Legacies of the Encounter in Forms of Expression

The presentation will review the Spanish and Mexican influence on several aspects of Philippine culture including language, music, fashion, architecture, customs, and religion, which are the result of the Manila Galleon trade route and overall Spanish rule of the islands for over three centuries.

The paper focuses on the military architectural heritage built by the Spanish authorities in the Maluku area, specially on the remains of a few forts—roughly six—and other minor fortifications (bulwarks), unequivocally assigned to the Spanish crown representatives, from 1606 to 1663. They spread across Ternate and Tidore islands, the most important political centres in the Northern Maluku Islands (Maluku Utara) up to the present day. The enquiry involves printed and archive materials, as well as fieldwork accomplished in 2007. In some cases, it was a challenging task, as a positive identification of the archaeological sites in the light of historical evidence had proven to be difficult, given the unreliable oral traditions and the fragmentary character of the available narrative and archival sources. This small number of Spanish built forts, among almost a hundred historical military sites registered throughout the entire region from Portuguese to Japanese origin, does not offer the relevance of other fortifications built by the Spanish elsewhere in Asia or America, which are often embedded in larger and richer urban environments. Though they also display a high degree of ruin and most of them suffered long-term reconstructive processes over the centuries, they form a unique and interesting heritage, highly valuable in the eyes of the local people, in terms of their collective memories. Actually, such heritage has touristic value and is also a pathway for the Ternatese and the Tidorese people to affirm their identity.

Early modern military architecture has usually been understood merely as a functional defensive instrument and therefore its aesthetic issues are undervalued. While profoundly defined by geometrical features, the different warfare traditions and the progressive definition of an empire’s image during the eighteenth century also played a key role behind these fortifications’ designs. Usually considered as the clearest examples of the imperial imposition of architectural models, certain Southeast Asian forts have been highlighted as good examples for understanding cultural dialogue, even though Portuguese contributions have received little attention. Much has been written about fortifications in the Philippines and other eighteenth-century Southeast Asian ports, but not as much has been studied regarding Macao’s defensive structures, which were completely reconfigured at this time. Examination of Johannes Vingboons’s aerial views (ca. 1665), Lafitte de Brassier’s cartographic works (1781), and Georg Chinnery’s sketches makes it clear that the changes in Macao’s fortifications were drastic, bringing together the most avant-garde European innovations with the traditional features of Chinese fortifications. Pre-existing hilltop forts were reinforced with bastions and curtains connecting them, defining the limits of the settlement, as was not done before. While this can be viewed as a European solution, the Chinese expertise on the topic might likewise play a role. For this reason, the archival materials and the preserved remains will be cross-examined with contemporary Portuguese treatises and existing projects as well as other similar fortifications in China and the Philippines.

The paper will show that the Spanish influence in Philippine architecture is obvious since the architecture is the manifestation of the culture and the identity of one nation and the Spanish ingredient is a substantial part of Philippine culture and identity (Nick Joaquin).  The paper will also show that the influence of Spain in Philippine architecture is rather conceptual than formal. Clichés and preconceived ideas about materials should not be taken very much into consideration. The paper will show how the action of Spain in the Americas and the Philippines was one of urbanization and civilization, only comparable to the one of the Roman Empire, and so far away from the colonial ones from the British or Dutch. The paper will make a typological tour through the different types of architectural structures that have survived up to this day in the Philippines. The paper will conclude that the Spanish presence in the Philippines was the vehicle for the creation of a new and unique culture by grafting inside the local existing reality concepts and principles and by allowing other cultures as the Chinese being main actors in this creative process.

