Mandirigma.org» General Philippine History https://mandirigma.org Mandirigma Research Organization Fri, 23 May 2025 08:49:04 +0000 en-US hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.6 BOOK: – Mandirigma – Uniforms of The Filipino Fighting Man 1935-1945 https://mandirigma.org/?p=3944 https://mandirigma.org/?p=3944#respond Sat, 21 May 2022 10:44:27 +0000 MO1 https://mandirigma.org/?p=3944 https://www.black6project.org/store-1/p/57s1rtjw9bglibetk0inieqfxai4ya

 

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Mandirigma – Uniforms of The Filipino Fighting Man 1935-1945

Mandirigma is a compilation of photographs and description of the various uniforms, equipment and accoutrements of Filipino soldiers in the Second World War.

An exhibit of some of these uniforms will be on display at the Philippine Center of New York from April 4-15, 2022

Book availability can be picked up at the Philippine Consulate General of New York on April 7th during the book launch event at 8pm.

When checking out, please choose PIck-Up or Delivery.

Delivery $50 + 6 Shippng

Pick Up $50

Pick-Up can be facilitated for you at the Philippine Consulate General of New York during the book launch event

 

https://www.black6project.org/store-1/p/57s1rtjw9bglibetk0inieqfxai4ya

]]> https://mandirigma.org/?feed=rss2&p=3944 0 Spanish ship ‘Elcano’ drops anchor in Eastern Samarr, the exact same spot Ferdinand Magellan and the ship’s namesake sighted on March 16, 1521 https://mandirigma.org/?p=3884 https://mandirigma.org/?p=3884#respond Tue, 16 Mar 2021 09:52:50 +0000 MO1 http://mandirigma.org/?p=3884 https://www.pna.gov.ph/articles/1133841

 

kali arnis eskrima 2021

Spanish ship ‘Elcano’ drops anchor in Eastern Samar

 

MANILA – The Spanish Navy training ship Juan Sebastián Elcano is finally in the waters off Guian, Eastern Samar, the exact same spot Ferdinand Magellan and the ship’s namesake sighted on March 16, 1521– an important route that made the first circumnavigation of the world possible.
Elcano is on a seven-day visit to the Philippines from March 16 to 22 after departing Spain in October 2020 to retrace the original route the Magellan-Elcano expedition took five centuries ago.
Around 11 a.m., the ship took part in the unveiling of the Suluan quincentennial historical marker and a fluvial parade organized by the municipality of Guiuan in Manicani waters. The Spanish vessel is accompanied by the BRP Apolinario Mabini.
Elcano will participate in the unveiling of Homonhon’s historical marker on March 17 and will leave for Cebu on March 20.
Back in 2018, the National Historical Commission of the Philippines announced that it would mark 34 sites in the country along the first circumnavigators’ route.
Aside from the historic circumnavigation, the Philippines is also celebrating the 500th anniversary of the Victory at Mactan and the quincentenary of Christianity this year.
PNP joins commemoration
Meanwhile, the Philippine National Police on Tuesday kicked off its own commemoration of the 500 years of Christianity in the country ahead of the national inauguration on April 4, 2021.
The 500th year celebration of Christianity in the Philippines marks two milestones in Philippine history –the birth of the Christian Faith which dates back to March 31, 1521 when the first Holy Mass was held in Limasawa Island, and the victory of Lapu Lapu and his warriors in the Battle of Mactan.
“The quincentennial celebration is not just an ecclesial celebration but deserves the recognition and appreciation of the country including the police organization. The PNP core value ‘maka-Diyos’ is but a manifestation of our strong desire to commune with God who is the greatest reliable source of courage and strength in the everyday fulfillment of our job as police officers to serve and protect the public” Lt. Gen. Guillermo Lorenzo Eleazar, officer-in-charge of the PNP, said.
Heralding the theme: “500 Years of Christianity strengthens the Faith, Discipline and Integrity of the PNP”, the PNP presented awards to select bishops, priests, evangelical leaders, and PNP Chaplains who strengthened Christian faith in the country.
Most Reverend Nolly Buco, D.D, JUD, Auxiliary Bishop of Antipolo who was guest of honor and keynote speaker in the ceremony, espoused the constitutional guarantee “Public office is a public trust” in his speech.
“As public servants, we also have a vocation. By simply doing our jobs with honesty, discipline, and integrity, we can be holy just like the saints. Our jobs, our works are paths to holiness. It is now for us to act upon it,” Buco said. (PNA)
]]> https://mandirigma.org/?feed=rss2&p=3884 0 Anting-Anting Collector | Documentary Philippines https://mandirigma.org/?p=3861 https://mandirigma.org/?p=3861#respond Mon, 15 Mar 2021 11:26:46 +0000 MO1 http://mandirigma.org/?p=3861 Anting-Anting Collector | Documentary Philippines

 

]]> https://mandirigma.org/?feed=rss2&p=3861 0 Spanish Ship Sails to the Philippines As it Retraces Magellan and Elcano’s Route The ship will dock in Guiuan, Homonhon, Cebu, and Suluan. https://mandirigma.org/?p=3889 https://mandirigma.org/?p=3889#respond Thu, 11 Mar 2021 10:12:52 +0000 MO1 http://mandirigma.org/?p=3889 https://www.esquiremag.ph/long-reads/features/ship-retraces-circumnavigation-ph-a00293-20210309

 

Spanish Ship Sails to the Philippines As it Retraces Magellan and Elcano’s Route

The ship will dock in Guiuan, Homonhon, Cebu, and Suluan.

 

 

A Spanish ship powered by the wind will sail to the Philippines as it retraces the circumnavigation route of Ferdinand Magellan and Juan Sebastian Elcano. Currently, it is docked in Guam, where Magellan stopped in March 1521, a month before his death. The Elcano will sail to the Philippines just in time for the 500th anniversary of Magellan’s Mactan landing.

The ship is named Juan Sebastian Elcano, after the famous explorer who completed Magellan’s circumnavigation of the world. The Elcano itself is a historic ship, having been built in 1928. It is a four-masted brig-schooner that measures 113 meters long. It was received at Naval Base Guam on Friday.

 

The Juan Sebastian Elcano Ship


PHOTO BY DAWID K PHOTOGRAPHY | SHUTTERSTOCK.

 


PHOTO BY DAWID K PHOTOGRAPHY | SHUTTERSTOCK.

 

 


PHOTO BY DAWID K PHOTOGRAPHY | SHUTTERSTOCK.

 

 


PHOTO BY CHRIS_DOAL | SHUTTERSTOCK.

 

 


PHOTO BY DAVID ACOSTA ALLELY | SHUTTERSTOCK.

 


PHOTO BY BLUECRAYOLA / SHUTTERSTOCK.

 

 


PHOTO BY KIKOSTOCK | SHUTTERSTOCK.

 

 

Spanish Sailors Aboard the Elcano Ship


PHOTO BY DAWID K PHOTOGRAPHY / SHUTTERSTOCK.

 


PHOTO BY DAWID K PHOTOGRAPHY / SHUTTERSTOCK.

 

 

According to the Spanish Embassy in Manila, the Elcano will dock in the town of Guiuan in Eastern Samar on March 16, where Magellan’s ship also stopped 500 years ago. It will also make port calls in Suluan and Homonhon through March 18. Finally, it will dock in Cebu and stay there for a goodwill visit from March 20 to 22.

Guian, Suluan, Homonhon, and Cebu represent the first visual contacts made by Spain with the Philippines, which is a significant part of this expedition.

The Spanish Embassy in Manila compared the circumnavigation to today’s most praised scientific discoveries.


PHOTO BY DIMITRIOS KARAMITROS | SHUTTERSTOCK.

 

“The journey was a historical leap forward and a technical challenge for that time. Initially, five ships and 238 men departed Spain as part of the expedition and only 18 men and one ship made it back three years later,” the Embassy said in a statement.

After its Philippine stops, the Elcano will sail westward and retrace Spain’s circumnavigation voyage from the Philippines to the Moluccas, around Africa, and back to Europe.

The reenactment of the voyage is being kept as faithful as possible to the original routes taken by Magellan and Elcano. The crew will likely experience similar weather patterns documented by the crew and the expedition’s chronicler, Antonio Pigafetta.

 

 The,Route,Of,The,Magellan-elcano,Expedition
]]> https://mandirigma.org/?feed=rss2&p=3889 0 Keeping ‘balangay’ legacy alive By: Erwin M. Mascariñas https://mandirigma.org/?p=3790 https://mandirigma.org/?p=3790#respond Sun, 16 Feb 2020 22:19:28 +0000 MO1 http://mandirigma.org/?p=3790 Keeping ‘balangay’ legacy alive

 

BUTUAN CITY, Agusan del Norte, Philippines — On Dec. 17 last year, two wooden boats docked at the port of nearby Nasipit town, in Agusan del Norte province, the modern gateway for goods and people in the Caraga region. They had earlier sailed from Palawan to Cebu in time for the launching of a 500-day countdown to the 500th anniversary of the Battle of Mactan next year.

The 18-meter and 21-meter boats are replicas of the “balangay,” a vessel used by mariners of an ancient civilization that developed along the mighty Agusan River during the third century. These balangay are navigated through the way of ancient mariners by relying on the position of the sun and stars, wind direction, cloud formations, wave patterns and bird flights.

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Tapping the traditional navigational methods would, in a way, “resurrect the seafaring spirit of our forefathers,” leading people to appreciate “what [they were] are capable of doing, … as adventurous seafarers and discoverers,” said Arturo Valdez, who led the crew.

 

 

The boats do not have modern navigational aids and are only equipped with small engines for use in case of emergency.“Now I am back here in Butuan City, the home of the balangay, hopefully to stir the conscience and revive the pride, and remind everyone here that the balangay is a Butuan boat, and that Butuan is the balangay,” Valdez said.

