introduce the Gospel to pagan nations. The missionaries believed that by doing so, they would merit eternal salvation (Alzona 21).

Religion took a vital part in Spain’s interaction with the native people for the Spaniards regarded baptism into the New Faith as a sign of adherence to their power. Many Filipinos were successfully converted to Christianity. The pageantry of the church had a wide appeal, supported by the integration of Filipino social customs into religious observances. The new religion appeared to be similar to their pagan beliefs such as God, who was comparable to their Bathala and the Christian saints, who resembled the spirits that they prayed to. What attracted the native Filipinos even more were the huge cathedrals, grand altars and festive celebrations that the friars presented to them (Alip 113).

Women were the ones greatly influenced by the changes brought about by the New Faith. Alzona records that the niece of Cebu’s supreme leader, Chief Tupas, was the very first Christian here in the Philippines. Not long after, women who came from other distinguished clans were also drawn to the new religion and baptized into Christianity (22).

There was resistance to this introduction, however, and this came from women as well. The babaylans and catalonans deemed Christianity as a hindrance in the performance of their vocation. They refused to embrace the new religion and held on to their customs and traditions. These babaylans and catalonans were forced to flee to the mountains where they could continue practicing their native religion.

2. Political Status of Women

In order to strengthen their colonization, Spain introduced a new form of government and with this, the important roles held by women in the political field were particularly affected. Men completely took over, acquiring positions such as cabesa de barangay and gobernadorcillo, the highest position a Filipino could occupy. They overshadowed the women who, until that time, enjoyed their own authority in pre-colonial society. Apart from those who were born into influential Filipino families (principales) or those who were married to men with high ranks, the Filipina did not possess any political power.

The Spanish law limited women’s rights. Married women were not permitted to deal with their personal possessions and to involve themselves in trade and commerce without their husband’s approval. They were denied the right to occupy any public position aside from the position of a teacher (Alzona 39).

On the other hand, Filipino women participated in the economic progress of their communities. They managed farms and retail shops in provincial towns; only a few engaged in large-scale businesses. Women in the rural areas were also involved in the field of agriculture. They were usually wives, daughters or relatives of farm workers who helped in the numerous tasks around the farmlands (Alzona 37).

B. Women in Colonial Society

1. The Changes in the Position of Women

Men and women had an egalitarian relationship in the early Philippines, enjoying equal privileges in all aspects of living. The two genders were given the opportunity of having an education and of practicing his/her profession. Man regarded woman as his partner who had her say in both domestic and public issues.

In the colonial setting, young girls were sent to colegios or beaterios where they studied not to be learned citizens but to be pious, upright, and humble ladies who would later take their role as mothers and wives (Alzona 28). Women who finished schooling were allowed to teach once they received a license from the government. However, most Filipinas were not able to go to school; thus, their functions in the community were limited to those of managing the household, and rearing their children. A great part of their time was dedicated to visiting churches and praying lengthy novenas.

In his book, Alip states that the Catholic faith marked a development in the lives of Filipinos. As Hhe pointed out, that, “It raised the position of women and exalted motherhood. These changes explained why Filipino women enjoy more rights and privileges than the women of most Oriental countries” (115). There are still prevailing beliefs that the Spanish colonization raised the social standing of women, confirming the preceding statement. However, Lorna S. Torralba-Titgemeyer comments otherwise in her paper, La Mujera Indigena (The Native Woman). She says that the arrival of the Spaniards abolished the honored position of the Filipino woman and replaced it with the new Filipina shaped into the perfect lady as perceived by society.

2. Women According to the Writings of Men

Our national hero, Jose Rizal, criticized women for permitting themselves to be deceived by the friars. He states in his Letter to the Women of Malolos that Filipino women had the misguided conception that showing respect to friars, to the extent of kissing their hands, was the way in which they could manifest their strong faith (Alzona 35).

Apolinario Mabini wrote in The Philippine Revolution, “One of the greatest virtues recognized in a brave and honorable man was the respect for women because the behavior which protects the chastity and the life of one who is weak shows greatness of heart and nobility of soul” (Camagay 12). In addition, Emilio Jacinto reminds Filipinos, “Do not look at woman as a mere plaything but rather as a partner…treat the women’s weakness with utmost respect” (Jacinto’s “Teachings of the Katipunan” as quoted by Camagay 11) These statements from Mabini and Jacinto confirm the notion that women are indeed weak and should therefore be shown consideration.

Andres Bonifacio, on the other hand, recognizes the Filipino women’s competence when he writes in his essay that even before the Spanish colonization women were already literate (Camagay 11). Camagay states, however, that Bonifacio’s statement still suggests the opinion that women became unwise during the time of the Spaniards.

Although our heroes were evidently concerned about the degradeding status of women, their writings still reveal the undeniable view of the Filipino woman as someone inferior.

C. Women in the Philippine Revolution

1. How Women Started to Take Part in the Fight for Freedom

For years, many Filipino women struggled to break through the roles that had been delineated for them. They shunned the Maria Clara image that Rizal portrayed in his novel, Noli Me Tangere. For as much as Maria Clara was the epitome of perfection in the Spanish era, she also served as a sign of women’s submission to the rule of men. Although a lot of Filipinas never rose above these expectations (Balangue-Apilado 49), there were still those who made a mark in history for their efforts of going against the norm and proving the real competence of the female gender.

The start of the consciousness of an “alternative order” was the result of the institution of Logia de Adopcion, the first masonic lodge for women. This organization paved the way for the women to recognize the ailing system of the Spanish reign, particularly the Christian church. Some of these women were Trinidad and Josefa Rizal, the sisters of our national hero, who were once faithful to the church but later refused to attend mass because of the exploitation of the friars (Camagay 14).

The acknowledgment of the Filipino woman’s worth in the pre-Hispanic times was also restored in the foundation of Bonifacio’s Republika ng Katagalugan. The Katipunan, which was formerly exclusive for men, was opened to women not only to avert the enemies’ focus but also to expand the membership of the association (Martinez-Sicat 174). These women, who were commonly close relatives of katipuneros, involved themselves in the uprising and voluntarily presented their assistance. The duties assigned to them were not limited to simply feeding the katipuneros and sewing flags. They performed the risky tasks of transporting guns and ammunitions from one town to another, stashing them in their skirts and tricking the guardia sibil that they were carrying food.

As Policarpio puts it, “Certain it is that women were not silent spectators of the great drama that was to overthrow the Spanish rule.” Apart from being nurses and messengers, the Filipino women also fought alongside their fathers, brothers and/or husbands. They donned men’s clothes and faced combat armed with a rifle and a bolo (21). The women of Ilocos, as told in Apilado’s essay, participated in real warfare in the Battle of Batac in 1900, wherein the forefront of the guerilla troops was a row of women. One account claimed that women were actually shot, as if in a firing squad, and their bodies were left on the ground as the combat ensued.

2. Women of the Revolution

Even before the Revolution began, women already showed active participation in numerous uprisings. Perhaps the most distinguished among them is Gabriela Silang, wife of Diego, who was one of the major forerunners of Bonifacio’s revolution. This heroine of Ilocos led armies into battle and carried on her husband’s causes despite threats to her own life. Later, when she was arrested, she faced the ultimate sentence during the Spanish rule; she was hanged.

Another woman who gained prominence for her contributions in the Revolution was Melchora Aquino or Tandang Sora. She was an old lady who owned a small store where tired and hungry soldiers often found relief. Her house was used for the clandestine meetings of the Katipunan. Because of these, the katipuneros called her the “Mother of the Revolution” (Policarpio 21).
Trinidad Tecson, on the other hand, was considered the “Mother of Biak-na-Bato” for her services in periods of war. She participated in several battles, dressed as a man, and never showed “proverbial female weakness” (Policarpio 24). Aside from taking part in battle, Trining likewise nursed the injured soldiers and collected the dead bodies of men in Biak-na-Bato and burned them.

The abovementioned personalities were some of the few women who are presently given great recognition for their commitment to the Filipinos’ fight for freedom. Equally important, however, are women like Cresenciana Sanchez San Agustin de Santos, the first Filipino volunteer nurse who served in a hospital in Cavite and Agueda Kahabagan Ruiseñor, a woman soldier who acquired the position of a general (Alzona 55).

