Publications

The Pugutan (‘beheading’) is a theatrical reenactment of the life of Longhino (Saint Longinus), the Roman soldier who pierced the side of Jesus Christ during the crucifixion and, as a tomb guard, witnessed Christ’s resurrection. In the Philippines, the saint’s life story is derived mainly from the pasyon text, a popular source of Christian narratives written in the local vernacular. The Pugutan play is a part of the Lenten rite-festival known as Moriones (or Moryonan) in the island province of Marinduque in Southern Luzon, Philippines.

This paper focuses on the two Pugutan scripts which were staged in 2006 and 2007 in Gasan, Marinduque. The author of these scripts is Marjun Sosa Moreno, then a high school teacher in Bognuyan, Gasan, Marinduque. Dissatisfied with the function-oriented, fictive plot in the standard Pugutan play, Moreno tried to portray the Longhino story as close as possible to what is historically true. Thus, his scripts for the 2006 and 2007 Pugutan, both titled “Ang Landas Tungo sa Katotohanan” (The Way to Truth), can be considered as an interpretation of history through theater. However, in parts where the historical events remain unclear, Moreno employed his imaginative understanding to approximate the past. Moreno’s use of historical interpretation and imagination is apparent in his treatment of the characters Longhino, Hudas, Barabas, Pilato, Claudia, and Magdalena. Although his interpretative choices are not entirely faultless, the value of Moreno’s techniques rests on their ability to maximize the passion story’s rhetorical power while asserting what he deemed historical.

Discussions of the 1945 postwar restoration of the Philippine Congress often mention an American-sequestered Japanese school on Lepanto Street (now Sergio H. Loyola Street), Sampaloc, Manila. This building witnessed the country’s transition from a commonwealth to a republic in 1946 and the passage of significant laws before the Congress returned to the rehabilitated war-devastated Legislative Building in 1949. Despite its importance, the edifice is neither marked as a historic site nor featured in Manila’s local tourism materials. The historic structure was demolished around 2006. This paper argues that the site and structure’s post-Congressional utilization and its representation in various primary and secondary accounts contributed to its obscurity. However, reconstructing its history reveals details that might help illuminate Japan’s prewar dynamics with the Philippines and explain why the U.S. sequestered it.

Although the history of sport has migrated from the margins of scholarly attention to the mainstream of historical research, many gaps in knowledge remain in the 21st century, especially in the global south. This paper argues for more research to be conducted on the history of sports in the Philippines, given the unique insights it can provide on the development of social, economic, political, and cultural forces. First, it traces the historiographic trends in sports history around the globe to provide a conceptual and methodological backdrop for future research. Asia in general—and the Philippines in particular—is identified as possessing extensive histories of both traditional and modern sports that can contribute to the local and international discourse in the field. While regional patterns are highlighted, the existing literature on Philippine sports is also surveyed to reveal the niches historians can fill. Second, it surveys the rich variety of sources available to historians wishing to study sports in the Philippines. Sports, by their nature, leave behind many material artifacts, oral accounts, and extensive media coverage that can help supplement typical documentary sources a scholar might use, especially those wishing to investigate the histories of marginalized communities. By laying out the possibilities for further research in the field, the paper hopes to entice other scholars to pursue similar projects, or perhaps consider sports policies, trends, and/or events in their future work on Philippine history.

The aim of this research is to analyze the practice of narrative molding through a textual overview of selected media pieces circulated by the Marcos Administration—particularly concerning the lifting of the state of Martial Law on January 17, 1981. Given the significance placed by the Marcos Regime on media projection, I argue that the occasion of removing Martial Law on paper was instead used as its advertisement and enshrinement. Marcosian rhetoric would seek to touch upon both public and partisan realms, pitching Marcos leadership as both saving the nation against a perceived enemy, and as an agent of positive human development. Such frameworks thus necessarily situate the “New Society” in the same association as the “good” of Marcos.

During the Martial Law period (1972-1986), the Philippines was on the receiving end of aid provided by Australian aid among other international financial institutions aimed to alleviate poverty and foster development in the Third World. Existing scholarship on Australian and Philippine relations during this period largely revolve around the latter’s strategic location for regional trade and the presence of United States (US) military bases. This study aims to look at the impact of Australian aid concerning the human rights situation in the Philippines during Martial Law. In the spirit of international cooperation and regional stability, Australia funded humanitarian projects such as integrated rural development projects in Zamboanga del Sur and Northern Samar. This study takes off from Walden Bello’s work, “Development Debacle: The World Bank in the Philippines” that discusses disasters brought about by foreign aid. It first gives a general overview of the Australian-Philippine aid during the period and some of the projects that were funded as a result. It then focuses on how Australian aid impacted the militarization of the countryside and the repression of human rights in the Philippines, drawing on specific incidents such as the Sag-od Massacre of Northern Samar, and the trial of Australian priest Fr. Brian Gore.

