Chair: Oscar V. Campomanes, University of California, San Diego

In Filipinos and Their Revolution: Event, Discourse, and Historiography (1998), Reynaldo C. Ileto celebrates the fact that the popular enthusiasm for the celebration of the centennial of the declaration of Philippine independence in 1898 allows history, however briefly, to take center stage in public discourse. At the same time, centennial commemorations reveal a great deal about the millennial visions (and blind spots) of the individuals and institutions conducting them. This is especially true since that happy independence day was followed by the long (1899–1913) and bloody Philippine-American War. This panel considers a few of these visions with an eye toward understanding their implications for the present, if not for the next hundred years.

The first paper, by John D. Blanco, confronts "Centennial as Failure," by examining the existentialism of Filipino revolutionary Apolinario Mabini’s reflections in 1903 on the Philippine-American War. He parallels these with the reflections of Spanish historians in 1998 commemorating their defeat in the Spanish American War. In the second paper, Barbara S. Gaerlan analyzes the symbolism of "Language and Nationalism" in the Centennial commemorations at the University of the Philippines. Finally, Marcelo Estrada evaluates the way in which Philippine President Joseph Estrada has positioned himself to complete "the Unfinished Revolution" of Andres Bonifacio.

John D. Blanco, University of California, Berkeley

In 1903, while exiled by the Americans to Guam and shortly before his death, the revolutionary intellectual Apolinario Mabini wrote La Revolucion Filipina (The Philippine Revolution). The period covered was not, as would most likely be the case today, limited to the Philippine Revolution against Spain of 1896–1898. Rather, it dealt extensively with what today is called the Philippine-American War, fought between the Filipinos and the newly-arrived United States. Mabini considered this second chapter in the armed conflict to be the true "Philippine Revolution." He was intensely concerned with the way in which this war would be remembered, especially since, by 1903, it had essentially ended in defeat for the Filipino forces. He was most anxious to emphasize the importance of the fact that the Filipinos who fought this war knew that their chances of military victory were slim at best. And yet they fought anyway.

Mabini’s memorial was echoed in Spain in 1998 when the centennial of the Spanish loss of Cuba, Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines in the Spanish-American War was commemorated. Like Mabini, many Spanish historians dealt with issues of "Centennial as Failure." Others chose to displace it or to transpose it onto earlier or later crises such as the Latin American wars of independence or the Spanish Civil War. However, Mabini’s notion of an "inner revolution"—related to existentialism at the turn of the century—was among the most profound.

Barbara S. Gaerlan, Institute of Filipino Studies

As early as 1994 officials of the University of the Philippines (U.P.) began to cite the Centennial of the Philippine Revolution in their discussion of language use. Most remarkably, they traced the founding of the University not to the American colonialists who had chartered the University in 1908, but to the Universidad Literaria Cientifica de Filipinas (Literary and Scientific University of the Philippines)—a project of the revolutionary Malolos government which had existed for one year in 1898–99. Some of the commemorative speeches included paragraphs in beautiful Tagalog-based Filipino and implied that Filipino, the language of nationalism at the time of the Centennial, had been the language of discourse of the Universidad, as well. The language of the Universidad, however, had been Spanish, the former colonial language, and the language of the University of the Philippines had, from its inception, been English.

The discourse surrounding the Centennial of the Revolution at U.P. presented a vision of Filipino as the language of nationalism and English as the language of modernity in ways that were not reflective of the actual history of language use in the University. This paper discusses some of that history in light of the visions projected by the Centennial commemorations.

Marcelo Estrada, Lacanian School of Psychoanalysis

When incoming Philippine President Joseph Estrada spoke at the large centennial celebration of Philippine independence on June 12, 1998, he compared himself to the revolutionary Andres Bonifacio. Likewise, he compared his political platform to Bonifacio’s "unfinished revolution" of 1896. As historian Reynaldo Ileto has pointed out, the Philippine "revolution is inseparable from the nation" and Estrada’s formulation was "a virtual replay of every politician’s dilemma since 1898, when Aguinaldo began to draw on ‘the spirit of 1896’ and [Jose] Rizal’s martyrdom to boost popular support for his government." (Filipinos and Their Revolution: Event, Discourse, and Historiography, 1998).