Several paintings mounted in oratories and folding screens confirm the circulation of objects between China and Japan and the Viceroyalties of Peru and New Spain in the Early Modern Age, particularly in the seventeenth century. Moreover, this circulation is also attested by coeval texts, above all letters, written by the Christian missionaries stationed in the missions of China and Japan. The historiography of art has privileged a unidirectional analysis of this phenomenon, focusing mainly on the transpacific circulation of paintings from China and Japan to New Spain. However, it is desirable to make a more complex and comprehensive examination of the circulation networks between these different cultural and political spaces. The survey and study of a visual and material culture that emerged from the interactions between different cultures having the Pacific as the chief contact route may contribute to a thorough understanding of the connections established between the Portuguese and Spanish overseas domains in this part of the world, having the Philippines as a contact zone. The analysis of the paintings, both through their materiality and iconography, is the main focus of this presentation aiming at identifying new lines of research and helping to define the profiles and motivations of the different agents involved.

The Catholic missionaries were the main actors of the introduction of Western art into Japan between as of 1549. A first flow of works of art can be observed from Europe to Japan. However, at the end of the sixteenth century, another flow sent artists and pictorial themes to Europe as well as China and Latin America. A special place will be given to works of art which might have reached Japan through the Spanish route: first, French engravings from the very beginning of the seventeenth century which were in Japan before 1614 and second, the paintings brought back by the Keichō mission, among them a painting made in Manila now kept in Sendai City Museum.

Books in the Philippines have an ephemeral quality to them due to the conditions they are subjected to—the humid tropical climate, typhoons, floods, fires, earthquakes, and termites—and, generally, the inferior materials used in their manufacture. That the book has to contend with these multiple forces in order to survive is often raised in studies on Philippine book history, but how the book survives and why it does so in spite of these forces have hardly been given attention. This presentation seeks to address this lack in Philippine book history scholarship.  It will explore the survival of Philippine incunabula (books printed from 1593 to 1640) through the three stages defined by Thomas R. Adams and Nicolas Barker in “A New Model for the Study of the Book”: their initial creation and reception, their resting period after such, and finally their entrance into the world of book collecting.  The survival of early Philippine imprints has much to tell us about the transnational nature of books not only as objects but also as artefacts.  Where our old books are and how they got there reveal contacts and continuities established and maintained for centuries.  This presentation, which focuses on Asian and European connections in Philippine book history, is a preliminary attempt to take stock of the survival of Philippine incunabula at present in order to support their future survival and to foster further scholarship on the books themselves, their texts, and their contexts.

The pivotal role of the Manila Galleon system in the globalization of trade also played a crucial role in the construction of the Baroque cultural model during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Through the study of the material culture it is possible to trace the trajectories of several shared art and cultural values across the Pacific. Religious and secular expressions were selected, produced, traded and consumed through the merchant networks of the system.

Pedro Ordóñez de Ceballos allegedly traveled around the word for nearly three decades, until his return to Spain in 1602. In his own words, “I was in the four parts of the world, Europe, Asia, Africa and America, and I have visited the fifth part, Magallanica or Incognita.” In the following years, he published several works, and namely the Viaje del Mundo (Voyage around the world) and the Tratado de las relaciones verdaderas de los reynos de la China, Cochinchina y Champaa (Treatise on China, Cochinchina and Champa), where he claimed to have crossed the Pacific Ocean and to have lived for several years in continental Southeast Asia. Jesuit missionaries active in the regions bordering the South China Sea in the late sixteenth century claimed that Pedro Ordoñez never visited that part of Asia and that his travel accounts and historical treatises were fictitious. The purpose of the present paper is to shed some light on this matter, by contextualizing the alleged travels of Pedro Ordoñez and confronting his works with other coeval accounts of European authors.

At the end of the nineteenth century, Spanish attitudes towards its remaining colonies were rethought, as politicians focused on identifying and solving the specific problems. One of the problems identified in the Philippines was Chinese immigration. This circumstance coincides with the publication of some accounts of Philippine history and traditions written by Spaniards, which usually included at least one mention of Juan de Salcedo’s heroism in defeating the Chinese pirate Limahong in 1574. Juan de Salcedo became in the Spanish imagination of the period one of the great heroes and guarantors of the expansion of Spain and Catholicism, as had been Hernan Cortes and El Cid. Meanwhile, Limahong was reminiscent of the great Chinese immigration and was profiled as a villain. While this process is unfolding in Spain, Filipino writers are searching for an identity beyond the colonial invaders and looking towards Asia. This paper will approach texts written in Spanish by Filipino authors Isabelo de los Reyes, Cecilio Apóstol, and Antonio Abad, in which they explore the life and history of Limahong. A comparison will be made between the consideration of Limahong among Filipino authors—humanized by de los Reyes, mythologized by Apóstol—and in Spanish writers. This comparison will reveal a process of reevaluation of the Philippine relationship with China and of the national identity through the process of hero construction, the rewriting of Philippine history, and the act of giving voice to a previously silenced and dehumanized character.