Other revolutionary women rarely seen in historical records are Patrocinio Gamboa, a Filipina from Western Visayas who carried out intelligence tasks for the rebels in the war against the Spaniards; Teresa Magbanua, a revolutionary leader who won several battles in Iloilo despite having only a small number of men and weapons; and Nazaria Lagos who treated wounded soldiers by applying her skills in folk medicine (Locsin-Nava 62-63).

Most Filipinos of those times thought battle was not something a woman should engage in. Nevertheless, these brave women continued to take part in the uprising and found ways to offer their services for their motherland.

D. Arrival of Americans in the Philippines

1. The Role of Women in the American Era

The coming of another colonizer posed a new threat for the Filipinos in their endeavor to attain sovereignty over their own nation. When the Filipino-American War broke out, women found themselves in the midst of another struggle. The war stimulated the patriotism of the Filipinas, whose assistance became even more indispensable. A great number of them signed up in the army to defend their country in war. Others stayed behind the trenches to sew uniforms and nurse the sick and wounded soldiers.

The humanitarian missions of these women were organized by the establishment of Asociacion de Damas de la Cruz Roja, which was spearheaded by General Emilio Aguinaldo’s wife, Mrs. Hilaria Aguinaldo (Policarpio 30). This Red Cross association solicited contributions to support the war and bring gifts to the soldiers. The members labored tirelessly, going from one town to another, to collect food, clothes, matches and cigarettes for the men in the battlefront. The beneficiaries of these benevolent works were not only Filipino soldiers but also American and Spanish captives (Alzona 57).

The Revolution of 1896 and the Filipino-American War illustrated the innumerable selfless acts that the women performed for their beloved nation. These acts attested to their strength, which at the same time opposed the assumed frailty of the women under colonial rule.

When the war finally ended, Filipino women, led by Miss Constancia Poblete, founded Liga de Paz in 1901 to help create a harmonious relationship between Filipinos and Americans. As soon as peace was restored, they focused their concentration on social work and education (Policarpio 36). Under American rule, Filipinas gradually took their place in political affairs as educators, as administrators and later as politicians themselves.

Conclusion

Filipino women did not have an established position in the government during the Spanish colonial rule. Not unlike the prominent communal functions they had in the pre-colonial era, most Filipinas were deprived of their right to practice their preferred occupation and were regarded inferior to men. They, nonetheless, managed to demonstrate leadership and service during the course of the Revolution. Their participation in the uprisings, as well as in the restitution of peace, carried on even after the arrival of other colonizers.

The commitment of Filipino women to the nation’s endeavor to achieve independence refutes the impression of women as fragile and powerless individuals. Furthermore, it proves that the Filipino woman has been essential in Philippine history and in leading our country to what it is now.

Works Cited

Alip. Eufronio. A Brief History of the Philippines. Manila: Alip and Sons, 1972.

Alzona, Encarnacion. The Filipino Woman: Her Social, Economic and Political Status. Manila: Benipayo Press, 1933.

Balangue-Apilado, Digna. “The Women of Ilocos During the Revolutionary Era.” Review of Women’s Studies. Thelma B. Kintanar, ed. Quezon City: University Center for Women’s Studies, University of the Philippines, 1996. 41-52.

Camagay, Ma. Luisa T. “Women in the Text and Reality.” Review of Women’s Studies. Thelma B. Kintanar, ed. Quezon City: University Center for Women’s Studies, University of the Philippines, 1996. 11-18.

Dery, Luis Camara. Remember the Ladies and Other Historical Essays on the 1896 Philippine Revolution. Las Pinas, Metro Manila: M & L Licudine Enterprises, 2000.

Hilario-Soriano, Rafaelita. Women in the Philippine Revolution. Quezon City: Printon Press. 1995.

Locsin-Nava, Ma. Cecilia. “Teresa Magbanua: Woman Warrior.” Review of Women’s Studies. Thelma B. Kintanar, ed. Quezon City: University Center for Women’s Studies, University of the Philippines, 1996. 61-65.

Martinez-Sicat. “The Filipino Woman And/In The Filipino Rebel.” Review of Women’s Studies. Thelma B. Kintanar, ed. Quezon City: University Center for Women’s Studies, University of the Philippines, 1996. 173-182.

Policarpio, Paz. “The Filipino Women During the Revolution.” Review of Women’s Studies. Thelma B. Kintanar, ed. Quezon City: University Center for Women’s Studies, University of the Philippines, 1996. 19-40.

Torralba-Titgemeyer, Lorna S. La Mujer Indigena: The Native Woman. Austrian-Philippine Homepage. 1 March 1997.

<www.univie.ac.at/Voelkerkunde/ apsis/aufi/wstat/mujer.htm>

Sidewalk Cafe

2005-03-09T16:51:00.000+08:00

Sidewalk cafes are becoming popular in the Philippines despite the the terrible smell of diesel and gas on the streets. Have you ever wondered why? Don't ask me; I don't know the answer either.

Eddie Paul Saquilayan's Cavite paper

2005-03-09T16:21:00.000+08:00

I am sharing the following paper for the simple reason that it is controversial, and the author took pains to try to prove his point. Read it to see why I say it's controversial.

You will notice that the bibliographical entries are not complete. But that becomes a problem when you're working with local sources that are not properly indexed.

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Cavite in the Philippine Revolution

by Eddie Paul Saquilayan

I will die, without seeing the Day dawning on my country.... You who will see it, greet it. And forget not those who fell during the night.

-Jose Rizal

General Introduction

“Ang taong hindi tumingin sa pinanggalingan, hindi makakarating sa paroroonan.” This is one of the “kasabihan” of the Filipinos that is a general truth to all. One cannot move to his future if he will not look back to his past. His past is his identity. His past defines what he is today. This means that he must not only look into it, but he must also understand it.

The Philippines has a rich and colorful history. A history full of great people and noble men. As we look into it, we can see that the Filipinos have long struggled for freedom and democracy. In this freedom that we take for granted today, we are blind to the sacrifices our forefathers gave up for us to enjoy something that was a dream for them. Our freedom is the product of their blood and sacrifices.

In the long stretch of the colorful Philippine history, no event was so significant than the event called “The Philippine Revolution”. This Revolution took place in just one decade; in that short span of time, the Filipino fought two wars against two great nations, Spain and America. This Revolution was a defining era for the Filipinos. During the Revolution, Filipinos united to fight for a common cause, for freedom and independence. Though faced with incredible and one-sided odds, they pursued their cause; their love for the Motherland had fueled their hearts.
The Revolution is comprised of two wars: the Filipino-Spanish War and the Filipino-American War.

The Filipino-Spanish War was fought in 1896-1898. This war ended the 300-year rule of the Spaniards over the Philippines. It was during this war when great Filipinos emerged. They stepped forward and took the burden of leading the whole nation to a common cause- men like Jose Rizal, our national hero; Andres Bonifacio, founder of the “Katipunan” which started the Revolution; Emilio Aguinaldo, the First President of the First Philippine Republic; and many other Filipinos that kept the flame of nationalism alive.

The Filipino-American War was fought in 1899-1903. This war was the result of then U.S Pres. McKinley’s decision to take the Philippines as a colony of the United States. Though he knew that a war was inevitable if he would send American troops to take the Philippines, he could not just leave a country that was too young to be independent. The result was another war for the Filipinos to fight and later, lose.

This collection of papers researches about the Philippine Revolution. The research papers focus on three of the vital areas where the Revolution was fought: Batangas, Makati and Cavite. The objective of the papers is to research on how the three areas participated in the Philippine Revolution.

Cavite

One of the centers of operations during the Revolution was Cavite. Cavite can be called as “The Cradle of Independence of the Philippines” because this is the birthplace of freedom in the Philippines. Cavite has much of a story during the Revolution. Its part during the Revolution was significant. Many great battles were fought in her soil. Her sons stepped up to lead the Filipinos to freedom. She produced many Caviteños that became the generals of the Revolution -- men like Gen. Artemio Ricarte, Gen. Mariano Trias, Gen. Candido Tria Tirona, Gen. Daniel Tria Tirona, Gen. Baldomero Aguinaldo, Gen. Crispulo Aguinaldo, Gen. Tomas Mascardo, Gen. Mariano Riego De Dios, Gen. Pantaleon Garcia, Gen. Glicerio Topacio, Gen. Juan Castaneda, Gen. Flaviano Yengko, Gen. Mariano Castaneda and Gen. Emilio Aguinaldo, the first President of the First Philippine Republic. Major battles of the war were also fought here like the “Battle of Zapote Bridge”, “Battle of Binakayan”, and the “Battle of Alapan”. Cavite’s role in the history of the Philippines is very important. From the start of the Revolution until the end of it, the province of Cavite was always there. And for this, it must be retold. Many of us in the present times have forgotten the sacrifices of our ancestors. We must remember that because of the bravery of our forefathers we have gained this freedom. Our present has been built from the past. A past retold is an identity rebuilt. Our past is our identity.

