Publications

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.

This chapter examines the ways in which nature has been conceptualized to define nationhood and citizenship. It builds upon the earlier works on colonial science during the US-occupied Philippines by underscoring the role of nature education in cultivating scientific thinking, citizenship, and nationhood. Inquiring into state instrumentalities such as public education, the paper illustrated how the promotion of scientific understanding of the “Filipino” environment reflected the colonial agenda for cultural reorientation and national imagination. I argue that the “scientific” conceptualization of Philippine natures along notions of nationhood provided the fundamentals of environmentalism.

This study aims to contribute to the growing literature on the importance of non-European actors as prime movers in the early global trade. For this purpose, it locates the Philippines in the intercontinental exchange and reexamines its role, which has been confined to serving as a way-station for Asian and American goods (Schurz 1939). The chapter is organized into three sections. The first part discusses the value of Philippine products as tribute and trade goods and the mechanisms used for their production and circulation. The second part analyzes the flow of the Philippine trade goods in the Pacific leg of the sixteenth-century global trade. Finally, it utilizes archival data and contemporary colonial reports to understand better the Philippine commercial relationship with other “peripheries,” that is, American colonies.

 This paper explores the lives and circumstances of “undesirable” and “proletariat” Chinese in the nineteenth century Philippines set against the broader political, economic and social transitions and transformations in the colony at the time. It highlights the restrictive policies imposed by the Spanish administration upon the Chinese and the developments within the Chinese community that made such measures necessary. Using previously unutilized source materials from the National Archives of the Philippines (NAP) in Manila, it examines the factors that contributed to the “emergence” of these downtrodden individuals. It demonstrates that although the state treated them as undesirable and dangerous, these social outcasts viewed their daily activities as necessary strategies for survival. A collective biography of these “people without history,” provides another facet of the Chinese community in Spanish colonial Philippines.

One of the consequences of the Carrera del Pacífico (more popularly known as the Manila-Acapulco galleon trade) was the influx of global products in Spanish America and the Asia Pacific, which affected the daily consumption of their broader population. As a contribution to the growing scholarship on the topic, it will also be noteworthy to analyze the workers who transported these trade goods, circulated with them, and brought them to their destination areas. The present study will utilize the microhistorical approach to examine the sailors of the Carrera in the sixteenth century, particularly the case of Baltazar Hernandez. He was a Carrera sailor who died aboard San Martin, a Mexican-bound ship. By surveying the goods that he left when he died as well as those of the other sailors, the research aims to reconstruct their everyday and global lives during the early modern period: their trade and consumer goods, things of enjoyment, working instruments, food, drink, and other objects.

In his historically celebrated essay Filipinas dentro de cien años (1889), Jose Rizal emphasized the essential importance of studying history in charting a society’s future: “In order to read the future destiny of a people, it is necessary to open the book that tells of her past.”2 Indeed, Rizal was a historian of his time; a dedicated scholar and a conscious thinker, particularly of the importance of his role as a learned individual who involuntarily received yet embraced fully the task of pursuing the production of knowledge toward political reforms and social enlightenment. This paper aims to provide a historical survey of Rizal’s endeavors as a historian. I argue that Rizal’s training as a historian was a by-product of his engagements in the emerging scientific fields in Europe, as history and science both deal with the critical and comprehensive search for empirical knowledge. In particular, this work: (1) revisits Rizal’s thoughts on history and his initiatives in historical research; (2) assesses some of Rizal’s writings on Philippine History, and (3) analyzes how those ideas, initiatives, and writings were vital in the Propaganda Movement’s vision of social and political reforms, and in general, in the quest for a national narrative grounded on the point-of-view of the Filipinos. As an approach, this paper uses C. Wright Mills’ dictum of sociological imagination,3 wherein the critical cognizance of both the life of an individual and history of the society is vital in understanding one another. Rizal’s life, particularly his knowledge-seeking activities, is corroborated by his initiatives related to historical research. Moreover, Rizal’s works and ideas on history are contextualized with the prevailing social and intellectual climate of his time, specifically in Europe, to understand the contemporaneity4 of his legacies as a historian.

Addressing police and military men in his home city of Davao, President Rodrigo Duterte railed against the “firewall … that is the Bill of Rights—due process, right to be heard, lawyer during an investigation, and all of these things. And that is why we can hardly cope up [with drug lords and terrorists]” (Duterte, 2018c). To this “firewall” can be added the International Criminal Court (ICC), which announced early in 2018 that it was conducting a preliminary examination of conditions in the Philippines (International Criminal Court 2018a). Viewed as politically colored, the ICC quickly became the object of presidential ire, starting with Duterte’s instruction to the police not to cooperate with ICC investigators and culminating in his formal withdrawal from the organization on March 17, 2018 (Duterte, 2018d). The “firewall” metaphor not only aptly reflects Duterte’s attitude toward human rights and the rule of law but also hints at the deployment of populism as a political strategy to surmount the wall while remaining a popular leader” “(based on Social Weather Stations, 2017). A populist strategy sits comfortably with traditional Philippine politics, as both owe their popular appeal to promises of an earthly paradise in a land where the incidence of poverty is at 21.6% (as of 2015, Philippine Statistics Authority, 2017). In this chapter, I will demonstrate how populist and traditional political party politics have combined to exert a negative impact on human rights and democratic institutions in the Philippines.

In 1866, a new colonial institution was created to administer the construction of public works in the Philippines. This institution, composed of engineers and technological experts, was called the Inspección General de Obras Públicas de Filipinas (IGOP). Through the IGOP, these colonial engineers were tasked to undertake the study, execution, and supervision of the networks of public works in the Philippines such as roads, bridges, railroads, tranvias, ports, lighthouses, sewage system, street lighting, drinking water system, etc.

The paper tackles how the engineers of the IGOP were instrumental in the last attempts of Spain to bring in the forces of modernization to the colony in the second half of the 19th century. It also explores the role played by the IGOP and its engineers in the beginnings of the institutionalization of civil engineering in the archipelago.