The post-1898 Fil-hispanic literary production presented an image of Spain much different from those seen in the Rizal novels and the hard-hitting writings of Marcelo del Pilar (1850–96), Isabelo de los Reyes (1864–1938), and Graciano López Jaena (1856–96). Partly responsible for this wind change is American colonization in the country. The Americanization campaign—bannered by the imposition of English in the major domains of Philippine national life—prompted writers in Spanish to affirm a core identity to counter this cultural reinvention effort. The resulting Fil-hispanic literary discourse reimagined a new Spain, a representation helped in no small part by visits of cultural personalities seen as Spanish cultural ambassadors. This paper examines the images of this nueva España found in the writings in Spanish of Filipino authors during the American colonial period.

From 1909 to 1917, Spanish poet Salvador Rueda made visits to the Philippines and various countries in the Americas. He went as an official representative of Spain in order to “strengthen the spiritual ties” between “Mother” Spain and her “distant daughters” (Rueda’s words). Although nowadays a largely forgotten poet in the so-called Hispanic world, at the time, he was fervently received in all of the locations he visited. During his time in Manila, several poetic homages were written for him and by extension Spain. In this presentation, however, I argue that more than Filipinos desiring to reconnect with Spain through Rueda, it was Rueda who craved for the attention of Filipinos and Hispanic Americans. Moreover, I contend that in praising Rueda and Spain, Hispanophone Filipino poets were indirectly paying homage to Nicaraguan Rubén Darío, a key figure of modernismo, the first literary movement to originate in Hispanic America. Counterpointing the reception of modernismo and the reception of Rueda in the Philippines, I reconsider the avid interest Hispanophone Filipino writers had for writers from Hispanic America and view it as a dismantling of the until then centripetal world of Hispanic letters.

My contribution entails a critical study of the late eighteenth-century moro-moro, or pantomime of war between Christians and Moors, based on Tagalog adaptations and translations of chivalric romances [libros de caballeria]. I establish the basis of defining the moro-moro through a careful reading of existing sources on the development of Philippine poetry and theater during the late eighteenth century (as well as secondary works by Nicanor Tiongson and Isaac Donoso), with attention to the expulsion of the Jesuits in 1768 and the increasing subordination of the religious Orders to the colonial government. My analysis demonstrates how the political culture of the mission’s decadence informs the cultural politics of the moro-moro. The publication of Francisco Balagtas (renamed Baltazar)’s romance, The Life and Times of Florante and Laura from the Kingdom of Albania [Ang Pinagdaanang Buhay ni Florante at ni Laura sa Kahariang Albania] represents at once the culmination of this development and the formalization of a vernacular critique of Spanish colonial rule under the religious Orders. By privileging the virtue and heroism of the Moor in his moro-moro, as well as his later work Orosman at Zafira, Baltazar restages the scene of conquest as one in which the role of the mission as frontier institution is entirely absent. The implication of this omission is to introduce to the reader / viewer a universe that no longer relies on the Christian imaginary to condition native access to the law.