The “Philippine Revolution” began with the formation of the Katipunan. Andres Bonifacio organized this movement and soon, its membership grew. In Cavite, the Katipunan had two branches: the Magdalo (Cavite Viejo) and the Magdiwang (San Francisco de Malabon). According to the research of Imus Library, the Magdiwang group was also called Mapagtiis. (History of Gen. Trias) The Magdalo group was organized by Emilio Aguinaldo (Zaide, 53) while General Mariano Trias and General Artemio Ricarte headed the Magdiwang group (Imus Municipal Library, History of Gen. Trias). After the outbreak of the Revolution on August 26, 1896, the Caviteños started the revolt against the Spaniards. The first uprising in Cavite came on August 31, 1896 in the town of San Francisco de Malabon. The Magdiwang group spearheaded the revolt. On September 3, 1896, Emilio Aguinaldo and his group took the town of Imus in what came to be called the “Battle of Imus”. He defeated the Spanish forces under the command of General Ernesto Aguirre. (Zaide, 239)

But the outbreak of the Revolution had its setbacks. The Spaniards tried to stop the revolt. Many Filipinos suffered because of false accusations. Both the innocents and the patriots bore the consequences of the Revolution. Thousands were arrested and tortured. Many patriots were killed by firing squad. Thirteen of the martyrs were from Cavite. Known as the “Trece Martires”, they were executed by firing squad on September 12, 1896 at Fort San Felipe in the Cavite arsenal. They were Luis Aguado, Eugenio Cabezas, Feliciano Cabuco, Agapito Conchu, Maximo Inocencio, Maximo Gregorio, Antonio San Agustin, Jose Lallana, Severino Lapidario, Victoriano Luciano, Alfonso de Ocampo, Francisco Osorio and Hugo Perez (Imus Municipal Library, History of Trece Martires City). Despite of the terror tactics of the Spaniards, however, the Filipinos continued to fight with renewed vigor. The terror produced no fear but it caused the flame of nationalism in the hearts of the Filipinos to burst out.

The Spaniards tried to suppress the revolt in Cavite. From October to December of 1896, the naval warships of Spain bombarded its coastal towns. There were eight reported bombardments, according to Ronquillo. These happened on the 22nd of October, 7th-10th of November, 14th & 26th of November, and on the 13th, 20th, & 24th of December. (Calairo, 66-72) These bombings caused casualties on the civilians living in the coastal towns. The bombardment on the 7th-10th resulted in the effective landing of the Spaniards at the Dalahican shore in what became known as the “Battle of Binakayan and Dalahican”.

The “Battle of Binakayan and Dalahican” happened on the 9th-11th of November 1896. Under the cover of navy gunfire, Governor-General Ramon Blanco, along with his troops, established a beachhead on the Dalahican shore. After the landing, Governor-General Blanco divided his troop into two units. The first unit, commanded by Gen. Riego de los Rios, would assault Dalahican. The second unit, commanded by Col. Jose Marina, would assault Binakayan. Both barrios were fortified by Filipino revolutionaries. Dalahican was fortified by the Magdiwang forces under the command of General Mariano Alvarez. Binakayan was fortified by the Magdalo forces under the leadership of Aguinaldo. Both barrios were also built with trenches designed by General Edilberto Evangelista. The battle was to be won by the Filipinos. But, the battle was not only between Filipinos and Spaniards. It was also between Filipinos and fellow Filipinos. The first to attack the Filipino trenches were Filipinos loyal to Spain. They were used as human shields to deceive the Filipino revolutionaries. For this, the first minutes of the battles were in favor of the Spaniards. The battle raged on for three days, until, on the 11th of November, Governor-General Ramon Blanco was forced to issue an order of General Retreat after three days of no accomplishments. They were evacuated to the naval warships waiting at bay while some retreated to Sangley Point. This was a great victory for the revolutionaries. This victory boosted the morale of the revolutionaries. Cavite was virtually liberated from the Spaniards (except for Sangley Point where Spain had a naval base). Some of the prominent revolutionaries who died on this battle were Gregoria Montoya and General Candido Tria Tirona. (Zaide, 72-74)(Calairo, 238-239)

Bonifacio was asked by the Magdiwang faction to come to Cavite. He arrived on December 1, 1896. According to Zaide, “With the arrival of Bonifacio in Cavite, the good relations between the Magdalo and Magdiwang Councils ended, and the resulting disunity weakened the libertarian cause.” (241)

Things began to change when Bonifacio arrived at Cavite.

Before the coming of Bonifacio, the two factions in Cavite were on good terms. The two, though rivals, were allies during the revolt in Cavite. They helped one another to win the battles. But, it all changed when Bonifacio arrived. The two set borderlines with each other. It was as if the Revolution was divided. Magdalos and Magdiwangs were now complete rivals of each other. The two factions had their own capital and jurisdictions. This caused the eventual turn of tide against the Filipinos. Was the great organizer of the Katipunan the cause of the breakdown of the cause of the Revolution? Was the great organizer the great divider?
Or is it the other way around?

Were the Caviteños responsible for the turning tide of the war? Was there a conspiracy behind the fall of Bonifacio?

On December 31, 1896, an assembly was held in Imus. The host of the assembly was the Magdalo faction. In this assembly, the arrogance of Bonifacio was apparent. He took the chair of the presiding officer (which appropriately belonged to Baldomero Aguinaldo) and designated the seats for the Magdiwang officers. The Magdalo officers sat on the vacant seats in the hall. The agenda of the assembly was organization of a revolutionary government and the union of the two factions of Katipunan in Cavite: Magdalo and Magdiwang. Nothing was accomplished during the assembly. Pride dominated the whole assembly. The Magdiwangs opposed the formation of a new government because they believed that there was a government that existed and that was the Katipunan, which was headed by Andres Bonifacio. With the arrival of Josephine Bracken, wife of Jose Rizal, the assembly was dismissed and rescheduled another day. (Zaide, 243)

Governor-General Camilo Polavieja succeeded Blanco because of his failure to abolish the revolt. One by one, he started the counter-attack on Cavite. First to be taken was Zapote on the 15 of February 1897. General Lachambre, along with the Spanish reinforcements, assaulted Silang, which was defended by the gallant Filipinos under the leadership of General Edilberto Evangelista. General Evangelista was killed on the 17th of February and after two days Silang was captured. Dasmariñas fell into Spanish hands on the 25th of February. On March 1, General Zabala and the Spaniards attacked Salitran. The strong assault of the Spaniards forced the revolutionaries to retreat. General Flaviano Yengko was wounded in this battle and later died. (Zaide, 243-244) According to Zaide, “Yengko was the youngest general of the Revolution, being younger than General Gregorio del Pilar, the “Hero of Tirad Pass”, by one year, two months and seven days” (244)

The tables had turned against the Filipinos. The consequence of their divided organization had taken its toll on the battlefields. The rivalries of the two factions resulted in the weakening of the revolutionary force. They became independent of each other. The Magdalos had only themselves to defend their towns. The Magdiwangs, whose towns were not yet attacked by the Spaniards, offered no help to the Magdalos. Divided they were.

As the battle raged in the towns of the Magdalos, the Magdiwang organized an assembly in Tejeros. This was an unlikely time to organize a meeting in the middle of a battle. Though some officers of the Magdalos were in the field directing the battles, the Magdiwangs still continued the assembly. It was during this assembly that the first Republic in Asia was founded, where Aguinaldo was elected as the First President of the First Philippine Republic. (Imus Municipal Library, History of Gen. Trias) But the assembly had its setback. In the first few minutes were the Alvarez-Montenegro quarreled about the formation of the government. During the last minutes of the assembly the infamous Tirona-Bonifacio conflict occurred; Daniel Tirona questioned Bonifacio’s capability as the Director of the Interior. Angered by the protest, Bonifacio pulled out his revolver. Artemio Ricarte interfered to prevent bloodshed. Bonifacio disregarded the election and dismissed the session. He left the room along with his guards. This was the start of the fall of the once Supremo of Katipunan.