Baguio is typically understood as a potent, tangible manifestation of the Americans’ supposed mastery over nature in the Philippines. This view, however, relegates the natural environment to the background as a passive, docile entity. While it is true that the Americans introduced significant changes to Baguio’s environs, it is also equally important to emphasize that the natural environment was equally dynamic and influential during Baguio’s colonial incipience. An often-overlooked aspect of Baguio’s environmental history is the city’s vulnerability to natural hazards, particularly rain and the epiphenomenal hazards associated with rain such as river torrents and landslides. When Americans traveled to Baguio during its early years as a colonial hill station, they wrote generously of their experiences while making the upland journey. Baguio’s highland environment, including its vulnerability to rain and its associated hazards, takes center stage in American travel accounts. Through a critical scrutiny of these accounts, this paper will show that rains, whether brought about by monsoonal thunderstorms or typhoons, constantly interrupted American mobility to Baguio, thus belying American exceptionalist claims of completely conquering the Luzon Cordillera.

In this paper, I interrogate the experience of grief amongst Filipino propagandists in the nineteenth century by analyzing theirmain propaganda organ,the bimonthly periodical La Solidaridad. I show that the obituaries published in the periodical served as a space for the propagandists to memorialize the dead and to idealize individuals whose lives were devoted to the development of progress and public
service for the Filipinos. However, more than an idealized account of individual lives, I also argue that the obituaries served as an alternative space for the propagandists to navigate their feelings of grief while living away from their homeland, the Philippines. These notices provided them the means to finalize the experience of loss, to reaffirm religious beliefs, and to share memories of their loved ones. In the end, the propagandists’ geographical separation from the Philippines made traditional expressions of grief impossible and created an overall emotional experience unique only to the Filipino propagandists of the nineteenth century.

The Marcos dictatorship has long been an object of discussion both in the halls of the Philippines’ premier universities and in public spaces. Among the topics that have been a crucial subject of inquiry are the human rights abuses during the Martial Law years. However, while there has been substantial research on the abuses of the Marcos regime, some aspects beg further inquiry. In particular, there are still relatively few studies that try to understand the massacres during the period.

Given this context, this paper looks into the Sag-od Massacre in Northern Samar. Utilizing reports from major newspapers, human rights organizations, and first-hand accounts, this study aims to reconstruct the events of the Sag-od Massacre and contextualize it within the broader framework of Marcos’s repressive regime. Through historical inquiry, it examines the identities of the victims and perpetrators, the manner of death of the victims, and the motivations behind the massacre. Ultimately, this research seeks to contribute to Martial Law historiography by foregrounding the narratives of the massacre victims.

When a regime is perceived to be in crisis, speculation about its end begins to circulate. In the Philippines under Ferdinand Marcos, the early 1980s marked a period when signals of decline intensified, prompting key actors, from foreign intelligence officials to academics and opposition leaders, to project competing futures for the country. This paper analyzes these speculative discourses not as straightforward diagnoses but as strategic interventions shaped by political position, ideological commitment, and historical memory. The scenarios envisioned—ranging from communist takeover to transitional authoritarianism to democratic restoration—reveal how crisis reconfigures the boundaries of political possibility. These discourses offer insight into how authoritarian collapse becomes legible not only through institutional change, but through the ways people in the past imagined, and attempted to shape, what came next.

This article examines the factors that explain the present status of the Philippines as one of the two remaining countries, alongside Vatican City State, where absolute divorce (marriage is dissolved; can remarry) is not legally recognized. After gaining independence, the Code Commission (1947) was formed to create a new Civil Code of the Philippines, intended to reform civil law, align it with the nation’s emerging identity, and depart from colonial legal legacies. Absolute divorce was removed from the original draft of the Civil Code during its deliberation in the First Congress in 1949. The Civil Code was enacted as Rep. Act 386 on June 18, 1949, which took effect in 1950. Unknown to many, however, the Philippines had two absolute divorce statutes: Act No. 2710 (1917) during the U.S. colonial regime and Exec. Order No. 141 (1943) under the Japanese occupation. Through examining a range of archival materials from congressional records to print media sources, this article demonstrates that Filipino lawmakers held complex and diverse opinions on absolute divorce, yet their arguments were commonly framed in terms of Catholic morality and preserving domestic happiness in Filipino families. It also argues that high divorce incidences (both during the Japanese period and in global divorce trends), election politics (1949 Philippine general elections), alongside the opposition coming from the Catholic church and Filipino women, served as decisive factors to abrogate absolute divorce. Instead, Congress institutionalized legal separation (marriage is not dissolved; cannot remarry)—a framework of marital separation that has endured from 1950 to the present.