In a version of Philippine history that proliferates in the Arnis community, the Spanish theater Comedia/komedya or  Moro-Moro, is depicted as having an instrumental role in the preservation and development of indigenous fighting styles. When the Spanish outlawed the practicing of martial arts, Moro-Moro theater premised on battles between Christians and Muslims supposedly offered plenty of opportunities for displaying fighting skills in the battle scenes that characterized the genre. Moro-Moro theater then is seen not just as a tool wielded by the Spanish for the conversion of natives to Christianity, but also as a site of resistance. In this paper, I look at discursive maneuvers that allow the Arnis community to trace the lineage of today's arnis masters to famed warrior-figures in Philippine history such as Andres Bonifacio; to Moro warriors in Mindanao and Sulu; and most importantly, back to Lapu-Lapu who is popularly associated with the native repulsion of Ferdinand Magellan's expeditionary force. While the veracity of this narrative is questionable, the widespread appeal of this view reveals something about the popular imagination. From Arnis websites aimed at a foreign audience, we see how migrants marketing a Filipino martial product capitalize on the stereotype of Muslims as superior fighters by presenting a historical narrative that frames the fighting styles developed in Moro-Moro performances as continuations of Moro and pre-Hispanic martial arts traditions. In this view, differences among pre-Hispanic, Muslim, and Christian Filipinos are downplayed, and what is emphasized is their common resistance against Spain through indigenous martial arts.

The musical theatre scene in Manila is often perceived as an imitation of Western models. When compared to the musical theatre cultures of neighboring cities in Southeast Asia, Manila musical theatre tradition seems inauthentic despite the thriving genre of the Original Filipino Musical (OFM) in the city. However, imitation, in the context of Manila’s musical theater scene, is not just a simple parroting but it is also a complicated strategy of aesthetics and poetics. In this regard, the OFM in contemporary Manila is a derivative of many sources and influences that must be understood as entangled. The use of entanglement is also informed by processes of returning, rewriting and repeating, in a sense that the entangled character of the Philippine musical traditions discussed here are sites of recollection, re-elaboration, and contestation of readily available cultural materials in order to produce new ones. As Filipino artists transform these foreign works into localized versions, the artists do not just replicate but they also complicate and expand the genres (i.e., the Hispanic commedia and zarzuela, the musicals and the megamusicals) through the creation of new ones (i.e., the komedya, the sarsuwela, and the OFM) based on their notions of imagined foreign worlds transplanted into their concrete realities.  

The final decade of the nineteenth century saw the emergence of a visible, palpable self-consciousness with the expansion of the formerly denigrating nomenclature “Filipino” (from its original criollo designation) to encompass the mestizo and indio. This resulted from a uniquely potent brew of socio-politico-economic factors which boiled over in this period to trigger the first stirrings of nationalism. Newspapers had chronicled the shift in the term’s usage, as explored in the journalism on music—from a mere geographic denotation of the colonized native from las islas Filipinas in the 1860s to a distinct identity in the process of coalescence in the last decade of the nineteenth  century, now claimed by a community of people—criollo, mestizo and indio, offspring of the turbulent, complex circumstances of colonization and enabled by a shared realization of a common identity forged and patented through similar experiences of struggle and oppression. Music and theatre were important channels for expressing this, as seen in three examples from Manila’s newspapers. First, in La Lectura Popular, Isabelo de los Reyes launched a passionate defense of the Tagalog komedya (which had been under attack by Spaniards and educated Filipinos) as a truly Filipino form, ‘la dramática Filipina”; second, in La Ilustración Filipina, the image of zarzuela superstar Práxedes “Yeyeng” Fernandez on the front page, with a write-up inside on her stellar life and career, proudly declared her a true “Artista Filipina”; and third, in El Comercio, a Philippine-made piano by instrument-maker Pio Trinidad in Quiapo, is lauded as a “piano Filipino” for its innovations and use of local wood, one of the first locally-made pianos to compete in a piano market saturated by foreign brands. This semantic birthing of the “Filipino” as a people had been observed through shifts in writing perspectives, and in the term’s meaning itself. These shifts may be read as positionings and negotiations towards identity, and anti-colonial critiques in themselves, set into motion by factors such as the bilinguality of some newspapers, the mix of classes and races which wrote and read newspapers, and the journalistic mannerisms, which communicated pride in a newly-imagined, nascent identity, which found unique and creative pronouncement through music and theatre. In these artistic forms and performers, the power of cultural hybridity was at work, transforming the Spanish theatre forms comedia and zarzuela, as well as the European piano into genuine Filipino expressions.