After the Tejeros Convention, Bonifacio devised a conspiracy to oust the Magdalo faction. The first conspiracy happened on March 23, 1897. Bonifacio, along with 44 other conspirators, drew up the document called “Acta de Tejeros” which questioned the legitimacy of the Tejeros Convention and accusations in opposition to the Magdalo faction of a conspiracy against Bonifacio. The second meeting happened on the 17th 0f April at Naic. Known as the Naic Military Pact, this document states the formation of an armed force under the leadership of General Pio Del Pilar. Unfortunately, Major Lazaro Makapagal, a Magdalo Officer held captive by the conspirators, escaped and went to Aguinaldo. He told Aguinaldo about the conspiracy. Aguinaldo hurried to the house where Bonifacio and the conspirators were staying. Seeing that the house was surrounded by the troops of Aguinaldo, Bonifacio and other conspirators evaded the guards and escaped while other conspirators were left in the room. Among those who were left were General Pio Del Pilar and Mariano Noriel. After apologizing, Aguinaldo forgave the two and also the other conspirators. (Zaide, 246-247)

The once great organizer of the Katipunan was now a fugitive. His dream of becoming the supreme leader of the Revolution had ended. Maybe this is one of the reasons why the Filipinos lost Cavite in the 1897 assault of the Spaniards. The once united Revolution began to fumble.

On the 19th of April 1897, the Naic Revolutionary Assembly was organized. This was to finish the election of officials of the newly formed Revolutionary government. The Cabinet was as follows:

President: Emilio Aguinaldo
Vice-President: Mariano Trias
Saquilayan; History of Cavite, 8Captain-General: Artemio Ricarte
Secretary of Interior: Pascual Alvarez
Secretary of State: Jacinto Lumbreras
Secretary of Finance: Baldomero Aguinaldo
Secretary of Commerce and Industry: Mariano Alvarez
Secretary of Justice: Severino de las Alas
Secretary of War: Emiliano Riego de Dios

Other agenda were the creation of a new flag, reformation of the armed force and the standard uniform called rayadillo with its ranks and insignia. (Zaide, 247-248)

Could there have been another conspiracy behind this? Why was Bonifacio elected to an insignificant position on the Revolutionary government? And, still he was questioned on his capability to execute his duty. Was there really a conspiracy to throw Bonifacio out of leadership? Was there a struggle in leadership between Bonifacio and Aguinaldo? According to the research posted on the site http://opmanong.ssc.hawaii.edu/filipino/struggle.html, “Bonifacio, the father of the Revolution, became a victim to the ambition and self-serving interests the ilustrados as personified by Aguinaldo.” Ilustrados were middle class persons. Bonifacio was a lower class type of citizen. Days after he arrived in Cavite, much propaganda against him was spread in Cavite. The Ilustrados did not want Bonifacio to take the leadership of the Revolution. Another site, http://www.philippinenewscentral.com/cgi-bin/redirect.cgi?url=philrev.html, also states, “Bonifacio, founder of the Katipunan and initiator of the revolutionary struggle in the country, lost the leadership to Emilio Aguinaldo, who was voted president. Bonifacio was merely elected to the minor post of director of the interior. None of the other leaders of the Katipunan, not even Emilio Jacinto, were considered for positions at Tejeros.” Many if not all of the newly elected officers of the Revolutionary government were from Cavite. None coming from Manila (or can we say “lower classes”) were elected as officers. The “conspiracy” on leadership had taken place. The next “conspiracy” would be on the death of Bonifacio.

Now a fugitive, Bonifacio hid in the barrio of Limbon in Indang until men under the command of Colonels Agapito Bonzon, Felipe Topacio and Jose Ignacio Paua finally captured him. A short fight took place until the wounded Bonifacio was captured. A court-martial was carried out; even with the lack of proof, the Bonifacio brothers, Andres and Procopio were found guilty of treason. They were sentenced to death. Aguinaldo withdrew the verdict and lessened it to exile Bonifacio to a far place. But, Generals Pio del Pilar and Mariano Noriel (former allies of Bonifacio) persuaded Aguinaldo to reconsider his decision. Finally, the execution order was released. Andres and Procopio Bonifacio were executed by firing squad on May 10, 1897 (Zaide, 248-249). The place where the Bonifacios was executed is a confusion. According to Zaide and the research of Imus Library, they were executed in Mt. Hulog. According to the article posted on http://www.philippinenewscentral.com/cgi-bin/redirect.cgi?url=philrev.html and http://opmanong.ssc.hawaii.edu/filipino/struggle.html, they were executed in Mt. Tala.

According to an article posted on the site http://members.tripod.com/masternoel/compdev/main4.htm, they were executed on Mt. Nagpatong. All these sites are near Maragondon. The answer came after an interview with Mr. Cargulio, a Scoutmaster from Cavite Science National High School in Maragondon. According to him, the Bonifacio brothers were killed in Mt. Hulog. Supposedly, they were to be killed in Mt. Buntis. On their way to Mt. Buntis, they stopped in Mt. Hulog because Andres Bonifacio insisted to open the letter. When Maj. Lazaro Makapagal opened the letter, it was a letter to execute the two brothers. There, on the plains of Mt. Hulog, the two brothers were executed.

On the same day, the Spaniards attacked Maragondon. It fell after two days of fighting. Aguinaldo and the revolutionists were forced to transfer the government to Biac-na-Bato in Bulacan.

Nothing was written about Cavite after the transfer of government to Biac-na-Bato. But, with the arrival of the Americans and the retreat of the Spaniards to Manila, Cavite was again in the pages of history.

On May 1, 1898, the battle of Manila bay took place. The battle was between the Spanish fleet and the American squadron. The Spaniards suffered heavy losses on this battle while the Americans were unscathed, losing no man and incurring no damage to any American ships. They, along with the Filipino counterparts, were victorious during the siege of Manila. (Zaide, 255-256)

Aguinaldo returned to the Philippines from his exile in Hong Kong on the 19th of May 1897, onboard the ship “McCullough”. He organized the armed forces again and continued the campaign against the Spaniards. On the 28th of May, the Battle of Alapan happened in the town of Imus. The Filipinos were again victorious against the colonizers. This was also where the Philippine flag was first raised in action. After three days, the second battle for Binakayan took place. This was the final engagement between the Filipinos and Spaniards on Cavite’s soil. (Calairo, 79-80)

This action led to the declaration of independence of the Philippines.

According to Zaide:

“During his exile in Hong Kong, General Aguinaldo designed the Filipino flag as it looks today. Mrs. Marcela Agoncillo sewed it with the help of her daughter Lorenza and Mrs. Josefina Herbosa de Natividad (niece of Rizal). It was made of silk with a white triangle at the left containing a sunburst of eight rays at the center, a five-pointed star at each angle of the triangle, an upper stripe of dark blue, and a lower stripe of red. The white triangle stands for equality; the upper blue stripe for peace, truth and justice and the lower red stripe for patriotism and valor. The sunburst of eight rays inside the triangle represented the first eight provinces that took up arms against Spain. The three stars symbolized Luzon, the Visayas, and Mindanao.” (259)

The Philippine National Anthem was originally called as the “Marcha Nacional Filipina”. The piece was composed by Julian Felipe. The lyrics of the anthem were taken from the poem composed by Jose Palma entitled “Filipinas”. The lyrics were as follows:

“Philippine Hymn”

Jose Palma

Land of the morning; Child of the sun returning,
With fervor burning, thee do our souls adore.
Land dear and holy, Cradle of noble heroes,
Ne’er shall invaders trample thy sacred shore.
Ever within thy sky and through thy clouds
And o’er the hills and sea.
Do we behold the radiance, feel the throb
Of glorious liberty.
Thy banner, dear to all our hearts, its sun and stars alight,
O never shall its shining field be dimmed by tyrant’s might!
Beautiful land of love, o land of light,
Saquilayan; History of Cavite, 12In thine embrace ‘tis rapture to lie.
But it is glory ever, when thou art wronged,
For us thy sons to suffer and die.

