Hidalgo and Luna: Vexed Modernity (page 5 of 8) 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | Luces Through most of the latter 20th century, Filipinos have used the word ilustrado as though it were coined by the expatriate community of middle class young men, mostly mestizos from las islas filipinas, who sought education and entertainment in several cities of the late 19th century Europe; and who self-designated as ilustrado to signify their faith in the value of an educated elite to a society. The word, however, preceded its deployment by the men from the Philippines. It is useful to unearth the detail that Francisco Goya, for instance, was among the so-called ilustrados of late 18th -early 19th century Spain. Already in circulation then, the word carried its clear reference to l'âge de lumiére, which was expressed in the Francophile (afrancescado) and elitist bent of these Spanish followers of the French Enlightenment. Like the young Goya (specifically, the Goya who made a marginal note in the series Los Caprichos,31 that "The author's...intention is to banish harmful beliefs commonly held, and with this work of caprichos to perpetuate the solid testimony of truth..."), the Spanish ilustrados were acolytes of Reason. They suffered neither the the excesses of monarchy nor the medievalisms of the pueblo, and managed to push reform under the dispensation of Carlos III. However, post the Caroline regime and the French Revolution, and during the subsequent war between Spain and France, the Spanish ilustrados—luces—would find themselves close to extinguished by the strange alliance of traditional conservatives with the pueblo. In a fit of anti-modernist nationalism, the Spanish royalty and aristocracy, joined by the plebeian nobles—the majos and majas—indulged in a paroxysm of folksiness. The toreros, the bandidos and other picaro (rogue) types of legends, and theater's duende and other grotesques, would populate the imagination; that is, the imagining of a national Spanishness.32 Taking stock of this turn of events, one observes that the early 19th century Spanish ilustrados were by force of circumstances as anti-nationalist as they were anti-theocracy and anti-monarchic, none of which were stable political positions. Politics for most of these ilustrados was negotiated in gradients, rather than immovable polar points of commitment; many were torn individuals. In his later years, antagonistic forces drove Goya to emotional extremes: on one hand, the pull of the pueblo, with its menagerie of monstrous beings and its utility to a "refulgent" Spanish nationalism (costumbrista);33 and on the other, to the pull of the emancipatory principles of the Enlightenment. Not so, for the heirs of the ilustrado name who came from the Philippines to live in Spain and France about a century later. In comparison, then: the Philippine ilustrados (some of them were "Filipino," the equivalent of the American creole) abided by a constellation of ideas and political positions different from that of their predecessors. The former held the Enlightenment in contradistinction to a pseudo-folk nationalism, while the latter wouJd produce a conflation of nationalism with Enlightenment ideals. But which nationalism? To the extent that peninsulares, insulares, Spanish and Chinese mestizos—and comparatively few self-designated indios—all participated in the brief, early days of the reform movement prior to the collapse of España en Filipinas, it is possible to borrow the term creole nationalism for (limited) use in the Philippine context. As to what that nationalism meant, one might take recourse in Schumacher again, who draws attention to the book entitled El progreso de Filipinas by the Chinese mestizo, Gregorio Sancianco, an early advocate of reform in the Philippine Colony, saying that:   " [...it] anticipates most of the principal themes of the later Filipino nationalist campaign: administrative reform, eradication of corruption in the government, recognition of Filipino rights as loyal Spaniards, extension of Spanish law to the Philippines, curtailment of the excessive power of the friars in the life of the country, and assertion of the dignity of the Filipino."34 [My italics]

Operating allegorically, this nationalism deployed a poetics of kinship: Mother Spain and Daughter Philippines. In containing the child's independence within the embrace of filial piety—Juan Luna's "España y Filipinas" shows how this containment can be conceived prettily—such a nationalism linked itself surreptitiously to racial politics. Ambiguously too: the creole, and by extension the Spanish mestizo, is racially a de facto child who, unable to ask for "birthright," instead demanded rights by virtue of the genealogical descent of one país to another. Still, the creole, the Spanish mestizo, and by further extension, the mestizos of all sorts who qualified as honorary creoles by virtue of newfound wealth—only demanded those rights for all inhabitants of their country of birth at the extremely abstract level of an idealized Enlightenment. The realpolitik of the matter was that those rights were only demanded in behalf of those who are racially linked to the motherland. Although Anderson points out that American creoles at the cusp of their national imagining imagined themselves to be mythically related to an American indigeneity, it remains that their invocation of the Enlightenment liberté and egalité disguised an underlying genetics discourse.

