This month Filipinos mark the 113th anniversary of Philippine Independence from Spain.
It is important to emphasize that freedom gained was won from Spain. It was this victory that Americans snatched away from Filipinos in connivance with Spain who said that it could not surrender to an inferior race and instead gave the country, lock stock and barrel, to America for twenty million dollars.
All in all it was the confluence of the Filipinos collective struggle and aspirations that led the country to become sovereign. It is not the intent here to point out who led a victorious people as debates continue as to which event really must be considered the beginning of a sovereignty.
One thing is sure from the start, there was a people who wanted to be free.
With the US of A’s “talk softly, carry a big stick” foreign policy it saw it its divine right to subjugate inferior races such as the Pacific Negroes as Theodore Roosevelt called the Filipinos then. It is the same Machiavellian chicanery that fooled General Emilio Aguinaldo into believing that the Americans were the antithesis of Spain. Sweet talk, big stick succeeded.
So from close to four hundred years of Spanish sense of religiosity to the fifty years of American rule that razzled and dazzled, Filipinos became torn between what Pulitzer winner Stanley Karnow called three hundred years in a Convent and fifty years in Hollywood. No wonder that Filipinos up to this date are in a confused state. The collective moral fabric is torn between religious beliefs of the dark ages to the razzmatazz foofaraw of 21st century Hollywood.
With his lackey William Howard Taft, to whom one of the longest streets of Manila is named after, Roosevelt succeeded in convincing the American public and the world that Filipinos are a stupid race, incapable of self-governance. As part of what was euphemistically called ‘benevolent assimilation’ little brown brothers were led out from caves and off trees to live the civilized modern American way.
In the St. Louis World’s Fair of 1904, President Theodore Roosevelt, ordered the largest part of the fairgrounds devoted for his Philippine reservation. According to a book by James Bradley, “Roosevelt had his minions search the wild of the Philippines and ship twelve hundred Filipinos to St. Louis, where he presented them as creatures closer to monkeys than human beings. The Filipinos had no input into how their country was represented.”
Bradley’s book, Imperial Cruise, says that “The official brochure of the Philippine reservation made the benevolent assimilation process clear. The cover featured a scary looking savage in a bird-feather headdress. The back cover featured the end result of American uplift: a close-shaven Filipino standing ramrod-straight, dressed in his U.S. Army – supplied uniform.”
“As a keepsake souvenir to take home to the kids, fairgoers could purchase an “Album of Philippine Types.” Each Filipino type was represented by two photographs that looked like mug shots, which they were – Roosevelt’s scientists had searched Bilibid Prison in Manila to find “typical” Pacific Negroes. Fairgoers viewed more than one thousand photographs depicting a Philippines populated by robbers, murderers, and rapists.”
It is important that as we celebrate our Motherland’s Independence, we reflect on this vignette of our history. Our past defines what we are today, while both past and present help us become what we will be in the future.
History tells us that it was not only Spain and the Americans that were lured to the pristine beauty of our shores nestled in the tranquility of the blue seas. Peaceful and serene but when stepped on by invaders became hornets’ nests with lethal stings. Such is the Indio or maybe was.
It is ironic that a country which was ones a magnet to many foreign expansionist aims, economic or political, has become a country of people who are magnetized by the lure of other countries. The desire to leave ones homeland is not a natural inclination for who would really want to be uprooted from where they are planted?
Today mostly for economic reasons it would be safe to say that seven out ten Filipinos dream of leaving the Philippines for better economic opportunities overseas. It is so because the country does not cultivate a sense of equity and equality among its citizens.
While the Philippines is an independent country today, its people are still chained to poverty exacerbated by corruption that continues to erode the country’s moral and social fabric which vestiges of the so-called “Convent and Hollywood” continue to perpetuate.
Having said this, it is difficult to say to a kababayan, “happy independence day” with a straight face.