Translated by Camilo Osias and M.A Lane
(Reyes, Santamaria, Beyer and De Veyra, 178)

On the 12th of June 1898, the Philippine Independence was proclaimed in the house of Aguinaldo. It was around 4 o’clock in the afternoon when the Independence was declared. The Proclamation of Independence was read by Ambrocio Rianzares Bautista. After the proclamation, the Philippine flag was raised. The band “San Francisco de Malabon” played the National Anthem. And so, on this Sunday afternoon, the 12th of May, the freedom and independence of the Filipinos was declared. (Calairo, 83-86)

Summary

After a month of research on the history of Cavite during the Revolution, I learned that there was so much of a sacrifice our forefathers had given up for us to enjoy this freedom. Also, I uncovered some new information.

According to what I researched, General Flaviano Yengko was the youngest general of the Revolution, not General Gregorio Del Pilar (Zaide, 244).

The Bonifacio brothers were killed in Mt. Hulog (Zaide and Imus Municipal Library)(Cargulio), and not in Mt. Tala (http://www.philippinenewscentral.com/cgi-bin/redirect.cgi?url=philrev.html and http://opmanong.ssc.hawaii.edu/filipino/struggle.html), nor in Mt. Nagpatong (http://members.tripod.com/masternoel/compdev/main4.htm).

But one of the most striking is the alleged “double conspiracy” of the Revolution. One is the “conspiracy” of the ilustrados to depose Bonifacio out of leadership. The other is the “conspiracy” of Bonifacio to bring down the Revolutionary Government. Both of which can be the cause of the defeat of the revolutionaries in the Spanish campaign of 1897. This was a dark moment in the history of the Philippines.

Now, history has been retold. But, what about it? The objective of this research is not only to retell the history of Cavite, but also to make the present Filipinos to be aware of what they are taking for granted. The freedom that we enjoy today was attained because of the sacrifices of our ancestors. But, we take this freedom for granted. We also tend to forget what we are. We exploit it. The Philippines today is slowly collapsing on itself. The problems of the Philippines are not made by other nations but by Filipinos themselves. The nation is at war with itself. Filipinos corrupting the government; Filipinos killing other Filipinos; Filipinos who just sit around and do nothing, yet they complain about their status in life. The problem of the Filipinos is their bad attitude- their selfishness, greed for money, laziness, and complaints are some of it. They just sit around and wait for the government to give them jobs. Most of all, instead of fixing the problem, the Filipinos are making it worse.

The only way that the problems of the Philippines can be fixed is for all to the Filipinos to unite and help the nation. The good men and women in our government, who are doing their best for the Motherland and not for themselves, cannot fix this problem all by themselves. They need the Filipinos to cooperate and do their part for the Motherland. I think God has permitted the problems to come for us to learn from our mistakes. Unity and sacrifice for the country is much needed this time, as it was a hundred years ago. The Filipinos gained the independence because they had united to fight for it. We, today, must also unite to bring this problem to an end. Sacrifices have to be given for us to solve the worsening problem of our country. We must do our role for our country. Every Filipino is vital to the success of the nation. He must do his part for the country. Like John Kennedy said, “Do not ask what your country can do for you but ask what you can do for your country.” We must do our part for our country. We are the only ones who can help the Philippines. Let us rebuild this nation.

We must remember what our ancestors wanted for us. They wanted us to live in peace and harmony. Free from foreign colonizers. They gave their lives, for us to live freely. Let us not waste their sacrifices. Let us unite for the sake of the Motherland.

Works Cited

_________________. “The Province Of Cavite.”

Calairo, Emmanuel Franco, “Cavite el Viejo.” Cavite, Cavite Historical Society, 1998.

http://opmanong.ssc.hawaii.edu/filipino/struggle.html

http://www.philippinenewscentral.com/cgi-bin/redirect.cgi?url=philrev.html

Imus, Cavite, Imus Municipal Library, _______, Philippines, Capitol Publishing House, 1953, and Quezon City, All-nations Publishing Co., 1999

Reyes, Pedrito, Prof. Grau-Santamaria, Mercedes, “Pictorial History Of The Philippines.”

Zaide, Sonia M. The Philippines: A Unique Nation. Quezon City, All Nations Publishing Company, 1994.

Zaide, Sonia M., “Kasaysayan At Pamahalaan Ng Pilipinas.”

Cargulio, Leo. Interview. 22 October 2004.

Resto

2005-03-09T16:16:00.000+08:00

The previous post was long and I still have a few more papers to post, so allow me to break the text monotony with a picture. Guess where it was taken? U.P. students should know.

Aissa Rivera's "Filipina in Perspective"

2005-03-04T21:47:00.000+08:00

I will start to post here or on my websites the best research papers written by my students in English 10 last semester. This first one is among the best of the best.
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Now and Then —The Filipina in Perspective

by Ma. Aissa Francesca Rivera

“I’m just your wife.” This was Sharon Cuneta’s bitter retort to her domineering and demanding husband in the 1997 Filipino blockbuster hit “Madrasta”. Is the Filipina just a wife? How different is the contemporary woman nowadays? Although the sands of time have trickled down to centuries, some things have not changed. Women constitute a large portion of a country’s human resource, and yet our society remains a patriarchal one (Ibe, 133). There are more women than men in our society. Statistics have shown that fifty-two percent of the Philippine population is composed of women. Yet with these astounding numbers, misconceptions about the Filipina are indelibly printed in our minds and hearts, all because of the Spanish Colonization. The infamous Maria Clara image exemplified the romantic and ideal Filipina who loved purely, and only once (Alzona, 15). According to Cynthia Nolasco, “The law considered the Filipino wife as occupying a position of inferiority, of minority and incurable debility of absolute incapacity.”

On the other end of the spectrum, there is the contemporary woman—a woman who supposedly knows what she wants in love and in life. The contemporary woman has somehow transcended the stereotype, but retains remnants of the past. It is clearly shown in the way Philippine society treats women. The Filipina during the Spanish colonial period and the contemporary Filipina greatly differ in several aspects; they differ in beliefs and practices. Likewise, there are also multifarious differences in their characteristics, mannerisms and activities.

The Filipina during the Spanish colonial period had many facets and characteristics. Accumulated beliefs, practices, traditions and customs in the Iberian Peninsula during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries determined the Filipino woman’s position and role (Mananzan, 49). Spanish customs, religion and laws constrained and debilitated a woman’s freedom (Feliciano, 10). Likewise, colonial rule changed a woman’s status. Rules were passed that constrained a woman during the Spanish colonial period (Feliciano, 11). It designated her to an inferior position. The Filipina was regarded as her husband’s servant because of these laws (Borden, 1-3). Filipina wives were dependent on and were subordinate to their husbands. The Filipina was fashioned in the image and likeness of the perfect woman in Iberian Society (Mananzan, 50).

The Filipina during the Spanish colonial period had a different way of dressing compared to her Western sisters. A half-chemise, bodice or a light jacket camisa and an ankle length skirt called a saya were what she usually wore. No footwear was worn inside the home. Outdoors, she needed to wear a tapis and wooden clogs without heels called bakya. For her accessories, on the other hand, she tied her hair in a bun with a small comb adorned with flowers. Long hair was considered to be a woman’s pride and joy. Ornaments like earrings were worn as well. As the Filipina was very meticulous and finicky, nails were likewise given special attention.

The Filipina during the Spanish colonial period was generally described as sweet, demure, honorable, coy, kind, affable, pure in heart, obedient, respectful to their parents and elders, sympathetic, mild mannered, humble and unaffected. Meanwhile, religion was the focus in a young girl’s education, since they were thought to “have a natural inclination to piety” (Mananzan, 50). The Filipina was trained to submit to religious authority (Molina, 21-22). She was taught by the local friar to be self-conscious, to keep in mind the values of fidelity and not to be friendly with men. Independence of mind, courage and education were frowned upon by the religious authorities; that is why women were only educated to regard strict obedience as an essential feminine virtue (Alzona, 2). In that sense, the Spanish friars and encomenderos were triumphant in producing a shy and puritanical woman (Molina, 21-22).

Girls were educated in colegios and beaterios (Feliciano, 12). Those who were sent to colegios and beaterios had to undergo the education which promoted the values of docility and obedience. The courses offered to girls were different from those for boys (Feliciano, 12). General subjects were reading, writing and arithmetic. Instead of Spanish, geography, history and practical agriculture, which were taken up by the boys, girls were required to take up deportment and needlecraft (Feliciano, 12).

The Filipina was not only considered to be biologically inferior, she was also supposedly racially inferior (Molina, 21-22). Although any form of sexual activity was considered taboo during the Spanish colonial period, she was regarded as a sex object who was confined to the domestic chores of the household (Molina, 21-22). In addition, men during the Spanish colonial period valued the chastity of young women. The Filipina woman during the Spanish colonial period believed that losing her virtue meant losing her value of being a woman. If she lost her value, she became an outcast who was condemned to live a life of obscurity by society (Alzona, 11-12).