In 2006, Valdez organized the conquest by Filipino climbers of Mt. Everest.

 

To honor their arrival in Butuan, the city government hosted a welcome ceremony for Valdez and his crew.

Glorious past

The balangay, Valdez said, indicated that Butuan was once a center of trade and commerce in this part of the world, long before the arrival of the Spaniards.

Italian chronicler Antonio Pigafetta mentioned about the vessel in his accounts of Ferdinand Magellan’s voyage in the 1500s.

Historians have pointed out that jars found in an archaeological site in Butuan indicated that the city had trading ties with old kingdoms in its immediate neighborhood of Southeast Asia and China, and as far as Persia, now Iran.

“We have a boat that precedes even the Viking ships,” said Valdez, who has been using the balangay voyages since 2009 to talk about the Philippines’ precolonial past and drum up pride in it.

 

 

Archaeological excavations in Butuan City unearthed a skull and coffin, dating back to the 14th century, several meters from where an ancient balangay was found. Pottery shards were also recovered from a balangay in 2012.

The oldest balangay unearthed in Barangay Libertad in Butuan dates back to 320 AD. Other finds were dated around 900 AD and 1250 AD.

Treasure hunters discovered the ancient boats in 1976. Experts from the National Museum counted nine vessels, but in 2012, more diggings in the area yielded the tenth.

The boats have been declared national cultural treasures under Proclamation No. 86, issued by then President Corazon Aquino in March 1987.So far, remnants of three boats had been dug. A more complete boat is on display at the Maritime Hall of the National Museum in Manila while another is at a National Museum site in Libertad.

Replica

Excavations stopped in 2014 as funding ran short and access problems cropped up as the site sits on private property.

Efforts to revive the balangay legacy came when the three replicas were built starting 2009. The boats set off on a voyage, with Valdez leading the crew that used the traditional navigation methods.

Valdez tapped the centuries-old boat-building knowledge of the Sama people of Tawi-Tawi to build the balangay replicas. He sought permission from the Department of Environment and Natural Resources to harvest local hardwood species, like red “lawaan,” apitong and “yakal,” to build the boats.

UNEARTHING HISTORY A technician of the National Museum cleans parts of a wooden plank of a “balangay” during an archaeological excavation in Butuan City eight years ago.

Work on one boat, named “Diwata ng Lahi,” was done at the Cultural Center of the Philippines complex next to Manila Bay while two — “Masawa Hong Butuan” and “Sama Tawi-Tawi” — were done in Butuan.

Diwata ng Lahi’s first voyage was on Sept. 1, 2009, sailing from Manila to Butuan and passing by 54 ports. On Feb. 4, 2010, Masawa Hong Butuan joined Diwata ng Lahi in a voyage to Zamboanga City and on to Sulu where the third boat, Sama Tawi-Tawi, caught up with them from Butuan.

By September that year, all three boats journeyed to Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, Cambodia, Thailand and Singapore, and back to the Philippines. 

After the voyage, the Diwata ng Lahi was loaned to the National Museum as a cultural exhibit. So was the Masawa Hong Butuan in Butuan.

Two more balangay were built in 2016 for a journey to commemorate the 600th year since the 1417 voyage of Sulu Sultan Paduka Pahala, popularly known as Sultan Paduka Batara, from Maimbung, Sulu, to Dezhou, a city in China’s Shandong province.

For the 500th anniversary of the Battle of Mactan next year, the two replicas were named Raya Siyagu and Raya Kolambu in honor of the kings of Mazaua and Butuan, respectively.

More support

The building of the replicas has always been a private initiative. The first three boats were the fruits of collaboration among the TAO Community of Companies, Butuan Global Forum (BGF) and Kaya ng Pinoy Inc. Sulu Gov. Sakur Tan donated the wood materials, while private donors gave cash.

Today, the Sama Tawi-Tawi is docked in Palawan province, needing repairs.

Valdez and Jody Navarra of BGF cited the need for more support for the maintenance of the balangay as a way of continually reminding Filipinos of their rich history.

LOCAL TREASURE Remnants of the “balangay,” dated 320 AD, are on display at a National Museum site in Butuan’s Barangay Libertad. —PHOTOS BY ERWIN MASCARIÑAS

Agusan del Norte Rep. Lawrence Fortun, who is pushing for the declaration of balangay as the country’s national boat, said the government should take a big part in funding the initiatives. He also hoped to have the private estate in Libertad declared a national historical site so that full development could be undertaken, and to hasten the settlement of ownership over the land.

Butuan Mayor Ronnie Vicente Lagnada promised to keep the balangay legacy alive by building more replicas. Tours along the Agusan River using the balangay are already being planned, he said.

“It’s been more than a decade … I think it is time to pass on the torch and I think there is no other better place to pass this on than to the people of Butuan, to the home of the balangay,” Valdez said.

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Archaeological excavations in Butuan City unearthed a skull and coffin, dating back to the 14th century, several meters from where an ancient balangay was found. Pottery shards were also recovered from a balangay in 2012.

 

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UNEARTHING HISTORY A technician of the National Museum cleans parts of a wooden plank of a “balangay” during an archaeological excavation in Butuan City eight years ago.

 

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LOCAL TREASURE Remnants of the “balangay,” dated 320 AD, are on display at a National Museum site in Butuan’s Barangay Libertad. —PHOTOS BY ERWIN MASCARIÑAS

 

Original Article:

https://newsinfo.inquirer.net/1229287/keeping-balangay-legacy-alive?fbclid=IwAR1YggQXamckrHH40aFpZ0VxXZHUG53bmshIovcMwfycyVx1PrjbfsB_QWs&__cf_chl_captcha_tk__=c30e204c50e1ac76a137a385c13b422fe9de2256-1596233840-0-AXuOWxa3-3ruXH2IPDD24YANNzCanQGpoK6fNNdFBHNfjU-PVwFNZ6-XQAJR8TMflwId2ku4aZyPfcg5xHqjDb-IfMICNJLdsNVbwKf369M-8dE0Bw5N8jSQdAyvE0Nt7WTsOD4NWi_m8tq0ExPvIjq0u5s0a-dHEa4YTLgrF_bZh11kxLRb05xUXaODm336lVz9ACwvKVdCqUZoAgeoW0MnMHRfrBKqnXjxGcO-n_ohCNDK6-oJrZ-RfOJpSgpPSkAVooWJzx1VBQpaC6vk1ICLbbkMrpqRq_dtiPMO2IN30_9IJGUaFt8M7JzapYMb4WwRZJGz3eKHyeXa5NU3Cr82xktRJFY4pXZl-teojsjm8qWs5C3sqi4CrYoDzIUhE4RsoV10DlBjQDnuSDusVmpfXivdiEhnpm_bRAGOnMge2qWqunCdPejM-mJLvgd-vBsNGf1MTUmVDT-IM4GU5lPZsqdaZoILTRLjyNSrF0WmJpwB1tL3cOP-fEXDFER1eBiemr7WPpTpVtuC7uzrrlDi-dTkGJ01C3LM9KTdDqjhzyc6Rs5Jrz2mThIub6eks4iU9pBh3w2ko4DCdTqRiWAmMzbJKdcKEvx_-mRZZqbxbp2KsSM5-qQp3fThYZ_-jFSeVYIt5VAMqK1Yy5hYxxo

]]> https://mandirigma.org/?feed=rss2&p=3790 0 Photo: Members of “The Tinio Brigade”. Anti American Resistance in the Ilocos Provinces, 1899-190. https://mandirigma.org/?p=3760 https://mandirigma.org/?p=3760#respond Sat, 20 Jul 2019 21:14:44 +0000 MO1 http://mandirigma.org/?p=3760 Photo: Members of “The Tinio Brigade”. Anti American Resistance in the Ilocos Provinces, 1899-190.

67176442_2224305747618724_5415895374470578176_n
Staff: (to which Apolinario Querubin’s Guerilla 4 belonged) seated L to R: Captain Yldefonso Villareal, Brig. Gen. Benito Natividad, Brig. Gen. Manuel Tinio, Lt. Col. Joaquin Alejandrino and Maj. Joaquin Buencamino(son of Felipe Buencamino, a minister in the Aguinaldo cabinet); Standing L to R: 2lt. Francisco Natividad and two unidentified officers; Seated: the 15 year-old officer 2Lt. Pastor Alejandrino.

 

———

 

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manuel_Tinio

Manuel Tinio y Bundoc (June 17, 1877 – February 22, 1924) was the youngest General[2] of the Philippine Revolutionary Army, and was elected Governor[3] of the Province of Nueva Ecija, Republic of the Philippines in 1907. He is one of the three Fathers of the Cry of Nueva Ecija along with Pantaleon Valmonte and Mariano Llanera.

Manuel Tinio, then 18 years old, joined the Katipunan in April 1896. By August he had organized a company composed of friends, relatives and tenants. Personally leading his group of teenaged guerillas, he conducted raids and depredations against Spanish detachments and patrols in Nueva Ecija. Occasionally, he joined up with similar forces under other youthful leaders.

An Early flag of the Katipunan.

On September 2, 1896, Manuel Tinio and his men joined the combined forces of Mariano Llanera and Pantaleon Belmonte, capitanes municipales or mayors of Cabiao and Gapan, respectively, in the attack on San Isidro. Of 3,000 who volunteered, 500 determined men were chosen for the attack. Led by a bamboo orchestra or musikong bumbong of Cabiao, the force came in two separate columns from Cabiao and Gapan City and converged in Sitio Pulu, 5 km. from San Isidro. Despite the fact that they had only 100 rifles, they furiously fought the Spaniards holed up in the Casa Tribunal, the arsenal, other government buildings and in the houses of Spanish residents. Capt. Joaquin Machorro, commander of the Guardias Civiles, was killed on the first day of battle. According to Julio Tinio, Manuel’s cousin and a participant in the battle, Manuel had a conference in the arsenal with Antonio Luna and Eduardo Llanera, the general’s son, immediately after the battle.

