Publications

This study examines the role of Spanish consulates in Singapore and Hong Kong during the 19th century, highlighting their function as agents of interaction within a context of growing interconnection in Southeast Asia. Through the analysis of archival documents from the Archivo Histórico Nacional in Madrid, the research seeks to answer several key questions: When, how, and why were Spanish consulates established in Singapore and Hong Kong? How were these consulates connected to the Philippines, Spain’s closest colony in the region? Who were the consuls, vice-consuls, and agents appointed to these British-controlled territories? What were their main activities, concerns, and the issues addressed in their reports and correspondence? Additionally, the study examines the relationship between these consulates and the authorities in Manila and Madrid, revealing tensions between the perspectives of consuls on the ground and the decisions made by the central administration.

This paper seeks to examine notions of indigenous land ownership through notarial records of land sales and claims in the Philippines in the 16th and 17th centuries. These records include the procedure by which natives proved the ownership of lands they were selling and their reasons for the sale. Before land could be sold or alienated, a probe on ownership was done to ensure that the rightful owners were making the sale or the land being claimed was not owned by anybody. In the absence of land titles, witnesses, other natives from the same town or neighboring areas, were invited to provide their testimony about the owner of the land and how it was used. Ideas of land use and ownership that the natives practiced presumably before the advent of colonialism can be drawn from these records. The paper will give tentative conclusions about land ownership by native Tagalogs in the early colonial era in the process of transitioning into a colonial society.

By focusing on food, the present study explores the connection between a Pacific sailor’s body, intercontinental exchanges, and the Spanish empire’s mechanisms of control in the seventeenth century. The first part discusses how food as tribute, gift, or commodity facilitated trade and exchanges among the Philippines, New Spain, and Spain. Further, it tackles the transformation of the sailors’ bodies as they traveled from one location to another, as the food became abundant, rotten, or scarce. The last part examines how food functioned as the Spanish empire’s instrument of inclusion or exclusion of its royal workers. For the sources, it used two seventeenth-century travel accounts specifically focused on the Manila- Acapulco journey: one by the famous Italian traveler Gemelli Carreri and the other by a Manila creole named Diego Lopez, who served as a page at the young age of fourteen. It also consulted archival documents from Archivo General de la Nación de México (AGNM), especially the bundle titled Archivo Histórico de Hacienda (AHH), which contained information regarding efectos y víveres (stocks and provisions) loaded to the ships. Lastly, it utilized inquisitorial records of foreign sailors accused of heresy.

This paper explores the important roles of the cabecilla principal de sangleyes (also called capitan chino)—the highest leader of the Chinese community in Manila—in the recruitment, transportation, and employment of Chinese immi- grants in the Philippines during the late eighteenth century. Using the experi- ences of cabecillas principales Nicolas Quito and Bartolome Pitco and framed within the political and socio-economic milieus of the period, it describes and analyzes (1) the need for the Spanish colonial government to use these Chinese

community leaders in bringing new immigrants into the colony; (2) the factors that made them the most suitable “immigration agents”; and, (3) the benefits that they and the colonial state obtained from such conscription and migration arrangements. Comparisons are made between these two cases, especially as Quito spearheaded the migration process while the Chinese immigration ban was still in effect. In contrast, Pitco did it when the Chinese were again allowed to return to the islands. This paper aims to contribute to a better understanding of the Chinese community and its leaders, colonial administration and various aspects of Philippines-China relations during the early colonial period.

This study is a historical and historiographical evaluation of select eighteenth-century Philippine geological disasters: the 12 January 1743 Tayabas and Laguna de Bay earthquake and the 02 June-12 December 1754 Taal Volcano eruption. Using archival chronicles and historical studies, it analyzes how these two geological phenomena can be contextualized in the larger world of the eighteenth century. It also argues that the meanings emanating from these disasters and their interpretations constitute the complexities of historical studies on calamities and catastrophes. Finally, it attempts to present an exploratory comparison with their contemporary geological disasters: the 01 November 1755 Lisbon earthquake in Portugal and the 29 July 1773 Antigua Guatemala/Santa Marta earthquake in Guatemala. Albeit proportionate in terms of sheer strength and gravity of destruction to human communities, the Philippine disasters seem remote not only because of the archipelago’s geographic location in reference to the center of the Spanish empire but also of the way they are mounted as historical disasters – they are paramount yet frontier – colossal yet they occurred in the fringes.

Isinalaysay ng kabanatang ito ang pagsibol ng interes at pagpapanday ng kasanayan ni Rene O. Villanueva sa pagsulat ng panitikang pambata mula 1977 hanggang 1986. Maliban sa personal na buhay at pagkatha ni Rene, ipinopook din ng pag-aaral na ito ang mga pangyayari sa mas malawak na kaligirang pangkasaysayan-- ang diskurso ng pagkabata at pagkabansa, ang pulitika ng wika at malikhaing produksyon, at ang pag-akda sa panahon ng diktadura.