This paper focuses on the rancho folclórico tradition of Malacca. Originally an “invented tradition” harnessed to policies of social control and fascist propaganda of the Portuguese Estado Novo, the form survived in post-1974 Portugal. Today ranchos folclóricos celebrate local identity with an increasingly transnational focus. A small repertory of these dances was introduced to Malacca in the early 1950s via a colonial Portuguese priest to entertain a visiting Portuguese minister. The group continued as a social activity and gradually became a local “tradition.” With minimal continuing connection to Portugal, the repertory was passed down through generations of dancers’ bodies, augmented by locally composed material. By the 1990s, however, there was little knowledge of the Portuguese rancho folclórico tradition. With the expansion of social media in the twenty-first-century and interest generated by the five hundredth anniversary of Portuguese presence in Asia, fresh contacts have been made with ranchos folclóricos from Portugal and with cultural troupes from other Asian Portuguese communities. While these links re-connect Malacca to a diasporic Portuguese identity, new connections ripple outwards through emigration. Specifically, key individuals involved in the introduction of Malacca’s rancho folclórico tradition in the 1950s left Malaysia for Australia in the mid-1970s. Their descendants, now part of a small Malaysian-Portuguese immigrant community in Perth, look to Malacca as “home,” not Portugal. Less concerned with issues of purity and preservation of tradition, these Australian-Malaysian-Portuguese musicians exhibit a more experimental approach to style and repertory.

Whitework, or white embroidery on a white ground, was a popular form of needlework in 18th-and 19 th -century Europe. Well-known types of whitework such as Dresden work, Ayrshire work, and chikan (from Lucknow, India) combined embroidered floral and foliate motifs with openwork on cotton muslin or linen cloth. These would have been the models for 19th-century Philippine whitework, which was applied to nipis (fine cloth) made from fibers of abaca or pina. Whitework was applied to Filipino clothing and was, later, developed for the Western market. These were in the form of kerchiefs, collars, handkerchiefs, table runners and children’s clothing.

While authors on whitework embroidery acknowledge the Philippines’ contribution to this genre, particularly due to its distinctive use of pineapple cloth, its repertoire of decorative forms and techniques have not been discussed extensively. This talk will initiate this discussion to demonstrate that the hybridity of Philippine whitework served the artistic taste of both Filipino and foreign consumers. Its distinctiveness was recognized overseas and, more importantly, Filipinos continue to use it in clothing as a mark of Philippine identity.

Archaeological and irregular recoveries of pre-colonial gold adornments throughout the archipelago in the late twentieth century add much to our body of knowledge about pre-Islamic and pre-Christian strategies of marking worldly and supernatural power in early Philippine societies. Antonio Pigafetta’s well-known account of Ferdinand Magellan’s encounter with the king of Butuan sumptuously adorned in gold jewelry and silk cloths provides evidence of the importance of personal ornamentation as pre-colonial mediator of power and prestige. Early references to gold adornments worn by local inhabitants include the sixteenth-century manuscript known as the Boxer Codex, whose illustrations portray well-dressed individuals wearing sumptuous garments with lavish layers of gold chains and rings adorning the neck, arms, and legs. Spanish colonial accounts from the early contact period similarly report gold jewelry in astonishing quantities. Early gold necklaces feature carnelians, garnets, and other imported gems strung in between gold beads of various types that have been referred to as matambukaw (four-sided), tinaklum (long hollow), pinoro (granulated), arlay (Job’s tears), tinigbi (tigbi fruit), and bongan buyo (betel nut). This essay traces mutations of pre-colonial gold objects associated with Hindu-Buddhist concepts to Catholic imagery and related notions of spiritual and worldly power. I examine early goldworks including ritual objects and personal adornments and their subsequent transformation to culturally entangled Catholic expressions of faith, protection, and power.