The Spanish authorities hastily organized a company of 200 civilian Spaniards and mercenaries the following day and attacked the overconfident insurgents, driving the besiegers away from the government center. The next day more Spanish reinforcements arrived from Peñaranda, forcing the poorly armed rebels to retreat, leaving behind 60 dead. The Spaniards went in hot pursuit of the insurgents, forcing those from Cabiao to flee to Candaba, Pampanga, and those from Gapan to hide in San Miguel de Mayumo in Bulacan. The insurgents from San Isidro fled across the river to hide in Jaen. The relatives of those who were recognized were driven away from their homes by the colonial authorities. Manuel Tinio and his troop stayed to protect the mass of people from Calaba, San Isidro, who were all his kinfolk, hastening across the river to Jaen, Nueva Ecija.

The Spaniards’ relentless pursuit of the rebels forced them to disband and go into hiding until January 1897. Tinio was a special target. At 5 feet 7 inches (170 cm) tall, he literally stood out among the attackers, whose average height was below 5 feet (150 cm). He fled to Licab. A platoon of cazadores (footsoldiers) was sent to arrest him, forcing Hilario Tinio Yango, his first cousin and the Capitan Municipal of the town, to lead them to him. Warned of the approaching soldiers, Manuel again escaped and fled on foot back to San Isidro, where, in the barrios of Calaba, Alua and Sto. Cristo, he hid with relatives in their various farms beside the Rio Gapan (now known as the Peñaranda River). Fear of arrest compelled him to be forever on the move. He never slept in the same place. Later on, he would attribute his ill health in his middle age to the privations he endured during those months of living exposed to the elements.

The passionate rebels reorganized their forces the moment Spanish pursuit died down. Tinio and his men marched with Gen. Llanera in his sorties against the Spaniards. Llanera eventually made Tinio a Captain.

The aggressive exploits of the teen-aged Manuel Tinio reached the ears of General Emilio Aguinaldo, whose forces were being driven out of Cavite and Laguna, Philippines. He evacuated to Mount Puray in Montalban, Rizal and called for an assembly of patriots in June 1897. In that assembly, Aguinaldo appointed Mamerto Natividad, Jr. as commanding general of the revolutionary army and Mariano Llanera as vice-commander with the rank of Lt.-General. Manuel Tinio was commissioned a Colonel and served under Gen. Natividad.

The constant pressure from the army of Gov. Gen. Primo de Rivera drove Aguinaldo to Central Luzon. In August, Gen. Aguinaldo decided to move his force of 500 men to the caves of Biac-na-Bato in San Miguel, Bulacan because the area was easier to defend. There, his forces joined up with those of Gen. Llanera. With the help of Pedro Paterno, a prominent Philippines lawyer, Aguinaldo began negotiating a truce with the Spanish government in exchange for reforms, an indemnity, and safe conduct.

On August 27, 1897, Gen. Mamerto Natividad and Col. Manuel Tinio conducted raids in Carmen, Zaragoza and Peñaranda, Nueva Ecija. Three days later, on the 30th, they stormed and captured Santor (now Bongabon) with the help of the townspeople. They stayed in that town till September 3.

On September 4, with the principal objective of acquiring provisions lacking in Biac-na-Bato, Gen. Natividad and Col. Manuel Tinio united their forces with those of Col. Casimiro Tinio, Gen. Pío del Pilar, Col. Jose Paua and Eduardo Llanera for a dawn attack on Aliaga. (Casimiro Tinio, popularly known as ‘Capitan Berong’, was an elder brother of Manuel through his father’s first marriage.)

Thus began the Battle of Aliaga, considered one of the most glorious battles of the rebellion. The rebel forces took the church and convent, the Casa Tribunal and other government buildings. The commander of the Spanish detachment died in the first moments of fighting, while those who survived were locked up in the thick-walled jail. The rebels then proceeded to entrench themselves and fortify several houses. The following day, Sunday the 5th, the church and convent as well as a group of houses were put to the torch due to exigencies of defense.

Spanish Governor General Primo de Rivera fielded 8,000 Spanish troops under the commands of Gen. Ricardo Monet and Gen. Nuñez in an effort to recapture the town. A column of reinforcements under the latter’s command arrived in the afternoon of September 6. They were met with such a tremendous hail of bullets that the general, two captains and many soldiers were wounded, forcing the Spaniards to retreat a kilometer away from the town to await the arrival of Gen. Monet and his men. Even with the reinforcements, the Spaniards were overly cautious in attacking the insurgents. When they did so the next day, they found the town already abandoned by the rebels who had gone back to Biac-na-Bato. Filipino casualties numbered 8 dead and 10 wounded.

Gen. Natividad and Col. Manuel Tinio shifted to guerrilla warfare. The following October with full force they attacked San Rafael, Bulacan to get much-needed provisions for Biac-na-Bato. The battle lasted several days and, after getting what they came for, they left a detachment in Bo. Kaingin to hold back the Spanish reinforcements from Baliwag, Bulacan. To divert Spanish forces from Nueva Ecija, Natividad and Tinio attacked Tayug, Pangasinan on Oct. 4, 1897, occupying the church in the heart of the poblacion.

Meanwhile, peace negotiations continued and in October Aguinaldo gathered together his generals to convene a constitutional assembly. On Nov. 1, 1897 the Constitution was unanimously approved and on that day the Biac-na-Bato Republic was established.

However, Gen. Natividad, who believed in the revolution, opposed the peace negotiations and continued to fight indefatigably from Biac-na-Bato. On Nov. 9, while leading a force of 200 men with Gen. Pío del Pilar and Col. Ignacio Paua, Natividad was killed in action in Entablado, Cabiao. Col. Manuel Tinio brought the corpse back to the general’s grieving wife in Biac-na-Bato. (Incidentally, Gen. Natividad’s widow, Trinidad, was the daughter of Casimiro Tinio–”Capitan Berong”.) With the death of the army’s commanding general, Col. Manuel Tinio was commissioned Brigadier General and designated as commanding general of operations on Nov. 20, 1897. Gen. Tinio, all of 20 years, became the youngest general of the Philippine Revolutionary Army. (Gregorio del Pilar, already 22, was only a Lt. Colonel at that time.)

On Dec. 20, 1897, the Pact of the Biac-na-Bato was ratified by the Assembly of Representatives. In accordance with the terms of the peace pact, Aguinaldo went to Sual, Pangasinan, where he and 26 members of the revolutionary government boarded a steamer to go into voluntary exile in Hongkong. The Novo-Ecijanos in the group were Manuel Tinio, Mariano and Eduardo Llanera, Benito and Joaquin Natividad, all signatories of the Constitution.

In Hongkong, the exiles agreed among themselves to live as a community and spend only the interest of the initial P400,000 the Spanish Government had paid in accordance with the Pact of the Biac-na-Bato. The principal was to be used for the purchase of arms for the continuation of the revolution at a future time. The Artacho faction, however, wanted to divide the funds of the Revolution among themselves. The Novo-Ecijanos did not vote with the opportunist Artacho ‘faction’, and, being relatively well off, thanks to a relative who provided them with funds (Trinidad Tinio vda. de Natividad), “they got a house where they lived like a republic”, as they said.

Would history have been different if the Spanish authorities had not reneged on the terms of the Pact and withheld the amount of P900,000 which was supposed to have been divided among non-combatants who had suffered in the fighting? Thus shortchanged, considering themselves no longer honor bound to lay down arms, the revolutionists rose again. Once again fighting broke out all over Luzon. In Nueva Ecija, the rebels captured the towns again one by one.

But American intervention was on the way. As early as February 1898 an American naval squadron had steamed into Manila Bay. On May 1, less than a week after the declaration of the Spanish–American War, the American naval squadron completely destroyed the Spanish fleet. Admiral Dewey of the United States of America immediately dispatched the revenue cutter “McCulloch” to Hongkong to fetch Aguinaldo, who returned to the Philippines on May 19. On May 21 Aguinaldo issued a proclamation asking the nation to rally behind him in a second attempt to obtain independence. Revolutionary leaders promptly stepped up their raids and ambuscades on Spanish garrisons in Central Luzon, capturing more than 5,000 prisoners. By the end of May, the whole of central and southern Luzon, except Manila, was practically in Filipino hands. Aguinaldo promptly established a Dictatorial Government on May 24, with himself as Supremo (supreme commander) and proclaimed Philippine Independence on June 12, 1898. Apolinario Mabini, however, prevailed upon Aguinaldo to decree the establishment of a Revolutionary Government on June 23.

Manuel Tinio and the rest of the revolutionists in Hongkong sailed for Cavite on June 6 on board the 60-ton contraband boat “Kwan Hoi” to join their Filipino leader. Upon his arrival in Cavite, Tinio was instructed to organize an expeditionary force to wrest the Ilocano provinces from Spanish hands. Thus would start the thrust into the North and its conquest by Novo-Ecijano General Manuel Tinio. First, he retrieved from Hagonoy, Bulacan 300 Mauser and Remington rifles that had been captured from the Spaniards and stored in that town. He then took the steamer to San Isidro, Nueva Ecija. Upon his arrival on June 13 he immediately set up 3 companies of 108 men each under the commands of Captains Joaquin Alejandrino, Jose Tombo and 1st Lt. Joaquin Natividad who was given overall command. All the officers were Novo-Ecijanos, except for Celerino Mangahas who hailed from Paombong, Bulacan.