The Filipina was portrayed in novels as more exotic, submissive and feminine than her Western counterparts (Borden, 1-3). She had a disposition that could be described as being exaggeratedly humble, innately good and ignorant (Alzona, 3-4). She was shy, reticent, passive, yet surprisingly business minded (Borden, 1-3). However, the Filipina seemed to lack the freedom to think for herself (Alzona, 3-4). Unquestioned obedience was required of her. She had no voice in family affairs and no social life outside the home. Along with that, she is excluded from political activities. Her activities and aspirations never left the domicile.

Women during the Spanish colonial period had different roles, and these roles differed for each tier of society. Some women during the Spanish colonial period were laborers. Although other women were mistresses, most Filipinas were legal wives. Prostitutes also roamed the cobbled streets during the Spanish colonial period.

Roles and responsibilities of the Filipina during the Spanish colonial period varied. A peasant woman during the Spanish colonial period worked. She did the weaving, fishing and gold panning. She also raised farm animals. Her life revolved at home. She cooked meals, and she washed the clothes. She took care of children. In addition, she kept the house and the yard clean. She prepared buyo for visitors. It was considered to be polite if the woman smoked and chewed buyo while entertaining her visitors.

The Slete Partidas was a rule passed during the Spanish colonial period that excused the ignorance of the law for peasants, soldiers and women. It also stated that puberty was legal marrying age and now share of the patria potastas was given to the mother.

Meanwhile, daughters were kept in seclusion. They were not to play with boys nor accept presents from them. Although most of the time was devoted to prayer, time too was spent in handiwork, cooking and managing the household. The only instance when they left the house was to attend the Holy Mass. This served the purpose of seeing other people, being seen, socializing and looking for a suitable mate. (Mananzan, 50).

At the same time, a law called the Leyes de Toro stated that the Filipina woman was congenitally dependent on her parents until she got married (Feliciano, 11). Once married, the authority over the woman transferred to her husband (Mananzan, 50). She should dress in accordance with her husband’s whims. She should not be aroused to jealousy, and she endured them in silence and in prayer (Mananzan, 50). In addition, during the Spanish colonial period, Filipina mothers were devoted to their children, sensitive to their needs, giving their all for the good of these children.

Moreover, the Spanish Marriage Law of 1870 and the Spanish Civil Code of 1885 confined and defined the role of the Filipina wife. It stated that the wife must obey the husband and follow him when he moved residence to another country (Feliciano, 14-15). She was unable to make contracts or acquire property without permission and consent of the husband. The wife was unable to publish anything scientific or literary without her husband’s consent. Similarly, if a woman engaged in trade, it is presumed that she had been authorized by her husband to engage in such activities (Feliciano, 11-12). Widows during the Spanish colonial period were treated differently and many complex rules applied to their state (Feliciano, 16). Encarnacion Alzona clearly states a woman’s roles by saying that

As a wife, her duty should be to help her husband, inspire him to be courageous, share his troubles, comfort him in his affliction, and avoid giving him worries…As a mother, she should teach her children to price their honor above all else and guard it zealously; to love their fellowmen and their native land; and to do their duty, emphasizing to them that to die with honor is more to be desired than to live in dishonor (Alzona, 5).

The Contemporary Filipina

On the other end of the spectrum, the contemporary Filipina is a woman of the times. She has many characteristics and facets about her. Although she has different values from the Filipina during the Spanish colonial period, she finds some values significant. The contemporary Filipina values a happy and united home. She values employment as well.

Since the contemporary Filipina thrives in the twentieth century, gone are the days of arranged marriages. She chooses whom she wants to marry. The contemporary woman does not wait to be chosen by the man of her dreams. She selects the crowd she wants to be associated with. In addition, she joins religious, civic and political organizations to widen her social circle in hopes of finding her a suitable partner in life (Molina, 34). She has the final say on her future mate.

The Philippine Constitution of 1973 practically removed the discriminatory treatment of women through its different provisions. The 1973 Philippine constitution superseded the 1935 constitution. Article III Sec 2 of the Philippine constitution states that unlike the Filipina during the Spanish colonial period, she can now choose her citizenship, regardless of her husband’s citizenship.

The contemporary Filipina’s presence can be felt in the political arena, the business world, in social work, multifarious professions and trade. She is free from the four walls of the home. Gone are the routine and rote of household chores.

In addition, the contemporary woman dresses in any manner that she wishes. She decides to wear whatever she thinks is fashionable. She can wear pants, skirts of any length, shorts or any style she desires. Tops are chosen in accordance with a contemporary woman’s tastes, whether it be conservative or daring. Footwear ranges from boots, sandals, stilettos and sneakers. Accessories would include jewelry; some contemporary women have body art and piercings which can also be found in the navel, the tongue and other places. Since hair could be kept long or short, it can be styled in any way (Ibe, 35-45).

The modern Filipina who [sic] does not typify anymore the shy, demure, deeply religious Maria Clara who had no mind of her own; nor the reserved feminine, queenly Dona Aurora Quezon, wife of the late President Manuel L. Quezon, but a new creature, independent-minded and development oriented, intensely committed to public welfare and a product of a highly democratic and scientific climate of the times. (Ramos according to Albarracin)

The different roles and responsibilities of the contemporary Filipina varies. The contemporary woman has a choice on whether to have a career or to stay at home. In decreasing rank, multifarious professions are preferred and entered by the contemporary Filipina. She chooses to be a nurse, midwife , laboratory technician, educator, doctor, cashier or accounting clerk, nutritionist or dietician, accountant or auditor, medical technologist or therapist, pharmacist, engineer, clerk or office operator, social worker, diplomat, business proprietors, business executive, saleswoman or buyer, service worker, dentist, scientist, writer or journalist (Montiel and Hollnsteiner, 20). Aside from having a career or a job, the woman budgets family income as well (Montiel and Hollnsteiner, 14).

Women leaders are proving the heightening competence of women in the Philippines (Montiel and Hollnsteiner, 1). Cory Aquino’s presidency is often cited as corroboration on how women have risen in Philippine society (David, 88). Nowadays, more and more women are found in appointive positions. Women can be found in the Cabinet. They are also found in the Career Executive Service and Community Service. Women likewise serve in the diplomatic service, and are also found in the judiciary. Women are also into community service.

Unlike the Filipina during the Spanish colonial period, the contemporary Filipina can act without her husband’s consent to be able to do certain things. According to the Civil Code, she can now choose what name to use, whether it be her husband’s or her own. Moreover, Article 114, Muslim Code, Section 36 states that the wife can enter any profession she would like, provided that her husband agrees and supports her. She can ask for annulment or separation. Articles 165 and 112 now permits the contemporary Filipina to make a will and inherit possessions without her husband’s consent (Women’s Decade in the Philippines).

The contemporary Filipina joins organizations. One organization is comprised composed of high society women who have husbands in the male counterpart organization. They delve into civic oriented activities such as donating to the less fortunate, visiting hospitals, establishing schools, etc. Another type of organization is church groups. All women of social classes are encouraged to join this organization where they perform corporal works of mercy. Another kind of organization that women join is one that expresses their voice in society. These are the nationwide civic groups and labor unions (Montiel and Hollnsteiner, 18).

The Spanish Filipina and the Contemporary Filipina in Perspective

Surprisingly, the Filipina during the Spanish colonial period and the contemporary Filipina have similarities. They both have a strong attachment to their family as the foundation and fundamental unit of society (Borden, 5). Similarly, women belong to the category of things to be owned. Fathers and husbands treat their daughters and wives as possessions, not as persons (David, 87-88). Like the traditional Filipina, some contemporary women are content by in handling behind-the-scenes management tasks. They help and support their husbands unconditionally in the positions of authority assumed by the latter (Montiel and Hollnsteiner, 28-29).

But the Filipina of the Spanish colonial period and the contemporary Filipina also have multifarious differences. Among these are conflicting values and morals. The values of the young contemporary Filipina are damaged by the media as reported by both local and foreign news reports (The Women’s Decade in the Philippines). In effect, the contemporary Filipina is more sexually liberated (Molina, 44). A 1978 study determined that twenty two percent of Filipinas lose their virginity at seventeen. Moreover, approximately seventy percent of men under thirty years old in Metro Manila no longer desire to marry virgins (Molina, 50). In addition, some contemporary Filipinas now believe in the concept of trial marriages or “live – in”. In this scenario, there is no guarantee or permanence of love and affection. It completely ignores the Church dictum that the sole purpose of marriage is parenthood (Molina, 45).

