The legacy of encounters between Iberia and Asia stretches across time and across many different topics, as this conference will demonstrate. In the early modern period (ca 1500–1800) the basis for these enduring connections was laid down in the creation of a new form of cultural hybridity that developed from the relationships between Iberian men and Asian women. In many cases this hybridity could be supported through a relatively stable household, but even when liaisons were short-lived, the connections that were established introduced different ways of thinking that had a lasting influence. The children born of these relationships, with a foot in two or more cultures, often served as bridges between ethnic communities and as conduits for many of the themes that will be developed in this conference. My keynote address considers the kinship and family networks that developed across Asia, reaching from India and Sri Lanka to China, Japan and the Philippines, their position in relation to mainstream cultures and the contributions they have made to the rich tapestry of Asian societies.

Studies on pre-colonial Philippine society often cited the relative autonomy of women and their power over men in terms of sexual and familial practices. Many believe that the coming of the Spanish colonial government and the entrenchment of the Catholic Church and ideology in the lives of Filipinos had rendered women “powerless” and “sexless,” and yet studies on how the lives of the Filipino women were transformed under Spanish colonialism remain limited. Through civil and church records, my paper aims to demonstrate how a once polygamist society, which permitted women to leave their husbands at will, transformed into a monogamous Philippine society where divorce was deemed illegal under Spanish colonialism. More generally, I want to interrogate marriage as a legal institution and a set of social practices in order to illuminate the role of Catholicism and civil law in shaping the private and public lives of Filipinos, especially women, in Philippine colonial society. And finally, my paper will offer reflections on how marriage laws, which trace their origins in the Spanish colonizing process, continue to shape the debates about divorce in contemporary Philippines.

Filipinos see education as a path to social mobility, showing its continued importance in Filipinos’ minds. Educational institutions currently play a crucial role in framing the constitution of gender and masculinities in the Philippines, specifically powerful masculinities. Before we can ask how schools framed gender and masculinities, we must understand how schools were shaped. The survey of the Philippines’ experience of education during the Spanish colonial period reveals the process of the country’s forced adaptation to colonisers’ needs and later decolonisation and adaptation to its own needs. This study uses historical data to outline the gender order influenced by the Spanish colonial period. Specifically, it focuses on gender relations and Philippine manhood, as framed by Connell’s (2005) three-fold model on gender’s structure that distinguishes relations of power, production, and cathexis (emotional attachment), framed by notions of hegemonic masculinity (Connell and Messerschmidt 2005). The study highlights three specific trends during this period: controlling women’s sexuality through religious beaterios, labour and control through elite and private education, and single-sex schools. Lastly, the Propaganda Movement’s protest masculinity encapsulates both the indigenisation of Spanish colonial masculinity while revealing how Spanish colonial values beyond “macho” influence contemporary Philippine life. Success in education reform cannot be fully achieved without grounding issues of gender and education in the history of colonisation.

Adelina Gurrea's contributions to the intellectual and literary life in Spain, hitherto unknown, are of relevance for the development of Spanish feminist movements and for Spanish women’s literature. Her background in the Philippines provided her with a solid academic and economic position to defend women’s rights and to get involved in intellectual discussions in Spain. The dimension of her contributions awaits a full evaluation. This paper aims to partially fulfill this aim. Adelina Gurrea was born in 1896 in the island of Negros. She grew up in Spanish and Bisaya, both languages of her childhood. During her youth in Manila, Gurrea was an active writer, publishing her poems and playing an influential role as director of the literary section for the newspaper La Vanguardia. In 1920, after her father’s death, she travelled with her mother and siblings to Spain, where they finally stayed for the years to come. By 1921, Gurrea joined the activities of relevant Spanish institutions such as the Ateneo de Madrid, the Lyceum Club Femenino, and the Agrupación Femenina Republicana, a women’s association for the defense of the Republic. She wrote poetry, essays, and plays, and delivered lectures before the Civil War erupted. We can trace her itinerary, from a modern lesbian woman under the Republican Spain, to her surviving strategy of accommodation to the Franco’s regime, keeping under concealment her fundamental alliances. Her relevance for the survival of Spanish women writers against Franco’s dictatorship will be discussed.