On July 7, 1898 Aguinaldo reorganized the provincial government of Nueva Ecija and appointed Felino Cajucom as governor. The province was divided into four military zones:

  • Zone 1 under Gen. Mariano Llanera with Gen. Tinio as deputy covered the towns of San Isidro, San Antonio, Jaén, Gapan and Peñaranda;
  • Zone 2 under Pablo Padilla and Angelo San Pedro covered the towns of Cabanatuan, San Leonardo, Sta. Rosa, Sto. Domingo and Talavera;
  • Zone 3 under Delfin Esquivel and Ambrosio Esteban covered the towns of Aliaga, Licab, Zaragoza, San Jose, San Juan de Guimba and Cuyapo;
  • Zone 4 under Manuel Natividad and Francisco Nuñez covered the towns of Rosales, Nampicuan, Umingan, Balungao and San Quintin.

On June 19, Gen. Tinio and his men proceeded to Pangasinan to assist Gen. Makabulos in the siege of Dagupan which was the most important of the three Spanish strongholds in the North at that time, the others being Tarlac, Tarlac and San Fernando, La Union. Dagupan was held by the Spaniards under the command of Col. Federico J. Ceballos. In Dagupan, Gen. Tinio met the force of Lt. Col. Casimiro Tinio, composed of Captains Feliciano Ramoso and Pascual Tinio, Lt. Severo Ortega, several other officers, and 300 Novo-Ecijano soldiers. Gen. Makabulos, who had taken over the Central Luzon Command the previous April, was optimistic that he had the situation well in hand and allowed Gen. Tinio and the combined Novo-Ecijano troops at Dagupan to proceed northward to liberate Ilocos from the Spaniards. This Ilocos Expeditionary Force would become the nucleus of the future Tinio Brigade.

The Novo-Ecijano troops, now over 600 strong, reached San Fernando, on July 22, the day that Dagupan surrendered to Gen. Makabulos. They found the capital of La Union already besieged by revolutionists under the command of Gen. Mauro Ortiz. The Spaniards, under the command of Col. Jose Garcia Herrero, were entrenched in the convent, the Casa Tribunal and the provincial jail and were waiting for succour. Gen. Tinio wanted a ceasefire and sent for Col. Ceballos in Dagupan to mediate a peaceful capitulation of the San Fernando garrison. But despite news that the Spaniards had already surrendered Central Luzon to the Revolutionists and the pleadings of Col. Ceballos, the besieged Spaniards refused to capitulate. On the morning of the eighth day, July 31, Gen. Tinio ordered the assault of the convent from the adjoining church. At a cost of 5 lives and 3 wounded, Capt. Alejandrino’s company occupied the kitchen and cut the water supply in the aljibe or cistern under the azotea, the terrace beside the kitchen. At 4 p.m. a 4″-cannon taken from the gunboat “Callao” moored in the harbor was fired against the left side of the convent. The deafening blast frightened the Spaniards who immediately called for a ceasefire and flew the white flag. Alejandrino received the saber of Lt. Col. Herrero as a token of surrender. 400 men, 8 officers, 377 rifles, 3 cannons and P 12,000 in government silver were turned over. Upon seeing his captors, the Spanish commander wept in rage and humiliation, for many of the Filipino officers and men were but mere youths. Gen. Tinio himself had just turned 21 the previous month!

From San Fernando the Tinio Brigade and its prisoners marched on to Balaoan, where they met stubborn resistance from the enemy who were again entrenched in the convent. The siege lasted for five days, and, despite the support of the populace, resulted in the deaths of more than 70 Filipinos, mostly townspeople. Camilo Osías, a witness to the event, wrote in his memoirs that after the siege, the Balaoan katipuneros were inducted en masse into the ranks of the Tinio Brigade. Meanwhile, the company of Capt. Alejandrino, dispatched earlier by Gen. Tinio to reconnoiter and clear the neighboring commandancia or military district of Benguet, had met no opposition for the small force of cazadores in La Trinidad had fled to Bontoc upon learning of their approach. Alejandrino immediately turned back and rejoined Gen. Tinio.

From Balaoan, the rebels marched on to Bangar, the northernmost town of La Union, where they laid siege to the Spaniards holed up, again, in the convent. They won a victory on Aug. 7 after four days of fighting at a cost of 2 casualties. 87 Spaniards surrendered in Bangar.

The Tinio Brigade then crossed the mighty Amburayan River that divides the province of La Union from Ilocos Sur. The colonial force occupying the strategic heights on the opposite bank was the last obstacle to Tinio’s advance to Vigan. Tinio stormed their positions, causing the enemy to withdraw to Tagudin,[5]:250 the first town of Ilocos Sur. There, the Spaniards consolidated all the available forces they could muster (1,500 men according to one source)[5]:250 and prepared to make a stand in the convent and surrounding buildings. However, their spirited defense the first three days turned into a rout, when the native volunteers in the Spanish army deserted their units to fight with the rebels. The Brigade suffered no casualties in that siege. The Spaniards fled north, but were intercepted in Sta. Lucia, Ilocos Sur by Ilocano and Abra revolutionists under Gen. Isabelo Abaya.

The Tinio Brigade, now over 2,000 strong, marched northward and encountered the Ilocano patriots in Sabuanan, Sta. Lucia. The latter escorted them to Candon, whose inhabitants jubilantly received the conquerors.

There, Isabelo Abaya, a native of the place and the initiator of the revolution in Ilocos, was given a regular rank of Captain of Infantry in the Tinio Brigade.

On August 13, 1898, the same day that the Spaniards surrendered Intramuros to the Americans, Gen. Tinio entered Vigan, the capital of Ilocos Sur and the citadel of Spanish power in the North.[5]:251 He found the capital already in rebel hands. Gov. Enrique Polo de Lara, newly appointed Spanish governor of both Ilocos Norte and Ilocos Sur, had fled to Laoag, the capital of Ilocos Norte, with all the resident Spaniards of Vigan. There he spent five days at the beach of Diriqui, loading the civilians and friars, including Bishop Campomanes, on boats which would hazard the rough weather for the journey to Aparri. He then ordered the troops under Col. Mariano Arques, district commander of the Civil Guards and Jefe de Linea in Ilocos, to take the coastal road to Aparri, Cagayan.

Upon his arrival in Vigan, Gen. Tinio had immediately launched a two-pronged movement to capture the Spaniards fleeing northward and those escaping into the interior.[5]:251 He dispatched his brother, Casimiro, with a light cavalry column of 600 men to Ilocos Norte to pursue the fleeing enemy. Without encountering any opposition along the way, the Filipino column reached Laoag on August 17. They overtook some of the fleeing Spaniards at Bacarra, the next town, where, after exchanging a few token shots, more than 300 Spaniards surrendered. The Spaniards had heard of the humane treatment Gen. Tinio afforded prisoners and did not put up much of a fight.

Two companies were then dispatched to Bangui, the northernmost town of Ilocos Norte, and to Claveria, the first town in Cagayan. Capt. Vicente Salazar’s company pressed the northward pursuit with more tenacity, overtaking the enemy on the road to the Patapat Pass leading to Cagayan province. Right there and then, on August 22, Col. Arques and some 200 Spanish regulars, all tired and frustrated, surrendered almost willingly. In Patapat itself, the crack Regiment No. 70, composed of Ilocano and Visayan volunteers, stationed there to guard the pass, deserted their officers and joined the revolutionaries. The enemy was on the run, and even Aparri at the very end of Luzon was secured too by the detachment under the command of Col. Daniel Tirona.

Relentlessly, from Vigan, Capt. Alejandrino and 500 men, with Capt. Isabelo Abaya as guide, went to Bangued, Abra to track and capture the enemy who were retreating towards the rugged and mountainous interior towns of Cervantes, Lepanto and Bontoc. The Filipinos easily achieved their goal with only 3 casualties, the whole Ilocos and the Cordillera commandancias were now in Philippine hands.

Gen. Tinio is credited with capturing the most number of Spanish prisoners during the revolution, over 1.000 of them. The prisoners were brought to Vigan, their number later augmented by other prisoners sent over from the Cagayan Valley and Central Luzon during the last quarter of 1898. Gen. Tinio exercised both firmness and compassion in dealing with the prisoners. Fray Ulpiano Herrero y Sampedro, a Dominican who had been captured and sent over from Cavite, kept a journal of his 18-month imprisonment together with over a hundred other friars. He wrote that when they were imprisoned in Vigan, “Gen. Tinio wanted to improve the living conditions of the friar prisoners … sent us food, clothing, books, paper and writing implements.”

There was another group of prisoners. The revolucionarios’ anger against the friars extended even to their native mistresses, and these women were imprisoned in the girls’ school beside the Bishop’s Palace. Their properties were confiscated. One of the incarcerated women, a native of Sinait, had a 15-year-old daughter, Laureana Quijano, who pleaded with Gen. Tinio for her mother’s release and the restoration of their properties. The general, attracted to her beauty, forthwith acceded to her request, and then began to court her. Later, Laur, as she was called, also pleaded for the release of another prisoner, her mother’s first cousin, and introduced the daughter, Amelia Imperial Dancel. Again, the general gave in and released Amelia’s mother. Subsequently, Gen. Tinio also fell in love with Amelia.

Gen. Tinio set up his Command Headquarters in the Bishop’s Palace in Vigan. There he lived with 18 of his officers, all very young, mostly 16–20 years of age, the oldest being the 29-year-old Captain Pauil.

In accordance with Aguinaldo’s Dictatorial Decree of June 18, 1898 which set the guidelines for setting up a civil government in those towns liberated from the Spaniards, Gen. Tinio conducted elections for the whole region. First to be elected were the officials of each town. Under the revolutionary government, the mayor, instead of being called the capitan municipal, was now addressed as the presidente municipal. These mayors then elected the Provincial Governor and Board.

With the civil government in place, Gen. Tinio then reorganized the Tinio Brigade. The successful military exploits of the Brigada Tinio were heralded all over Luzon and attracted hundreds of volunteers. The Brigade swelled to over 3,400 men, with scores of officers and more than 1,000 non-commissioned officers and soldiers coming from Nueva Ecija. The rest consisted mostly of Ilocanos, Abreños, Igorots and Itnegs, with a few Bulakeños, Bicolanos and Visayans. There were also some Spaniards in the group.