This paper looks into the results of the ongoing conversations with Spanish, Latin and Asian influences on the evolving forms of the Philippine dress.

The Portuguese conquest of Melaka from 1511 to 1641, about 150 km south of the capital Kuala Lumpur, left a lasting legacy of people with Portuguese heritage and a creole language, commonly referred to as Papiá Cristang or just Cristang. In fact, the latter is even used to refer to the people (e.g., Jenti Cristang). Malaysians with Portuguese ancestry make up part of the one percent of “Others” in Malaysia, and comprise less than 0.5% of this category in Melaka. The Portuguese Settlement in Melaka, which was founded in the 1930s, and currently consists of about 1000 residents, is the heartbeat of Melaka Portuguese language and culture, However, the number of fluent Melaka Portuguese speakers has been on the decline even within this Settlement, and an increasing number of young adults now work and live away from Melaka. These factors, coupled with the changing social and physical landscape of the Settlement, give rise to the question of how young people with Portuguese ancestry, but who are likely to be offspring of bi/multi-ethnic marriages, express their self and cultural identity. This is the main question that I will address in my talk. The discussion of how these young Malaysians with a historical Portuguese ancestry see themselves will be based on a thematic analysis of interviews conducted with a group of Melaka Portuguese youth. The analysis will be interpreted using a social constructionist approach as its epistemology to explore the expression of identity through language choice(s) and other means of identity and cultural expression. This talk hopes to highlight the complexities of how a group of young Malaysians with a historical Portuguese ancestry, and who belong to an “Othered” community, negotiate their ethnic and cultural identity amidst a multilingual and multicultural space.

This paper shall discuss the grammar accounts of Zamboanga Chabacano, word and sentence structures. It shall argue that the Zamboanga Chabacano has grammar rules of its own and should not be looked at as a bastardized Spanish language. The grammar accounts are descriptions of the subconscious language grammar rules that the speakers of the language have been using.  Since the time the pidgin was developed and eventually transformed into a creole language, the native Zamboangueños were able to understand one another. Some grammar accounts show some exceptions because different speech communities coming from the different places show some variations in the use of the language.  One conspicuous variation is shown among the Zamboangueño speakers who are older, specifically those who are 70 years old and older.  Their variation is more Spanish than the relatively younger ones. Seven Zamboanga Chabacano sentence structures shall be discussed in the paper. These are: (1) Subject – Verb – Object; (2) Subject – Verb – Objective Complement; (3) Subject – Linking Verb – Complement (Noun); (4) Subject – Verb – Adverbial Phrase; (5) Subject (Expletive) – Verb – Object – Adverb Phrase; (6) Verb – Object – Adverbial Phrase; (7) Subject – Complement 1 – Complement 2.

This study provides a comparison of the linguistic ecologies of the Chabacano communities of Cavite and Ternate. I will bring together socio-historical data on demographic and geographical factors and the intensity of contact, such as, for example, the length of exposure to Spanish and/or other languages, closeness to administrative and commercial centres, access to standard forms through education, and further aspects related to the economic models present in the (post-)colonial society (e.g.Mintz 1971; Faraclas et al. 2007; Clements 2009). These are analyzed in relation to the structural and lexical profiles of the varieties (cf. Sippola 2017). The results will highlight differences and similarities between the creole communities’ sociohistorical characteristics and connect these with the linguistic profiles of the varieties. In general, the study will shed light on the sociohistorical motivations underlying contact-induced change in the dynamics of Spanish contact ecologies in South East Asia.

Chabacano is unique among the languages in the Philippines because of its nature as a Spanish-based creole that developed in a contact situation.  At the same time, it operates within a dominant Austronesian language environment, and many of its grammatical features show Austronesian influences that characterize Philippine languages.  This presentation will feature Austronesian influences in Zamboangueño Chabacano and will also feature the accusative actancy structure in the grammatical properties of the language.  It will also show cross-linguistic influence among young Zamboangueño Chabacano learners and how their errors in a picture description task show the ways they manage the difference between their first language and a second language, Filipino.