As the title of this abstract suggests, my analysis of a selection of works by Spanish-speaking Filipino author Evangelina Guerrero Zacarías (1904–49) concludes with the recurrent observation of a feeling of disappointment and boredom among the protagonists (usually women) in Guerrero’s short stories. This contrasts with the enthusiasm and force observed in the political writings of early Filipino feminists and contemporaries of Guerrero, such as Paz Mendoza, illuminating a different view on the political and social changes brought about by the US. This presentation is motivated by an interest in highlighting the type of feminist concerns that appear in Guerrero’s short stories (mostly from her collection titled Primicias) and to situate her work within Hispano-Filipino feminist discourses as well as the broader field of women’s writing in the Global Hispanophone.

It is often assumed that the Philippines’ conversion to Western forms of Christianity—Catholicism and Protestantism—differentiated it radically from the rest of Southeast Asia, and that its true connection to the region is Moslem Mindanao. The stereotype stems from a way of looking at the data: (1) First is a misunderstanding of “indigenous” as merely that “which is non-Western.” However, if we conceive of the indigenous as that which antecedes and/or is irreducible to outside influence, we discover that the Indigenous tradition flourishes still in varying degrees at all social strata in both the rural and urban areas of Lowland Christian Luzon and Visayas, which were exposed to Hispanization. Forgotten too is that Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam were originally as foreign to Southeast Asian countries as Western Christianity was. (2) Also overlooked is that Hispanization introduced a political organization, the “State-and-City,” that was already centuries old in other Southeast Asian societies but was still embryonic in sixteenth-century Luzon and Visayas. Central to the State-and-City is the bifurcation of religious tradition, one largely centering among the educated and powerholders of the cities / urban centers and another diffused among farmers and laborers of  the rural area and of the cities / urban center. Like its peers in the region, Christianized Luzon and Visayas would henceforth experience a dialectical tension between localizing the foreign via indigenization and universalizing the indigenous via the imported foreign religion. Comparisons to be made with Buddhist Thailand and Moslem Central Java corroborate this.

This study places the concept of “vulgos” of Isabelo de Los Reyes that can be found across his archive that came out at the turn of the twentieth century. The “vulgos” is a concept, at first, drawn from the folklore studies in Western Europe to denote the peasants who belong to the bottom rank of the social hierarchy and the “vulgarity” of their culture in comparison to that of the aristocrats. However, de Los Reyes, popularly known as Don Belong, mobilized this concept to characterize the revolutionary capacity of the folk, which eventually he hailed as the Philippine Folklore. The vulgos, as I argue, does not only capture an inferior class social formation during the tailend of Spanish colonialism and the rise of American imperialism. Such collective formation has also a dynamic with the Western powers, and in turn, the vulgos have also vulgarized the Western powers. The colonial experience of the vulgos was never a relationship of passivity. Instead, the vulgos have also demonstrated their agency, which the West adopted in exchange for the continuity of their colonial projects. Europe, as I argue, is also constructed through the vulgos that de Los Reyes mobilized in his folklore archive.

An early seventeenth-century document in the Archivo de la Universidad de Santo Tomás (AUST) in Manila is a complaint of the residents of the Parian against threats from a certain Dominican friar. Among the signatures, which are mostly in Chinese characters, are some in baybayin. According to Fr. Alberto Santamaria’s transcriptions of these, the family names appear to be Chinese, not Filipino. The document suggests that Filipina mothers were still teaching their children of Chinese fathers the use of baybayin. The Dictionario Hispanico-Sinicum, also in the AUST, is a dictionary of Spanish words, with corresponding meanings written in Chinese characters, and extra columns for romanized pronunciation of the characters in Mandarin and Hokkien. The work has been dated to between the 1620s and 1640s. An examination of the dictionary reveals a number of Tagalog words, linking the production of the volume to Manila. Both the Parian-baybayin document and the Dictionario date from the first decades of the seventeenth century, and witness to the development of the mestizo sangley in Philippine society.

Several southeast Asian and Hispanic groups performed various roles in the Spanish conquest and colonization of the Philippines. Merdicas from Ternate and Guachinangos from Mexico participated in Spanish military campaigns in the Philippines. Although they started out as mercenaries and soldiers, they eventually integrated themselves in colonial society by assuming political and economic roles in the provinces. While Asian-Hispanic interactions involved warfare and violence, they did not preclude the possibility of other forms of relations. In fact, Merdicas and Guachinangos were able to use their initial military position as a stepping stone to become officials and traders in the Philippines.