The Brigade garrisoned the entire western portion of Northern Luzon which included the four genuine Ilocano provinces of Ilocos Norte, Ilocos Sur, Abra and La Union, and also the comandancias of Amburayan, Lepanto-Bontoc and Benguet. Gen. Tinio divided this territory into 3 zones, each under a military commander who commanded a regiment, as follows:

Zone 1 under Lt. Col. Casimiro Tinio covered La Union, Benguet and Amburayan;

Zone 2 under Lt. Col. Blas Villamor covered Southern Ilocos Sur from Tagudin to Bantay, Abra and Lepanto-Bontoc;

Zone 3 under Lt. Col. Irineo de Guzman covered Northern Ilocos Sur from Sto. Domingo to Sinait and Ilocos Norte.

Captains Vicente Salazar, Jose Tombo and Juan Villamor were the deputy commanders.

The establishment of the civil and military government in the Ilocos brought 15 months of peace in the region. The young general and his officers became social denizens sought after and regally entertained by the people. Being young, they caught the eyes of pretty señoritas of the best families in the region. The dashing Manuel Tinio, rich, handsome and a bachelor to boot, seized the moment with the many belles of Ilocandia. He was unforgettably charming and popular. In the 1950s, women reminiscing about their youth, and the Tinios, would look up and sigh, “how handsome they were.” A grandmother from Ilocos Norte living in Baguio City could still passionately say in the 1960s, “all the ladies in the province were in love with the general.” An old maid in Vigan proudly recalled in her twilight years of the 1970s the dashing general’s visits every Friday afternoon when she was 14.

With the Ilocos in stable condition, Gen. Tinio then went to Malolos to report to Gen. Aguinaldo and upon the request of Felipe Buencamino, Minister of Finance, turned over P120,000 that had been contributed by the citizens of Vigan. During his visit, everyone, particularly his fellow generals, admired and congratulated Gen. Tinio for having the largest and best-equipped army in the country!

In October 1898 Gen. Tinio received his appointment as Military Governor of the Ilocos provinces and Commanding General of all Filipino forces in Northern Luzon. His army was formally integrated as an armed unit of the Republic. Thus he became one of only four regional commanders in the Republican Army!

Upon his return to Vigan, Gen. Tinio marshalled his troops, all well equipped and completely in uniform. He assembled them in the town’s main Plaza and made them swear to defend the new Republic with their lives. The next month, on Nov. 11, 1898 Manuel Tinio was appointed Brigadier General of Infantry.

Group showing General Manuel Tinio (seated, center), General Benito Natividad (seated, 2nd from right), Lt. Col. Jose Alejandrino (seated, 2nd from left), and their aides-de-camp.

A shot fired at a Filipino in Sociego Street, Sta. Mesa District in the suburbs of Manila on February 4, 1899 triggered the Philippine–American War. (Contrary to popular belief that prevailed for over a century, the first shot of the Philippine–American War was not fired on San Juan bridge but on Sociego Street in Santa Mesa district, Manila. The Philippines’ National Historical Institute (NHI) recognized this fact through Board Resolution 7 Series of 2003. On Feb. 4, 2004 the marker on the bridge was removed and transferred to a site at the corner of Sociego and Silencio streets.) Soon after, when war with the Americans seemed imminent, Col. Casimiro Tinio and most of the Tagalog troops in the Tinio Brigade were sent back to Nueva Ecija. When the conflict became critical in Central Luzon, all the soldiers in the Brigade who had seen service in the Spanish army were ordered to report to the Luna Division.

The inactivity of the Tinio Brigade during the period of peace in the Ilocos region spawned problems. Boredom led to in-fighting among the soldiers and the perpetration of some abuses. Gen. Tinio adhered to his principles of discipline among his troops, even imprisoning Col. Estanislao de los Reyes, his personal aide-de-camp, who had slapped a fellow officer in an effort to rectify the situation, Tinio asked Gen. Aguinaldo for the assignment of his forces to the frontlines of the new battle at hand, but Aguinaldo paid no heed to Tinio’s request.

Ever keen in foresight and strategy, anticipating an invasion by the American aggressors, Gen. Tinio ordered the construction of 636 trenches, well designed and strategically placed for cross fire, to protect the principal roads and ports and to guard the entire coastline from Rosario, La Union to Cape Bojeador in Ilocos Norte.

At the start of the Philippine–American War, Gen. Tinio’s forces were 1,904 strong, with 68 officers, 200 sandatahanes or bolomen, 284 armorers, 37 medics, 22 telegraphers, 80 cavalrymen, 105 artillerymen and 2 Spanish engineers. (By April 1899, this would be reduced to 1,789 officers and men.)

On May 18, 1899, six months before his forces began battling the American invaders, he married Laureana Quijano.

On June 5, 1899 members of the Kawit Battalion assassinated Gen. Antonio Luna, the commanding general of the republican army. His death in Cabanatuan, Nueva Ecija created a lot of antipathy against the Tagalogs, particularly in Ilocos Norte, where Luna hailed from. The Luna assassination, however, did not diminish the love and admiration of the Ilocanos for Gen. Tinio, who referred to the former as ‘my Ilocanos’. Luna’s death resulted in a cooling off in Tinio’s attitude towards Aguinaldo. Tinio, however, never failed to obey the orders of his superior and never made a comment on the deaths of Bonifacio or Luna. Whenever he was asked, he would shrug his shoulders and say, “answering the question would mean a betrayal of my superior.”

Less than two weeks later, on the occasion of his 22nd birthday, delegations from the entire region congregated in the capital to give him an asalto or dawn serenade in the main plaza of Vigan. One of the highlights of the day-long festivities, which included a royal feast and a grand ball, was the dedication of a birthday hymn specially written for him, set to music and sung by the populace.

Towards the end of June, Aguinaldo recalled Gen. Tinio by telegram and ordered him to help in the reorganization of the forces in Nueva Ecija. In his place, Brigadier Gen. Benito Natividad, recently promoted (at age 24) and on leave because of wounds sustained in the Battle of Calumpit, Bulacan, took over as temporary commander of the Ilocos provinces.

Gen. Tinio, seeing the handwriting on the wall, began taking private English lessons from David Arnold, an American captive who had come over to the Filipino side. In anticipation of the coming of the Americans, he began the construction of a formidable bank of defenses in Tangadan Pass between Narvacan, Ilocos Sur and Bangued, Abra.

Late in September, Gen. Tinio and his northern army were finally called to the front line to guard the beaches of Pangasinan and La Union. The Brigade was diminished in size when Gen. Tinio marched with his general staff and several battalions to Bayambang, Pangasinan to cover President Aguinaldo’s retreat while the others were sent to Zambales under Col. Alejandrino.

Gen. Benito Natividad stayed behind as post commander in Vigan with some officers and 50 riflemen, 20 others in Bangued and a few others scattered in neighboring towns. They were the only armed forces that guarded the whole Ilocos region! At that time, there were 4,000 Spanish prisoners of war (including 1 general) and 26 Americans being held in Vigan, Bangued and Laoag, where the military hospitals were located. More than half of the prisoners had been sent from Central Luzon at the height of the hostilities. Despite their great number, the prisoners did not rise up against their guards, because, on instructions of Gen. Tinio, they were well fed and nicely treated. As early as June, American prisoners had begun arriving from the battlefields of Central Luzon. Among them were Navy Lt. Gillmore and the war correspondent Albert Sonnichsen.[5]:382–383 Gen. Tinio’s humane treatment of prisoners was legendary. Sonnichsen wrote:

“. . while in Vigan, Tinio learned that the captive friars were living well on money sent from Manila, while the poor Cazadores were obliged to subsist on their meager rations (as prisoners of war). Before they could hide it, the young Tagalog had their money seized and, having all the soldier prisoners assembled in the plaza, he divided the pesos of the friars equally among them, the Cazadores cheering the Tagalog General lustily.”[5]:252

Having abandoned his last capital in Tarlac, Tarlac, Pres. Aguinaldo decided to retreat to the north and went to Bayambang, Pangasinan. Unknown to him, the Americans had planned a pincer-like movement in the overall battle plan to cut off his northward escape route and capture him.

On November 7, the Americans bombarded San Fabian, Pangasinan and the 33rd Infantry landed, including a battalion commanded by Col. Luther R. Hare, an old cavalryman who had served 25 years before under Gen. Custer.[6]:138 But on Nov. 11, on their way to San Jacinto, the next town, the invaders came across the entrenched forces of Gen. Tinio. Maj. John Alexander Logan, Jr and 8 American soldiers died in the fierce 3.5-hour battle that ensued, but the Americans, armed with a Gatling gun, claimed the lives of 134 Filipino soldiers, wounding 160 more.[6]:144–146

On November 13 a national council of war held in Bayambang resolved to disband the Philippine Army and ordered the generals and their men to return to their own provinces and organize the people for general resistance by means of guerrilla warfare.[6]:146 Gen. Aguinaldo divided the country into zones, each under a general. Gen. Tinio was designated regional commander of the Ilocos provinces. The following evening, Gen. Aguinaldo, accompanied by his family, the cabinet, their aides and the Kawit Battalion, left Bayambang by special train for Calasiao, only 15 kilometers away from American Headquarters!