The Czech community in the Philippines just prior to World War II was a small but intimate group. There were but a handful of old-timers, mostly businessmen and their families. Most recent arrivals of Czech Jews, refugees from Hitler's forcible occupation of Czechoslovakia. At least one had arrived from China, a refugee from the Sino-Japanese conflict. The group were employees of the Bat'a Shoe Company, working in the head office, retail outlets or the shoe factory, all in Manila. It was relatively young community, with most in their thirties or younger.

Manila at that time was a vibrant, cosmopolitan city full of promise. The Philippine Commonwealth government had been inaugurated in 1935, and prospects for a mutually beneficial relationship between the Philippines and Czechoslovakia were bright.

In 2013, the Philippine government officially recognized that the regime of Ferdinand Marcos Sr. perpetrated human rights violations between 1972 and 1986. With the passage of Republic Act (RA) No. 10368, the state established a Human Rights Victims’ Claims Board (HRVCB) to identify and provide monetary reparations to victims of human rights violations from the period. Despite this, however, former senator and Marcos’s defense minister Juan Ponce Enrile insisted that no person was massacred under the same administration. Articles from multiple news outlets countered Enrile’s statement by citing the 1974 Malisbong Massacre.3 The incident, frequently invoked by representatives of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF)4 and acknowledged by the Commission on Human Rights (CHR) in 2014,5 is said to have caused the deaths of around 1,500 Muslim men.6 Now, another Ferdinand Marcos has become president on the basis of his father’s legacy—one who has yet to address the Marcos regime’s accountability for corruption and human rights violations. In contemplating this, I ask: how does a nation build a comprehensive truth that reckons with its past and truly reconcile with it? I therefore attempted an inquiry into the Malisbong Massacre, now also known as the Palimbang Massacre, which was formally recognized by a joint resolution of the CHR and the Municipality of Palimbang in 2019.7 With data from the HRVCB slowly being made public, new research possibilities on martial law history appear. The timing is all the more important with the ongoing transition process of the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (BARMM).8 Greater attention to this part of Philippine history ought to aid in the reconciliation of the land’s tenuous past, and enlighten readers on questions of documenting and memorializing mass killings.

 This article will narrate the key events that shaped the life of May Rodriguez during the martial law period. It will first tackle her years in the University of the Philippines (UP) where she was integrated into the student movement. It will then discuss the events that led to her first arrest, torture under the hands of the military, and eventual release from detention. The article will also recount May’s return to the underground movement and second arrest. Aside from May’s personal accounts of torture and incarceration, a short discussion will be dedicated to the collective efforts of the political prisoners at Camp Olivas in seeking accountability from the government. Particularly, the case of Fr. Edicio dela Torre et al. remains a perfect example of well-documented and highly publicized torture accounts. Exploring it could shed light on how the authorities responded to the glaring human rights violations committed by individuals within their ranks. This article will then conclude that though martial law used torture to break its victims— physically and psychologically—May and her fellow martial law veterans remained resolute and continued the struggle against the dictatorship.

 The aftermath of the 2022 presidential elections may have revealed an inconvenient truth—that a large segment of the population has no memory of martial law from 1972 to 1986, let alone the disastrous record of dictatorial rule and its ill effects on the nation. The national community now faces the challenge of summoning or, perhaps, developing a collective memory of what many historians generally regard as a “dark period” in Philippine history. This was never more pronounced than in the 2022 electoral campaign, which ultimately saw the election of the son of Ferdinand E. Marcos, who declared martial law in 1972 and established a dictatorship that ruled the country for fourteen years, subverting democratic institutions until the dictator was ousted by a People Power uprising in 1986. The ouster was actually the end result of chronic discontent over a deep social and economic crisis and mounting, irreversible, resistance to the regime’s repressive policies that peaked in the mid-’80s.

Fifty years hence, or two generations after, democratic forces opposed to another Marcos rule were stumped in disbelief that the electorate had returned to power the Marcos political estate. But a review of the voters’ demographic profile could reveal that such outcome was perhaps to be expected, a factor on the social landscape that might have been missed in post-electoral analyses. As a matter of fact, months before election day, reality on the ground appeared to be telling a different story to the liberal groups, which expected that the electorate would see through the Marcos tales of a golden past massively churned out in social media, believing, or hoping, that a collective memory of the Marcos record existed. But poll surveys, dismissed by the liberal crowd, quite amazingly affirmed the unmistakable trend in the streets.