The evolution of the concepts used to discriminate peoples during the Spanish period in the Philippines is very wide. It includes a new kind of Filipino, mestizos, tsinoys, and many others, and new local religious ideas and imported concepts, such as stain, or macula. Local and foreign perceptions, both from Spain and from Latin America, mixed with the administration’s need for money. The influence of physical phenotypes, blood or social classes varied depending on intensity and provenance of migrations, on the increasing consideration to the human body and on the evolution of colonial science. The talk looks at the evolution of the discourses of the difference in the Philippines as a mixing of self-perceptions and foreign influences, and compares it with that of other territories, especially Latin America.

El discurso oficial jesuita solia celebrar la predisposición favorable de las poblaciones filipinas a la conversión al cristianismo, desde los primeros momentos de la presencia de la Compañia en el archipiélago (1581). Nos parece interesante sin embargo reflexionar sobre las dificultades de la conversión según las dos obras pioneras del jesuita Pedro Chirino, Relación de las Islas Filipinas (Roma, 1604) e Historia de la Provincia de Filipinas (2000). A través de anécdotas edificantes, persistencia de ceremonias “idolátricas” y ritos de “sustitución,” trataremos de estudiar la interacción entre las poblaciones filipinas y los agentes de su transformación religiosa y cultural a comienzos del siglo XVII.

[Jesuit official writing used to emphasize the Filipino peoples’ willingness to convert to Christianity since the first moments of the Company’s presence in the archipelago (1581). Nonetheless, it seems interesting to us to examine the difficulties of conversion according to the two pioneering works of the Jesuit Pedro Chirino: Relación de las Islas Filipinas (Rome, 1604) and Historia de la Provincia de Filipinas (not published until 2000). Through edifying stories, persisting “idolatrous” ceremonies, and “substitution” rites, we will investigate the interaction between Philippine peoples and the agents of their religious and cultural transformation in the first decades of the seventeenth century.]

*To be presented in Spanish

Often associated with Holy Week crucifixions in Central Luzon or street protesters carrying holy images, Philippine Christianity has emerged and developed since the arrival of late medieval post-Reformation Spanish Christianity through a dynamic process better described as translation. This description focuses on “lived religion” as historically mediated social practice rather than on the European notion forged during Catholic-Protestant conflicts and later articulated as an integrated body of doctrinal beliefs, moral norms, and ritual practices. Hence it subverts commonly employed but analytically inadequate binary oppositions between the official and the “popular” as well as the colonial mission and the “pagan” native. Moreover, though inaugurated by romanizing native scripts and translating religious texts, this translation process goes beyond finding literal or functional equivalences between source and target languages. Contemporary translation studies consider it the dynamic mediation through language as a carrier of socially constructed meanings. Thus, Christian symbols and stories still weave through the fabric of contemporary life on evolving platforms of connectivity.

This paper aims to trace the process through which the pre-colonial religion in what are now the Visayas Islands was demonized and transformed during the Spanish colonial period. It asks the following questions: How was the pre-colonial religion of the Visayas represented and redefined by European missionaries as reflected in early to late Spanish period sources? How did the Bisayans respond to such representations and redefinitions? Utilizing sources such as Bisayan-Spanish dictionaries, Spanish chronicles, and ethnographic studies, among others, it argues that the early period of Christian evangelization and conversion involved both colonizer and colonized in attempts to define and eradicate idolatrous practices and beliefs. Nevertheless, Christianity as it developed in the Visayas continued (and continues) to exhibit elements of the ancient religion. The emergence of new religious terminologies, new gendered religious roles, and the reconfiguration of the destinations and roles of ancestor-spirits and indigenous deities, respectively, exemplify the hybridity of religious identity in this part of the Philippines despite over three centuries of Spanish colonial rule. These religious transformations reflect the Bisayans’ frequent engagement with a hazard-prone environment and their need to maintain small, close-knit communities for them to survive in such an environment.