On November 14, early in the morning, the presidential party struggled through the knee-deep mud of backwoods trails towards Sta. Barbara, where they met with the Mixto Battalion under Lt. Jose Joven and the Del Pilar Brigade. The column, now with 1,200 armed men, managed to reach the forests of Manaoag and proceeded to Pozorrubio, where the party was greeted by Gen. Tinio. The evening before, Maj. Samuel M. Swiggert’s pursuing squadron had caught up with part of the Tinio Brigade in Manaoag, but on the morning of the 14th, failed to pursue Aguinaldo at Pozorrubio.[6]:147

Aguinaldo spent the night in Pozorrubio and was unaware of the proximity of the enemy. He only came to know about it when Gen. Tinio informed him that the Americans were in pursuit. The presidential party hurriedly left for Rosario, La Union, and then for Bauang. Fortunately, the encounters with the Tinio Brigade had delayed the American pincer movements and, by the time these closed, Aguinaldo was already far in the north.

On Nov. 18, 1899 Gen. Samuel B. M. Young with 80 men of the 3rd Cavalry plus 300 native scouts, made a forced march north through Pangasinan in pursuit of Aguinaldo.[6]:151 Ahead of them was Gen. Tinio, who caught up with Gen. Aguinaldo in Bauang, La Union on the 19th. The following day Gen. Tinio, upon Aguinaldo’s orders, accompanied Col. Simeon Villa to San Fernando, La Union, where most of Tinio’s troops were helping the townspeople with the rice harvest. Young’s troops made a surprise raid on the town at 3 in the morning, and, recognizing Tinio and Villa, pursued them. Luckily the two were able to flee into the mountains on foot and to make their way to San Juan, the next town. Gen. Tinio reassembled his men in San Juan and, in an orderly manner, marched with their wounded to Narvacan, only a day or two ahead of the pursuing Gen. Young. Tinio then set up his command headquarters in San Quintin, Abra and sent the wounded further ahead to the military hospital in Bangued.

On Nov. 26, 1899, Vigan became the hottest spot as the American battleship ‘Oregon’ and the former Spanish gunboats ‘Callao’ and ‘Samar’ anchored off it and started shelling Caoayan, Ilocos Sur.[6]:131 Vigan was immediately evacuated on orders of post commander Gen. Benito Natividad. The prisoners, both Spanish and American, together with his meager troops moved on to Abra and Bangued as early as Sept.[6]:120 When the Americans landed the following day, led by Commander McCracken and Lt. Col. James Parker, there were no Filipino soldiers in Vigan.[5]:358 A few days later, 225 American troops, mostly Texas volunteers forming a battalion of the 33rd Infantry under Major Peyton C. March,[6]:153 arrived from San Fabian, took up residence in the Archbishop’s Palace and stored their ammunition and supplies in the adjoining girls’ school.

On Nov. 27, the day the Americans occupied Vigan, Gen. Tinio sent orders for all active soldiers of the Brigade to concentrate along the shores of the Abra River towns of San Quintin, Piddigan and Bangued, beyond the Tangadan Pass. Gen. Young, who was chasing them relentlessly; had reached Candon on the 28th and, from seized documents, discovered that he was no longer trailing the enemy, but was right in their midst! He also learned that Aguinaldo was at Angaki, 25 km. away to the southeast, while Tinio was up north some 40 km. away.[6]:153 Young realized immediately that Gen. Tinio’s purpose in taking his forces to the north was, as he phrased it, “to lead us away from following Aguinaldo.” Unsure whether he should pursue Aguinaldo or go after Tinio, the decision was made for him when a battalion of the 34th Volunteer Infantry arrived under Lt. Col. Robert Howze. They had been sent by Gen. Arthur MacArthur to reinforce Gen. Young’s northern column.[6]:154 Forthwith, March’s battalion was sent in pursuit of Aguinaldo through Tirad Pass, while the bigger part of Young’s army, with Howze’s battalion, marched towards Tangadan Pass in an attempt to destroy the Tinio Battalion, the last remaining army of the Republic.[6]:156

From San Quentin, General Tinio ordered 400 riflemen and bolomen, led by Capt. Alejandrino, went down the Mestizo River in bancas and spread out on both sides of the plaza of Vigan.[6]:163 Just before 4 AM on 4 Dec., some of the attackers in the dark streets were challenged by an American patrol who then gave the alarm to the 250 Americans in the city.[6]:163 Although Filipino snipers were already in position in the buildings around the plaza, in the ensuing 4-hour battle at close range they were no match for the legendary Texas marksmanship and the inexhaustible supply of American ammunition. The rebels were routed, leaving over 40 dead and 32 captured, while 8 Americans were killed.[6]:165 The survivors fled to Tangadan.

By 3 Dec. 1899, Gen. Young and Lt. Col. Howze were at Tangadan Pass with his 260 men.[6]:165 The pass was defended by 1,060 men under Lt. Col. Blas Villamor, Tinio’s chielf of staff, in trench works constructed over the last year with the assistance of Spanish engineers.[6]:162 The Americans successfully scaled the steep, 200-foot cliffs flanking the entrenchments to gain a vantage position.[6]:168–169 The final assault came in the evening of Dec. 4, added by the arrival of Col. Luther Hare’s 270 men from the 33rd Infantry.[6]:168–169 Outflanked and outnumbered, Lt. Col. Villamor decided to save his men from carnage, and retreated, abandoning rifles and ammunition, and after losing 35 killed and 80 wounded to the American loss of 2 killed and 13 wounded.[6]:170Thus ended the Battle of Tangadan Pass.

Tinio, however, earned the admiration of Col. Howze who wrote glowingly on the Vauban-type Tangadan defenses:

“The trenches captured are the best field trenches that have ever come under my observation. They terrace the mountainside, cover the valley below in all directions, and thoroughly control the road for a distance of 3 miles. They are permanent in nature, with perfect approaches, bomb-proofs, living sheds, etc., with shapes and revetments sodded and supported by timbers. The complete terrace of trenches number 10 in all, well connected for support, defense and retreat.”

Gen. Young reported on the bravery of General Tinio and his men, that at the Battle of Tangadan,

“Some of their officers exposed themselves very gallantly on the parapets during heavy firing.”

The day after the Battle of Tangadan, December 5, the pursuing Americans invaded Tinio’s headquarters in San Quintin, five kilometers away from the pass.[6]:171 They continued upstream on the Abra River to Pidigan and Bangued, liberating 1,500 starving Spaniards, on 6 Dec.[6]:171, 173 The American prisoners and the Spanish general had been sent ahead to Ilocos Norte by Gen. Tinio for strategic reasons, with orders for them to be shot rather than be rescued by the Americans.[6]:172 But the capture of Bangued was a major setback for the Filipinos, because the Brigade arsenal was located there. Three tons of sheet brass, two tons of lead, as well as supplies of powder, saltpeter and sulphur were found by the Americans. General Benito Natvidad joined General Tinio at Tayum.[6]:193

The onslaught had started! Having captured Bangued, Gen. Young re-armed at Vigan and within a week made unopposed landings in Ilocos Norte at Pasuquin, Laoag and Bangui. He sent cavalry north from Vigan, destroying trenches and defense works around Magsingal, Sinait, Cabugao and Badoc.

Meanwhile, the rescue of the American prisoners from Bangued became the task of Col. Hare’s 220 men of the 33rd Infantry and Col. Howze’s 130 men of the 34th Infantry.[6]:172

In Abra, Gen. Tub had been roaming the farms disguised as a rich planter on a white horse. In this way he made regular daily visits to the various American outposts to chat with the enemy soldiers. He even went so far as to invite them to his house in Bangued for dinner. After gathering all the information that he could, Tinio went back to the hills each day to instruct his men on what to do that night. Unfortunately, one day his photograph was circulated among the Americans and the daring general had no choice but to take to the hills with Col. Hare and a picked group trailing him!

Howze caught up with the Brigade’s baggage train in Danglas on 8 Dec.[6]:182 and 750 more Spanish prisoners on 10 Dec. at Dingras[6]:188 This last group included General Leopoldo Garcia Pena, former commander of Cavite province.[6]:188 Hare’s column joined Howze at Maananteng, where they sent the freed Spanish and Chinese prisoners on to Laoag, and the remaining force of 151 men continued the pursuit into the Cordilleras on 13 Dec.[6]:189–192

When Gen. Tinio realized that the Americans were exerting all efforts to surround him, he had the American prisoners conducted to Cabugaoan in Apayao country as a diversion, spreading false rumors that he was with the group. (He had, in fact, on Dec. 12, though surrounded by the Americans in Solsona, Ilocos Norte, near the boundary of Apayao, managed to elude them dressed as a peasant woman.)[6]:189

After days of marching in the wild Cordillera Mountains, the Americans finally caught up with the abandoned prisoners on Dec.18 at the headwaters of the Apayao-Abulug River, having been abandoned by their Filipino guards in Isneg territory.[6]:207–208 On crudely constructed rafts, the Americans eventually reached the coast in Abulug, Cagayan, on 2 Jan. 1900, where the footsore and weary soldiers found the USS Princeton and USS Venus waiting to take them back to Vigan and Manila.[6]:217

Gen. Tinio spent the next couple of months in the mountains of Solsona, where he began fortifying the peak of Mt. Bimmauya, east of Lapog. It was also in the remote headwaters of the Bical River above Lapog that an arsenal had been set up to replace that captured at Bangued. This operated for a year. Rifles were repaired, cartridges refilled, gunpowder and homemade hand guns (paltik) manufactured with real feats of mechanical ingenuity. Twenty to thirty silversmiths and laborers could fashion 30-50 cartridges a day by hand!

The defenses constructed by Gen. Tinio were similar to those that he had put up in Tangadan the year before, but, having learned his lesson, he situated the defenses on a peak that Lt. J. C. Castner described as follows:

“one of the principal peaks (is) on the coast range of northwestern Luzon. Its altitude is between 2,500 and 3,000 feet above the Rio Cabugao that washes its western shore. By reason of standing more to the westward than its immediate neighbors and being bare of timber, it affords a view of the entire coastal plain from Vigan on the South to Laoag on the north. The lower part of Monte Bimmauya is wooded, but the upper three-fourths is bare of trees and bush, and, in certain places, even the grass has been burned off by the insurgents. Consequently, there is no cover for attacking troops ascending the western spur of the mountain. The slopes of the upper portion make angles of from 45-60 degrees with the horizon. The only trail in existence or even possible on this western spur… is so narrow that it is what is known among geographers as a ‘knife-edge’, hence the only formation admissible was a column of files, two men not being able to march abreast. The ascent is so steep and the footing so insecure that one has to watch continually where he plants his feet to avoid precipitation down the precipice-like slopes on either side.”

