Publications

This article examines how the American colonial government in the Philippines implemented public health reforms as part of its so-called “civilizing mission” during the early 20th century. Dr. Planta explores the role of education, Filipino schoolchildren, and local medical professionals in advancing sanitation, hygiene, and nutrition—and how these efforts, while framed as preparation for independence, also exposed the inequities of colonial rule.

Highlighting the agency of Filipino health workers and the growing frustrations under American administration, this work offers important insights into the intersections of medicine and public health, governance, and the Filipino struggle for self-rule.

The extant work on Spain’s empire in Asia does not take distinctions between freedom and enslavement for granted. But while authors have recognized the existence of slaveries by other names, this chapter examines a case wherein Indigenous agents sought to narrowly call a slave a slave (an alipin an esclavo). At the seventeenth-century’s end, Indigenous elites from the island of Luzon (in today’s Philippine archipelago) argued for enslavement’s necessity in response to an imperial prohibition. They deployed fictional genealogies and murmurs of unrest to play up the crown’s anxieties at this westernmost reach of Spain’s India Occidental. Through overlaid guises of familial intimacy and colonial duty, they conflated ideas of race, religion, and enslavement for themselves and for their audiences. By the century’s end, colonial reducciones had disrupted settlement patterns key to local life cycles of dependence and autonomy, and Indigenous leaders now deployed violence, rather than benignity, to recover escapees. In opposition to the extant literature’s static understandings of the equivalence or inequivalence of the concept esclavo and the Indigenous concept alipin, this chapter examines the role that these Indigenous participants played in narrowing local asymmetrical dependencies into enslavement.

This study was the result of a grant funded by the UP Center for Integrative and Development Studies (CIDS) in 1996. Materials used for the red tide research included journal articles, technical papers, and media reports. Fieldwork was done in nine (9) coastal municipalities of Bataan and other coastal provinces of Manila Bay by conducting interviews and focused group discussions (FGDs) with fisherfolks, NGOs, scientists, and national and local government agency officials. This paper’s aims are four-fold: 1. Trace and narrate the events that transpired during the first occurrence of the red tide episode in Manila Bay. 2. Describe the reaction and response of the fisherfolk who were directly affected by the red tide ban, while the government and marine scientists were finding answers to the “new” hazard. 3. Narrate the scientists’ and government’s assessment and response to the 1988 Manila Bay red tide episode. 4. Discuss and analyze how the scientists, local government, and the public eventually bridged the disconnect in knowledge and the gap in communication during red tide outbreaks. The study concludes with recommendations on how best to reach and communicate to the public disaster terms couched in academic/scientific jargon and proposes steps on how to be inclusive in solving and mitigating disaster risk and response. Keywords: red tide, Bataan, Manila Bay, disasters, local knowledge/perception

This is about all we know of Melchora Aquino. I do not mean to trivialize her life; my point is, rather, the opposite. These bare facts raise questions yet unanswered, such as: What drove Melchora, at the age of 84, to participate in the revolution? How id she develop her political consciousness? Did she study? What explains her resoluteness?

I ask these questions because Melchora presents an intriguing case of an unusual woman, for we know of no others in their eighties who also risked their lives for the cause of freedom.How can a woman so rare occupy such a miniscule space in our historic past?

The early 20th century saw a significant shift in the lives of Filipino women. The transition from Spanish to American colonial rule altered women's social and political roles, providing them with better opportunities. Suffragist and historian Encarnacion Alzona (1934) attributed this to the American regime's educational policy, which resulted in women's "complete emancipation, political and civil." Certainly, American colonial policy provided women with a voice in the public sphere, as well as opportunities to lead, particularly in education and civic work (Roces, 2001). But while there were significant changes in women's rights during this period, patriarchal values persisted, posing a challenge to women, particularly in their fight for suffrage.

The struggle for women’s suffrage was one of the most crucial battles that women faced in the early 20th century. Women gradually made their way into politics, despite opposition from various conservative groups. They began by expanding their roles as mothers through community service. They established socio-civic groups, which made a significant impact on their struggle for political engagement.

This paper attempts to highlight the contribution of women’s organizations in the quest for women’s suffrage which will be granted to Filipino women by 1937. Transitioning from the Spanish colonial tradition that confined women at home and church, the 20th century created a more liberal atmosphere that allowed them to extend their important roles in the public and political spheres. Initiated by influential women with family and social connections, this study examines the political involvement of women, which began with their socio-civic activities and culminated with the granting of women suffrage in 1937.