This paper is an exploration of the contribution colonial Christian rationality has made to enrich the cosmology of the native culture. This enrichment provided the frame of imagination and discourse of “bayan,” which shaped the millenarian revolts, the Revolution of 1896, and even subsequent reform and liberation movements in the Philippines. Through an analysis of the babaylan cosmology and the evolution of the concept of bayan during the Spanish colonization, the author will show how the indigenous rationality was both imposed upon by the colonizing rationality and was able to creatively impose itself on the dominant rationality. The study will begin by articulating the native concept of a balanced cosmos where humans and spirits of nature are engaged in systems of mutual flourishing. It will then show how the imposition of the Pasyon cosmology enriched the babaylan cosmos by breaking heaven open for the ducha and showing how it was a realm of power into which the ducha could tap into for empowerment. The paper will argue that this democratization of Langit, which made it accessible to the ducha, allowed them to imagine a better world than the bayang sawi that they suffered from the Spanish and allowed for the millenarian revolts and Katipunan revolution.

A legacy of our encounter with Spain’s colonial Christianity is the schooling of Filipino Catholics in the habit of looking to and, often, deferring to the Church’s authority. During the colonial period, “church authority” was a conflation of at least two distinct expressions of that authority, namely, the church’s legitimate magisterial authority that discerns and safeguards what the authentic Gospel is, and the colonizer’s authority that used coercion and persuasion in the effort to Christianize. In today’s postcolonial milieu, the church’s exercise of authority to “keep the faith” may still bear traces of that conflation. This presentation explores two instances in which the church as a whole exercised that responsibility and power in ways that were legitimate and acceptable on the one hand; and more questionable on the other hand. These are the creation of the Catechism for Filipino Catholics (1997) and in the preaching during the feast of the Black Nazarene of Quiapo. In each case, the use and reception of various sources of authority are negotiated, and real challenges in the theory and practice of inculturation come to light.

In the light of the latest debate regarding knowledge production and imperial governance in the Spanish empire, this paper analyzes Francisco de Leandro de Viana’s text, “La Demostración del mísero estado de las islas Filipinas,” written in 1765 and two more documents.  The author of these texts was a high bureaucrat, the General Attorney of the Audiencia of Manila, Francisco Leandro de Viana. His work experience in the Philippines from 1759 to 1767 made him the main advisor for policy making regarding the archipelago at the Council of Indies during the 1790s. This set of bureaucratic works gave the key economic guidelines for the socioeconomic reforms implemented by the Spanish colonial government during the 1780s and 1790s in the Philippines. In this work, I argue that these set of documents, while belonging to an eighteenth-century genre of political and administrative textual practice called proyectismo, embodied to the eyes of a postcolonial historian a type of knowledge production, which could be comprised in the category of survey modality within Cohn’s list of forms of colonial knowledge. While, at the same time, because proyectismo was looking for generating useful ideas for resolving in the long run specific problems, there were documents that propelled the formation of institutions for producing colonial knowledge, as well.

It is well known that the Royal Company of the Philippines not only stemmed from the late eighteenth-century Bourbon reforms, but also gave rise to the formation of opium trading networks in Eastern Asia, a sector in which the employees of the Company in Calcutta and Canton engaged as a consequence of the end of the Galleon of Manila in 1815 and the boom of opium. It is less known, however, that the Company and the derived networks constituted communities that shared both material and immaterial goods, such as knowledges, beliefs, ideas, and their concomitant practices and materials (books, texts, instruments, etc.). This essay will address the historical process through which the employees and former employees of the Company, as such mainly versed in purchasing and selling Asian goods, as well as in the opium trade, were able to create a space of circulation of ideas linked to currents of economic liberalism. The issue has particular importance, since to date there are few studies on the prima facie similarities between the evolution of trading companies and liberalism. Liberal thought was constructed at points of these networks whose dynamics were more complex than the traditional centre-periphery model of Enlightenment’s diffusion led us to believe.

When the Philippine archipelago was attached to the Spanish Empire from 1565 to 1898, native food and drink were exposed to new foreign ingredients, cooking techniques and technologies, tastes and preparations, as well as terms and status indicators. While there were required foods and food ways prescribed by Roman Catholicism as it acquired converts, there were desired culinary attractions that made their way into Philippine culinary heritage. A trio of locally authored recipe books, the earliest published in Manila at the start of the twentieth century, suggests how European encounters had blended with the Philippines’ pre-colonial insular Asian food and eating traditions. La Cocina Filipina (1913), Kusinang Tagalog (1916), and Condimentos Indigenas (1918) are statements of culinary holdovers from the Spanish colonial era. The staying power of food introduced from abroad depends on whether it is liked or not by the host culture.