New Year’s Day 1900 signaled the outburst of guerilla warfare throughout the Ilocos region. On that day, Gen. Tinio engaged in a skirmish with American forces at Malabita, San Fernando, La Union. The disconcerted Gen. Young ordered daily patrols by all his units “to settle this insurgent business with the least possible delay.” The following day, he requested another battalion of veterans with which he promised “to drive these outlaws out or kill them and settle the savages before letting up.” The day after that he repeated the request:

“My belief is that by keeping up a constant hunt after these murderers, thieves and robbers, the country can be cleared of them within two months.” Needless to say, he did not receive any reinforcements, because he already had 3,500 men, more than thrice the number of Tinio’s troops!

On January 13 the Americans intercepted an order from Gen. Tinio to execute all Filipinos who surrender to the enemy.

The following day, January 14. the only artillery duel of the Fil-American War was fought in Bimmuaya between the Republicans and the combined forces of Maj. Steever and Lt. Col. Howze. The barrage lasted from noon until sundown. Despite holding the ‘strongest position in Luzon’, as Steever believed the Bimmuaya stronghold to be, the Filipinos, with their paltry stock of rifles and ammunition, succumbed in less than 24 hours to the mighty American forces. Steever’s two Maxim guns dominated the show. Although the Americans halted their fire at sunset, the Filipinos kept up desultory fire until midnight. The next day the Americans discovered that it was just to cover the withdrawal of Gen. Tinio and his men!

After the Battle of Bimmuaya, Gen. Tinio’s guerrilla forces continuously fought and harassed the American garrisons in the different towns of Ilocos for almost 1½ years. His command was probably the first to initiate guerrilla activities in Luzon in accordance with the Aguinaldo’s official proclamation at Bayambang on Nov. 12, 1899. Once again, he reorganized the Tinio Brigade, now greatly reduced by the casualties sustained in San Jacinto, Manaoag and other places. Discarding its inter-provincial designation of units, he reformed his forces as a guerrilla organization with overlapping territories and troops, Ilocos Sur being shared by other Ilocano provinces. The military commands came to be known as:

· Ilocos Norte-Vigan Line covering the province of Ilocos Norte south to northern Ilocos Sur down to Vigan, · Abra-Candon Line under Lt.-Col. Juan Villamor which covered the Province of Abra and Ilocos Sur south of Vigan down to Candon · La Union-Sta. Cruz Line covering the province of La Union north to southern Ilocos Sur as far as Sta. Cruz.

The battalion commanders came to be known as Jefes de Linea, while the company commanders were now called Jefes de Guerrilla. Companies of riflemen became numbered units of guerrillas, each ranging from 50-100 soldiers, depending on the number of fighters a unit could arm and equip. These troops were then divided further into destacamentos or detachments of 20 men, more or less, under a subaltern officer. These bands were virtually independent of each other in their operations. But they could function occasionally as a unit on rare instances of mass assaults, as in the raids on Laoag on April, Bangued in June and Candon in February 1901.

Col. Bias Villamor, now 2nd in command as a result of his good showing in the Pangasinan campaigns, gave the full count of the Tinio Brigade in January 1900 at 1,062 men, 64 of them officers. The high proportion of officers to men was due to the nature of guerrilla warfare with its small separate units and flying columns of 20-30 men that strike at their chosen times and places. The majority of the officers were Novo-Ecijanos and veterans of earlier campaigns, some even from the Revolution of 1896!

The use of guerrilla tactics by the Filipinos resulted in more American losses than they had previous to Nov. 14, 1899. The never-ending guerrilla raids forced Gen. Young to start garrisoning the towns, setting up 15 of them in January, 4 in March and a total of 36 by April. Detachments varied in size from 50 in San Quintin, 200 in Sinait to 1,000 in Cabugao and Candon. These garrison troops were under fire in one place or another for the next 18 months. Cabugao alone was attacked every Sunday for 7 consecutive weeks! Ambuscades of American patrols became almost a daily occurrence and resulted in so many casualties for the invaders, that by March 1900, no patrols were sent out unless they were 40-50 strong! Gen. Arthur MacArthur, in an official report, stated that:

“The extensive distribution of troops has strained the soldiers of the army to the full limit of endurance. Each little command has had to provide its own service of security and information by never ceasing patrols, explorations, escorts, outposts and regular guards. . . In all things requiring endurance, fortitude and patient diligence, the guerilla period has been pre-eminent.”

The “secret weapon” of these attacks was the Ilocano people. The whole population was an espionage network and developed a warning system to apprise the revolutionists of approaching invaders. Even priests would tap church bells as a warning of approaching American patrols. Pvt. James Lyons, a prisoner in Tinio’s camp, reported that “runners came in every few minutes” with information. It seemed that the whole Ilocos was now engaged in war, with trade and agriculture virtually at a standstill!

Gen. Tinio’s raids were so sporadic and simultaneous that many, including the Americans, believed that Tinio had the power of bilocation, appearing in several places at the same time! His personal movements indicated an energetic contact with his forces – organizing, inspecting, consulting, encouraging or commanding in action, and constantly eluding his would-be captors. He was everywhere.

On 31 January, Gen. Tinio and his men had a skirmish on the Candon-Salcedo road with American troops. Fortunately they did not suffer any casualties.

The next day, February 1, Tinio, visited Sto. Domingo, unescorted and dressed as a farmer.

On February 9, he ambushed a troop of 7 cavalry in Sabang, Bacnotan, but withdrew when American reinforcements arrived.

On 16 February, from Bacnotan, he ordered Capt. Galicano Calvo to apprehend certain American spies.

On February 19, he ambushed an enemy patrol in Kaguman and captured the equipment.

On February 26, he ambushed an American convoy between San Juan and Bacnotan, together with their supplies of food, medicine, shoes, mules, etc.

On March 5 the next month, he surprised and routed an American camp in San Francisco, Balaoan, capturing all the equipment. He then went north to Magsingal, but left the next day on an inspection trip.

On the 8th, a surprise search for him in Sto. Domingo and San Ildefonso was frustrated by warnings of church bells.

On the 10th, he issued a warning to the Mayor of Candon, prompting the American command there to request for a picture of Gen. Tinio.

On the 14th, while holding a meeting in Bacnotan, he was surprised by an American patrol. Fortunately, a troop of Filipino cavalry arrived, and, with the support of two guns in the house, the Filipinos were able to repulse the attackers and enable Tinio to escape.

Two days after, on the 16th, Tinio met with Mayor Almeida in Bacsayan, Bacnotan.

On March 29, Gen. Tinio and his escort had a skirmish with an American patrol and routed them. An escaping American was drowned in the river between San Esteban and Sta. Maria.

In April, Tinio reported to Aguinaldo in Lubuagan, Kalinga and in May conferred with Aglipay in Badoc and fought a battle in Quiom, Batac, Ilocos Norte. He then moved on to Piddig, Ilocos Norte and, in June he set up a camp at a remote peak called Paguined on the Badoc River east of Sinait. The last was near his arsenal in Barbar.

All this incessant movement did not detract from his love life. Although he was already married, he continued his various liaisons, even going to the extent of bringing Amelia Dancel into the mountains of Ilocos Norte with him in July. American military reports even mention Amelia as his wife! In disguise, he once visited a maiden in enemy-occupied Vigan. The Americans, hearing that he was in town, began to make a house-to-house search, but were unable to find him, even when they searched his ladyfriend’s house. The woman had hidden him under the voluminous layers of her Maria Clara skirt! That was probably the narrowest escape he ever made! The incident became the talk of the town and was always cited whenever the name of Gen. Tinio came up. (The quick-thinking “heroine” lived until the 1970s.)

By November 1900, the number of American forces in the Ilocos had increased to 5,700 men—plus 300 mercenaries. The number of garrisons also rose to 59, spread thinly over 250 kilometers from Aringay, La Union to Cape Bojeador, Ilocos Norte. Earlier, mercenaries had been brought in from Macabebe, Pampanga and were stationed in Vigan, Sta. Maria, and San Esteban. These mercenaries started recruiting fellow Filipinos and by April numbered over 200, half of them Ilocanos and a quarter of them Tagalogs. Attached to regular occupation troops, these mercenaries caused significant damage to the nationalists by leading the enemy to hidden food supplies and inducing many defections. Because of this, Gen. Tinio issued a proclamation on March 20, 1900 as follows:

First and last article. The following shall be tried by summary court martial and sentenced to death:

  • All local presidents and other civil authorities, both of towns and of the barrios, rancherias (settlements of Christianized tribesmen) and sitios or hamlets, of their respective jurisdictions, who do not give immediate notice of any plan, direction, movement or number of the enemy as soon as they learn of it.
  • Those who, regardless of age or sex, reveal the location of the camp, stopping places, movements or direction of the revolutionaries to the enemy.
  • Those who voluntarily offer to serve the enemy as guides, unless it be for the purpose of misleading them from the right road, and
  • Those who, whether of their own free will or not, capture revolutionary soldiers who are alone, or persuade them to surrender to the enemy.

The insidious guerrilla war saw such rules and warnings proclaimed from both parties. The American commands in Ilocos Norte were ordered to warn barrio officials that those who did not report ‘insurgents’ immediately (meaning, within an hour for every 5 km. from the nearest American troops) would be considered insurgents themselves, and their barrios ‘absolutely destroyed’. Theft of telegraph wires or ambuscades of American patrols resulted in the nearest villages being burned and the inhabitants killed. When 200 m. of telegraph wire was destroyed in Piddigan, Abra, the Bangued command reported the next day that, “There is not a single building standing out of Piddigan.”