This is all in hindsight. It may very well have been the case that the Philippine ilustrados were generally unconscious of the dissimulating qualities of a reform agenda seeking to make Spaniards out of Philippine inhabitants. Certainly, as late as the mid-20th century, Dr. Jose Bantug, the compiler of the Epistolario Juan Luna around the period of the centenary of the artist's birth in the mid-20th century, did not find it necessary to qualify his remark: "...para Luna, 'español' y 'filipino' equivalían a ser una sola cosa, y usaban la palabra 'nosotros' y 'lo nuestro,' el uno cuando se refería a cosas de Filipinas y el otro asuntos de España."³⁵ Still, the basic features of 18th century creole nationalism were known to them, however historically and geographically distant it was at the end of the 19th century. (And it was not called creole nationalism in either century.) The reformists in the early stages of their movement worked closely with at least one Cuban republican politician, Rafael M. Labra, who graced the banquet in honor of Hidalgo and Luna, and whose "voluminous writings probably influenced Filipino thinking...³⁶ Indeed one defining moment for the pre-Solidaridad reformists was their decision not to continue working with Labra, whose agenda was explicitly for autonomy.

The later reform movement was less "creole" racially, composed as it was by Chinese mestizos and indios (the peninsulares, insulares, Spanish mestizos and their Spanish sympathizers largely having dropped off). Browner, it was this latter-day group that would veer very close to, but would stop short of, calls for independence. They went full tilt skirmishing with church authority; contemplating race theory in order to militate against prejudice; and fulminating against the excesses and ineptitudes of the crown. It might be argued, therefore, that they espoused another kind of nationalism, akin to the reactionary "official nationalisms" that were proliferating in Europe of that fin de siécle. This variant sought radical modulations to the infrastructure of imperialism, for the conservative purpose of staving off the very real possibilities of popular revolution. It was class prerogative, then, that inflected this ilustrado nationalist vision, and occulted racial considerations. The desired national community would be Enlightened, ilustrado by force of its authors' cultivation, which unhappily also meant a paternalistic or rejecting attitude towards the majority of the inhabitants who were thought to be beautiful and innocent, but shrouded in ignorance and incapable of staging a revolution based on reason.

I went into all this nitpicking to be able to suggest that the word ilustrado used by the Philippine reformists at the end of the 19th century had a complex—and far from synonymous—relationship with the same word as it circulated in late 18th to early 19th century Spain. To the ilustrado generation of Goya, emancipation was an Enlightenment project that demanded a rejection of theocracy, and of dynastic and aristocratic privilege; the categorization and acceptance of that new political player, The People; but also, an attitude of distancing from the rabid potential of that mass. To the ilustrados of the first stage of the reform movement, emancipation was a quasi-Enlightenment project that only demanded that attitude of distance from pueblo culture; a careful and wily critique of church and crown bureaucracies; and recognition of the rights of the racially-drawn category, hijos del país—that is, creoles, insulares, and Spanish mestizos. To the ilustrados who were active at the final stage of the reform movement, emancipation was a hypothetical Enlightenment project that demanded a wholly antagonistic stance vis-á-vis the church and crown bureaucracies, mitigated by careful negotiations with the imperial elite for "reform." Significantly, the class status quo was never under attack, as it would have been had the protagonists been the ilustrados of the early 19th century. Finally, there was no question about the disdain for vernacular culture that was latent in the studious reactions to the specter of popular revolution, and in the insistent call for the education of peasants and tribal people. Latent, as well, in their calls for recognition on the basis of bourgeois cultivation; signal of arrival In the world of the civilized, and apotheosized by the genius act.