Meanwhile, the 1936 constitution granted the contemporary Filipina the right to vote. A plebiscite held on April 30, 1937 granted them women’s right to suffrage (Tancangco, 60). Women nowadays can freely choose political representation and affiliation and become representatives themselves. This was unheard of during the Spanish colonial period. Since the contemporary Filipina now assumes greater responsibilities in nation building, she has stepped out of the confines of the home (Enrile, 180).

The Filipina now is an eclectic mix of the Filipina during the Spanish colonial period and the contemporary woman. She can take care of her children, raise them to become responsible and respectable citizens, and at the same time, have a flourishing and successful career. They might have similarities and differences, yet the same blood courses through their veins. What the Filipina during the Spanish colonial period went through is and always will be an indelible part of the contemporary Filipina.

The Filipina now is a woman of the times, equipped with the amazing intellect, love and strength that she possesses that made her survive the past three centuries. All throughout the hardships and the rocky roads, she traversed them with grace, strength and beauty. Lately, there have been gains for the Filipina; the government has helped her through her plight over the last few centuries through multifarious laws (Feliciano, 33). Now she holds her head up high. Blossoming in equality in the workplace and more importantly, stature with men, the Filipina now can conquer and face anything.

She is not just a wife after all.

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Bibliography

Alzona, Encarnacion. Rizal’s Legacy to the Filipino Woman. Pasay City: 1938 Taft Avenue, 1954.

Borden, Karen Wells. The Filipina: Some Observations about the Communication Roles of the Philippine Women in the Traditional Society and in the Liberation Movement. The Philippine- American Communication Conference, San Jose State University, 1976.

David, Randolf S. Nation, Self and Citizenship: An Invitation to Philippine Sociology. Quezon City: College of Social Sciences and Philosophy, 2002.

Feliciano, Myrna S. “The Filipina: A Historical Legal Perspective.” Women’s Role in Philippine History: Papers and Proceedings of the Conference on Women’s Role in Philippine History. Quezon City: University of Women’s Studies, 1989.

Ibe, Milagros D. “Values of Filipino Women.” Women’s Role in Philippine History: Papers and Proceedings of the Conference on Women’s Role in Philippine History. Quezon City: University of Women’s Studies, 1989.

Mananzan, Sr. Mary John. “The Filipino Woman Before and After the Spanish Conquest of the Philippines.” Women’s Role in Philippine History: Papers and Proceedings of the Conference on Women’s Role in Philippine History. Quezon City: University of Women’s Studies, 1989.

Molina, Mariano J. The Modern Filipina: Her Name is Woman. Quezon City: Buencamino Press, 1983.

Montiel, Cristina and Mary Racelis Hollensteiner. The Filipino Woman: Her Role and Status in Philippine Society. Institute of Philippine Culture, Ateneo de Manila University, 1976.

Tancgangco, Luzviminda G. “Women and Politics in Contemporary Philippines.” Women’s Role in Philippine History: Papers and Proceedings of the Conference on Women’s Role in Philippine History. Quezon City: University of Women’s Studies, 1989.

The Woman’s Decade in the Philippines: Analysis of Significant Changes in Women’s Role and Status. Manila: National Commission on the Role of Filipino Women,1985.

Dresser

2005-01-23T16:09:00.000+08:00

Good literature is like a well-taken photo. It is a reflection not of life itself, because life is too big and complex to be reflected in one picture (or one work of art), but of one part, maybe even a few parts, of life. It works by indirection, saying what it wants to say about that part of life of which it feels competent to comment, not straightforwardly, as in journalese or legalese or political economy, but by way of images, or narrative, or action, or even of rhythm or cadence or tone.

What is this photo trying to say? Is it any good? Do you find any use for it?

This poem will not get into my new collection

2005-01-12T13:08:00.000+08:00

Towards our Sixties
by Mila D. Aguilar

Towards our sixties,
fire gone from our eyes,
light now within
drawing the moths
of your desires
only to extinguish them.

For your sake.
Some got such wisdom
earlier, by grace,
but we had
the energy to burn,
I guess,

Or perhaps
the demons to expel.
Having been singed
ourselves
we now know
better.

January 12, 2005
8:15-8:23 am

The poem above is dedicated to Emmallaine Loreto of English 1 TFU, who has started her own blog, http://TapIntoMe.blogspot.com. Go and see it! She has good English, and thinks deeply too!

Students of English 1 TFU: Something to correct

2005-01-05T13:26:00.000+08:00

I am pasting onto this post a short article I received via email just now. It has only one grammatical mistake. If you can pinpoint it, then you've learned something from me. Though you don't have to be a student of English 1 to post your answer, I expect my English 1 students to beat everyone to the draw!
______

WORD FOR TODAY (Psalm 90:12):
Teach us to number our days aright, that we may gain a heart of wisdom.

THOUGHT:
When we lose our sense of urgency to live for God, we end up wasting our time. God has a plan for us, for our world, and for His Church. Without God's gift of "spiritual arithmetic" (numbering our days aright), we will never gain a heart of wisdom. So, how do we get such a gift? Ask for it without doubting. Trusting the Lord for wisdom has a huge effect on us and the way we conduct our lives. Rather than losing heart, God gives us a heart of wisdom.

PRAYER:
Holy and Almighty God, King of the Ages, You alone live in complete wisdom, justice and grace. Please help me to know what time it is in my life and the role You want me to play at this stage of my journey. I want my life to be lived glorifying You. In Jesus' precious name I pray. AMEN!

2005-01-04T15:25:00.000+08:00

Journey: An Autobiography in Verse (1964-1995), published by the University of the Philippines Press in 1996, is Mila D. Aguilar's sixth book of poetry and a compilation of her previous five. Her seventh book of poetry, due for publication in 2005, is entitled Chronicle of a Life Foretold: 110 Poems (1996-2004).

A new poem

2004-12-27T21:16:00.000+08:00

Just Like Ching

On the passing on to eternal life of my mentor, Concepcion D. Dadufalza, professor emeritus of English and Literature at the University of the Philippines.

by Mila D. Aguilar

Just like Ching.
She would choose to die
The day after Christmas,
On the anniversary
Of the Communist Party of the Philippines,
(Which I doubt she knew)
Ten days after her birthday party
(Which I have never been able to attend).

Just like Ching,
Or maybe just like me,
Not to see her off,
Not to bother to say hello
For more than a year.
Or was it two?
I cannot tell.
I also didn't see her

When I disappeared into
The fastnesses of the cities
Of the nation,
Carrying her Hegelian dialectics with me
Her Teilhard du Chardin,
And most of all the knowledge of hubris
Ineluctably emblazoned on my chest
By her Oedipus Rex

Without the Oedipal complex.
Even after my season underground
There seemed to be no reason to see her
Until I felt compelled
To watch her teaching her Oedipus again
In almost exactly the same way
She had done it two decades before
Only I couldn't remember the answers anymore.

Not even when I started teaching again,
After twenty-nine years, did I see her often.
She was there with me, looking at my students,
Bowing down eye-to-eye to hear every word.
I didn't shed a tear at her passing.
We will see each other again,
At the dialectical end of life (or is it death),
There where there is no hubris.

December 27, 2004
6:45-7:17 pm

A New Year's message to all

2004-12-26T13:17:00.000+08:00

This God Speaks in Tongues

by Mila D. Aguilar

Look how He talks,
this God,
without a sound
sending a whining wind
upon us
and when the roar
of log on falling log
didn't work,
the lick of death
and tongues of fire.

Listen to Him walk
on your green earth
how silently
He spins around
leaving the soil
on which He trod
flooded with the murk
of your filth
warning you
of your folly.

Feel His language
in your bones
eating you up
soon enough
the smell & taste
of His wrath
pungent
to your deaf ears
palpable
to your dulled eyes

December 26, 2004
8:54-9:51 am

2004-12-17T17:49:00.000+08:00

This is Marga Reyes in California. She'll be back in the Philippines January 11!

Students of English 1 TFU

2004-12-17T17:48:00.000+08:00

This is for students of English 1 TFU who would like to share something about their Christmas break to others.