While women have largely remained marginalized in Philippine history, an increasing number of works in recent decades have underscored their roles in the “public sphere”, participating in broad historical processes such as the Philippine Revolution, the women’s suffrage movement in the 1930s, and the Second World War, to name a few. Despite the generally accepted views that women were made for motherhood by virtue of their biology, their role as a mother in the more “private sphere” such as the home, has eluded examination and remain unexplored.

In this paper, I interrogate the concept of motherhood as it is presented and constructed in early twentieth century Philippine magazines such as the Revista Filipina and The Philippine Magazine. Through the representations of motherhood found in these magazines, I analyze societal expectations and norms imposed on women and explore how the Filipino woman in the early twentieth century stood at the brink of emerging contestations between traditional perspectives of domesticity and liberal views of modernity. 

This chapter explores the illegal immigration of Chinese in southern Philippines from 1850 to 1898. During the second half of the nineteenth century, the Spanish colonial government in the Philippines implemented policies aimed at controlling illegal Chinese immigration in the southern part of the colony. Although most Philippine Chinese would disembark at the port of the colonial capital of Manila, authorities were aware of the unregulated movement of the Chinese in Mindanao and Sulu that posed a threat to the colony’s political, military and economic stability. Chinese immigrants from Singapore, Labuan, Sandakan and other islands in the region provided commodity goods, arms and ammunition to local inhabitants and leaders such as the Sulu Sultan. Set against colonial conditions, this chapter examines the way that transnational networks in maritime Southeast Asia played a role in this illicit movement of people. Utilising Philippine and Spanish archives, it describes and analyses actors, institutions and processes operating in the Philippines and elsewhere that made this scheme possible, and from the state’s view, challenging to manage. This chapter contributes to an understanding of the creative ways of Chinese immigrants’ evasion of state regulations to engage freely in local and transnational activities.

In this consulta, the jurist Juan de Paz OP responds to a combination of queries from Luzon’s southernmost coast dated 1663, that is, within the first century of colonial rule in the Philippine archipelago. In one query, a missionary consults Paz about one provincial governor’s request that the priest commit fraud in his count of his parish’s tributary population. In a second query, a missionary accidentally mixed-up the ritual oils he applied and wonders whether he should redo a sacrament. Although seemingly disparate, in both cases Paz and his priestly correspondents candidly reflect on the fragility of their representations of less-than-self-evident truths to colonial audiences, adopting a tone in contrast with the adamance of their opinions better-known in the historiography. In this essay, the opacity with which early missionaries managed their articulations in oil and ink in the face of their less-than-credulous indigenous parishioners helps the reader problematize both our present engagement with colonial archives for information about the past as well as our own scholarly abstractions about the past-as-lived by our subjects into a history-as-valued by present audiences.

The death of a person and its consequences provide an opening to the social and cultural life of the society where that person belonged. In Spanish-era Philippines questions about the dead’s will and the legacies they leave behind give a glimpse about their networks, relationships, and beliefs in colonial society. This chapter is based on three documents that deal with Juan de Paz’s responses to consultations about distant relatives’ entitlement to inheritance, a dead woman’s slave, and the payment of debt to a dead creditor’s compulsory heirs. Though diverse, these consultations all revolve around the legacy of the dead and the ties they had made in their lifetime. The questions examine how the death of different persons impacts those ties. This chapter will discuss the context of these documents in seventeenth-century Philippines for a better understanding of the questions raised in the consultations. In particular, the essay will give a background on slavery in the Philippines, women’s property, and the Catholic custom of offering masses for the dead.

This paper explores the challenges faced by Spanish consuls in Singapore and Hong Kong as they navigated diplomatic and jurisdictional complexities within British colonial rule in the nineteenth century. Tasked with representing Spanish interests beyond the Philippines, consuls encountered difficulties in asserting authority over Spanish subjects due to extraterritorial limitations and conflicting legal frameworks. Through three case studies from 1864 to 1876, this study examines disputes over Spanish jurisdiction, diplomatic complaints, and efforts to reclaim deserters, highlighting the legal and geopolitical tensions involved. By analyzing archival records and diplomatic correspondences, the paper sheds light on the broader dynamics of colonial governance and Spain’s strategic maneuvers in Southeast Asia. Ultimately, it underscores the intricate interplay between consular authority, imperial expansion, and jurisdictional contestation in a rapidly shifting colonial landscape.