Right now Marga Reyes is in California, so I'll try share one of her pictures with you (once I've downloaded "Hello," the operation of which I still don't know). She (as well as you) can post her journal here by clicking "comments" below this particular entry.

Students of English 10 MHR1 & MHU1

2004-12-17T17:07:00.000+08:00

Students of English 10 MHR1 and MHU1 can post their reactions to "Bowling for Columbine" and "Birthing Lupang Hinirang" by clicking on "comments" below.

Go ahead, don't be shy! It isn't a big deal!

Students of English 11 TFR1

2004-12-17T17:02:00.000+08:00

While I'm at it, I may as well create a separate window for students of English 11 TFR1. They could post their paragraphs on the short story here by clicking on "comments" below.

Hey, Merry Christmas, all! I'm having a fine time in front of my desktop computer! What about you?

"Filipino English" from an Englishman's point of view

2004-12-08T17:20:00.000+08:00

This is a must-read for all students of English. It's a good study in how deeply rooted our culture is: we haven't adopted English totally; we've adapted it to our own language. We did the same thing with Spanish. In fact, we do the same thing with any other foreign language. We are the ultimate subversives!

FOR A WHILE
By Mathew Sutherland

Two countries divided by a common language -- George Bernard Shaw (on the US and the UK)

The very first thing the arriving tourist sees in Manila after the planedoor opens is a sign in the walkway that reads "watch your steps." This may not sound funny to you, but it sounds funny to me, an English speaker from England. This is because, in the UK, the expression is ,"watch your step," singular, not "steps," plural. There's nothing wrong with "watch your steps"; in fact, it actually makes more sense to watch all your forthcoming steps than to watch just one generic step. It just sounds funny, that's all.

"Watch your steps" is the first reminder for English speakers from outside the Philippines that English usage here is idiosyncratic, even unique.

Of course, every English-speaking nation has its own unique set of English phrases and idioms; English is equally idiosyncratic in, say, India, Jamaica, Zimbabwe, or Singapore. There is no right or wrong way to speak English. The many versions of English spoken around the globe merely serve to make English an even richer tongue. However, the purpose of this column is to shed light on Philippine culture from a foreign perspective, and many Filipinos may be surprised to find out that some of the phrases they use daily are unique to this country, thus sound odd to visitors.

If you ask most English-speakers from abroad to pick just one idiom unique to the Philippines, I reckon 75 percent would select that stalwart phrase, "for a while." This is the English translation of the Tagalog, "sandali lang."

Whilst the component words of the phrase "for a while" are clearly English, this expression as a whole does not exist in the rest of the English-speaking world. In the UK, where I come from, the idiomatic equivalent would be something like "just a second" or "just a moment."

On the telephone, where "for a while" is frequently used in the Philippines, in England we might use "hold on," "hold the line" or, informally "hang on."

My second favorite uniquely Filipino-English phrase is "I'll go ahead." Used when leaving a place before the person addressed, it is a translation of the Tagalog "mauuna na ako." "I'll go ahead" sounds funny to me, because it seems to imply that the listener should follow. If someone's going ahead, then someone must be following behind, right? When I first heard my secretary say "I'll go ahead," I thought she was expecting me to follow her to some secret assignation! Sadly, this turned out not to be the case; she's now suing me for stalking her. ("Just kidding!", as they say in the Philippines).

In the third place for me comes the phrase "I will be the one to do that." This is a translation of the Tagalog "ako na lang ang gagawa." Frequently shortened to just "I will be the one" ("ako na lang"), this is a Filipino-English way of saying "I'll do it" or "let me do it." These shorter versions would be the idioms I would use more commonly in the UK.

I was always taught by my English professors that the shorter the words used, and the simpler the grammatical construction, the better the resultant English. Perhaps that's why the four extra words "be the one to," inserted into the already perfectly adequate phrase "I will do that," sound odd to anyone taught English in England.

Another example of this type of seemingly unnecessarily weighty construction is the marvelous phrase "make an ocular inspection," which I caught my girlfriend Kitty saying in the back of the car last weekend. Ocular inspection?!? Per-lease! What's wrong with "go and have a look," I'd like to know?

From an intellectual point of view, one of the fascinations in all of this is how these phrases evolved. At some point in history it must have been deemed necessary to have an English equivalent for Tagalog phrases such as"sandali lang." At that moment, what you might imagine would happen is that the nation would borrow an existing equivalent idiom from an existing English-speaking nation. The magic is that, instead, the nation invented its own English idioms, and by so doing enriched the world of English.

I was so massively confused for at least my first two years over a couple of time-related phrases. The one that really gave me problems was the phrase "the other day." In the UK, it merely means "recently," i.e. a few days ago, whereas in the Philippines it means, quite specifically, the day before yesterday. I used to get furious when I would read in the paper that the Philippine peso closed at a certain rate against the dollar "the other day." This seemed to me to be a terribly imprecise piece of information, until I realized that the phrase was far more specific here than in England!

More confusion in the language of time arises from different usage of the word "last." Filipinos tend to use the English word "last" wherever they would use the Tagalog word "noon." This results in pharses like "last October 26th" and "last 1994," which we would not use in England. Instead, we would tend to say "on October 26th" and "in 1994," only using "last" in the context of "last week" or "last year."

And lastly, English in the Philippines has spawned some unusual nouns connected with the world of crime that commonly appear in the newspaper headlines, but which are unusual to me. Where I come from, "graft" means hard work; "salvage" means rescuing things that have sunk; and I had to look up "mulcting" in the dictionary. It sounds like it ought to be something to do with fertilizing flowerbeds, but it turns out to be more about enriching policemen than the soil.

Hope you enjoyed your ocular inspection of this article. I'll go ahead.

Write me

2004-11-29T13:28:00.000+08:00

Write to me and I'll write back.

The best way to learn English is to speak and write in English. Since I can speak with you only three hours a week, I figure you could learn faster if you also saw me on the Web more often, so that you could write whatever you want--about yourself, your homework, your family, your friends, or your bf/gf. I want to see if you'd dare.

This takes the place of those dreary, desultory consultation hours, where I'm forced to wait for no one, or you drop by at the exact moment I'm not around or went out to pee, for nothing, it turns out; all you wanted was to ask if I was around! Good grief.

So type away, tell me whatever you want to say, but do be prepared to be checked, okay?

Students of English

To the Pharisees, RE: #Occupy Wall Street

In Answer to James Soriano

The Filipino is Multilingual

by Mila D. Aguilar

How to Become an Honest Bureaucrat

Wilhelm G. Ortaliz: He Grew Orchids

By Mila D. Aguilar

In Response to Merlie's Seas

Someday is Here

By Mila D. Aguilar

Revillame Revisited, Part I of III

A Portrait of Slow Transformation

Revillame Revisited: Part II of III

The Great Class Divide

Revillame Revisited: Part III of III

What Then Should be Done?

Flowers and a Poem for...the Murdered?

Looking at the RH Bill Objectively

Reading _Room_ by Emma Donoghue

The Devil is Upon Us

Answering Denise Levertov

Bulwagang Rizal

I HAVE

A Story Of Mothers

Walang Pakundangan

Your Egypt Is No More

More stories from Iloilo re: Typhoon Frank

In the wake of Typhoon Frank: Letter from Iloilo

Ka Bel

She’s done for

Time to Act

Vallorbe in real life

It Was the Caves of Vallorbe

The Filipino Speaks to NICA & the CIA

In Excelsis Deo

George and Macel

HK-Macau Ferry Passengers

Which will you choose?

Old story, new poem, higher level of struggle

The Muses

Happy New Year?

2005: The Last Days

To N.O. USA

After the Rain

Tatiana, Sophie’s child

Aubonne

She sells Swiss watches

Whether Weather

Swiss Hibiscus

She sells Swiss watches

Church Steeple

Swiss Chalets

The Churches of Switzerland

The reading at the Chateau

Man, her pair

Woman in the Lower Garden

Chateau Trellis

Chateau Veranda

Bells and howitzers

Gumamela

Bush

Winged things

My barangay

And now the poems

Lamp & Lake Geneve

Woman of the Chateau

Chateau Garden

Chateau Front

Photos from Switzerland

Analysis

Hong Kong before turnover

Today's Poem

How many short stories?

It's a story and it's short

Poem for the first semester

Pagoda Tree

Calachuchi

Vigan

Teresa Casas' paper on the Batangas revolt