Gen. Tinio, on the other hand, ordered all the towns to aid the revolutionaries. Pasuquin, a town in Ilocos Norte, refused to cooperate with Filipino forces, so Tinio threatened to burn the town “at his leisure” and did so on Nov. 3, 1900.

On Dec. 21, Gen. Tinio issued a proclamation against crimes by military forces. On Christmas Day, Tinio, with Maj. Reyes and ten officers celebrated the holiday in Lemerig near Asilang, Lapog. On Holy Innocents’ Day, Dec. 28, the Americans made a surprise raid on Lemerig. Fortunately, the general and his officers managed to escape.

The first month of 1901 began inauspiciously with the capture of Gen. Tinio’s arsenal at Barbar on January 29, 1901.

The following month, on February 19, 1901, Brigadier Gen. James Franklin Bell came into the picture. Gen. Young turned over the command of the First District, Department of Northern Luzon to him. It is this General Bell who would later gain notoriety for his ‘re-concentration’ methods in the southern Tagalog provinces right after his stint in the North.

Determined to continue the same policy of repression, Gen. Bell, with an additional 1,000 men, ordered his forces to pursue, kill and wipe out the insurrectos. Food supplies were destroyed to prevent them from reaching the guerrillas. Inasmuch as the barrios were supplying rice from the recent harvests to the guerrillas, whole populations were evacuated to town centers within 10 days of notification. Noncompliance resulted in the burning of the whole barrio. Even some interior towns were completely evacuated, while others, like Magsingal and Lapog were surrounded by stockades to prevent the revolutionaries from infesting them.

On February 26, Gen. Tinio attacked the Americans fortified in the convent of Sta. Maria. It was his last attack against American forces.

The whole Ilocos was being laid waste and was in danger of starvation due to Gen. Bell’s iron fisted policies. The lack of supplies eventually forced hundreds of patriots to lay down their arms and return to their homes. By March the Brigade only had a few hundred soldiers left.

On March 25, 1901, the top brass of the Tinio Brigade met in a council of war at Sagap, Bangued. In this meeting, Generals Tinio and Natividad, the two Villamors and Lt. Colonels Alejandrino, Gutierrez and Salazar resolved that “the final action of the Tinio Brigade should depend upon the decision of the Honorable President.”

Unknown to them, Aguinaldo had been captured in Palanan, Isabela on March 23, 1901. When word of Aguinaldo’s surrender reached Gen. Tinio on April 3, he only had two command-rank subordinates remaining, his former classmates Joaquin Alejandrino and Vicente Salazar.

On April 19, 1901 Aguinaldo proclaimed an end to hostilities and urged his generals to surrender and lay down their arms. In compliance with Gen. Aguinaldo’s proclamation, Gen. Tinio sent Col. Salazar to Sinait under a flag of truce to discuss terms of surrender. The following day, Salazar was sent back with the peace terms. On April 29, 1901, Gen. Manuel Tinio, whom the American military historian, William T. Sexton, called “the soul of the insurrection in the Ilocos provinces of Northern Luzon” and “a general of a different stamp from the majority of the insurgent leaders”, surrendered. The following day, April 30, he signed the Oath of Allegiance. When Tinio handed his revolver to Gen. Bell as a token of surrender, the latter immediately returned it to him – a token of great respect. Gen. Tinio was only 23 years old!

The Americans suspended all hostilities on May 1 and printed Tinio’s appeal for peace on the Regimental press on the 5th. On May 9 he surrendered his arms together with Gen. Benito Natividad, thirty-six of his officers and 350 riflemen.

While the Americans boasted that they eliminated 5 insurrecto generals within a month, it took them 11/2 years and 7,000 men to ‘civilize’ Manuel Tinio y Bundoc, the Tagalog boy-general of the Ilocanos!

The significance attached to Gen. Tinio’s surrender by the Americans was felt throughout the country. Gen. MacArthur said that the little war in the Ilocos was the “most troublesome and perplexing military problem in all Luzon.” On May 5, as Military Governor of the Philippines, MacArthur issued General Order No. 89 releasing 1,000 Filipino prisoners of war “to specially signalize the recent surrender of Gen. Manuel Tinio and other prominent military leaders in the provinces of Abra and Ilocos Norte.” La Fraternidad, a Manila newspaper, happily reported, “The 1st of May is now for 2 reasons an important date in contemporary Philippine history – 1898, the destruction of the Spanish squadron in Cavite; 1901, the surrender of Generals Tinio and Natividad and the complete pacification of Northern Luzon.

Manuel Tinio, surprisingly, never suffered any injury during his entire military career even as he was known to stand up and face a barrage of artillery fire! He attributed this to an amulet, anting-anting, that he always wore and which he kept in a safe after the cessation of hostilities.

Upon his release, Manuel Tinio went back to Nueva Ecija to rehabilitate his neglected farms in present-day Licab, Sto. Domingo and Talavera. He lived in a camarin or barn together with all the farming paraphernalia and livestock. A typical hacendero, he was very paternalistic and caring, extending his protection, not only on his family, but also to his friends and supporters. His men even compared him to a ‘hen’.

As a family man, he was very protective of his daughters. Being family-oriented, he took in all the children of his deceased sisters and half sisters (from his father’s previous marriages) when their widowers eventually remarried or played around. He treated all his nephews and nieces as if they were his children, giving them the same education and privileges. This resulted in the extremely close family ties of the Tinio Family. He was very loving and fatherly and would entertain his children with stories of his campaigns. Perhaps because he never finished high school, he believed in a good education and, in 1920, sent his two eldest sons to the United States to study in Cornell University.

Manuel Tinio treated everyone equally, rich and poor alike, so everyone looked up to him and respected him. In fact, he paid more attention to the poor than to the rich, because, according to him, the poor had nothing but their pride and were, for that reason, more sensitive. When rich relatives came to visit, his children had but to kiss their hand in greeting, but when a poor relation came, they had to greet their kin in the same manner, but on bended knees – the highest form of respect in those days!.

All his tenants idolized Manuel Tinio, who was not an absentee landlord, but lived with them in the farm with hardly any amenities. However, he always kept a good table and had flocks of sheep and dovecotes in every property he owned, so that he could have his favorite caldereta and pastel de pichon anytime he wanted. He also enjoyed his brandy, finishing off daily a bottle of Tres Cepes by Domecq. Wherever he lived, he received a constant stream of visitors, relatives and friends. Many veterans of the Tinio Brigade, often coming from the Ilocos, invariably came to reminisce and ask for his assistance. Later, as Governor, he would help them settle in Nueva Ecija.

Although he was but a civilian, the prominence he earned as a revolutionary general and his immense network of social and familial alliances eventually became the nucleus of a political machine that he controlled until his death. An ardent nationalist, he fought against the federalists who wanted the Philippines to become an American state. He did not run for any position, but any candidate he endorsed was sure to win the position. Dr. Benedicto Adorable, one of the richest and most prominent men in Gapan, was so fanatically loyal that he often said, “I would vote for a dog if Gen. Tinio asked me to.” Of course, he was fanatically loyal because Gen. Tinio had saved him from a Spanish firing squad in 1896!

When Gov. Gen. Henry C. Ide lifted the ban on independence parties in 1906, the political parties with similar ideology merged into the present Nacionalista Party. Manuel Tinio always supported Sergio Osmeña, the leader of the party, throughout his political career. Even during the split between Osmeña and Quezon in 1922, Tinio remained loyal to the former. As the founder and leader of the Nacionalista Party in Nueva Ecija, Tinio stressed the significance of a unified party, emphasizing in every local party convention that the winner will be supported wholly by each party member. Any party member who won an election could serve only one term in office to give the other party members a chance. Should the incumbent seek re-election, Tinio advised his colleagues to support the choice of the convention. As a party leader, he did not want warring factions within the party, and exerted every effort to make rival groups come to terms. Thus, during his lifetime, the Nacionalista Party in Nueva Ecija was unified.

On July 15, 1907 Gov. Gen. James F. Smith appointed Manuel Tinio as Governor of the Province of Nueva Ecija, to serve the remainder of the 3-year term of Gov. Isauro Gabaldon, who had resigned to run as a candidate for the 1st National Assembly. Incidentally, one of the first major bills Assemblyman Gabaldon proposed was the establishment of a school in every town in the archipelago. The Gabaldon-type schoolhouses and Gabaldon town in Nueva Ecija are named after him. Gabaldon’s wife, Bernarda, was the eldest daughter of Casimiro Tinio.

Manuel Tinio’s first term as governor was marked by the return of peace and order to the province. William Cameron Forbes, Commissioner of Commerce and Police under both Gov.-Generals Wright and Smith, wrote of Tinio:

“…we picked up the new Governor of Nueva Ecija at San Isidro, the capital, General Tinio. He used to be a celebrated insurecto General and Governor Smith has just made him Governor.. . We have more robbery and murders here than almost anywhere, one leading band being continually on the move. General Tinio informed me that he had most of the band in jail already, his guns captured, and the robberies stopped, and the principal outstanding ladron (the only one that I know by name in the whole of Luzon) driven from his borders and over to Pangasinan. I talked busily on road building and maintenance to him for a couple of hours while we sped up to Cabanatuan and went up to call on the local officials..

An anecdote on Gov. Tinio’s bravery has him negotiating with a dreaded tulisan or bandit who held a family hostage for days, threatening to kill them if the constables, policemen, tried to rush him. Unarmed, Tinio went into the house, talked to the bandit and went out after 30 minutes with the bandit peacefully in tow.

Gov. Tinio also brought about agricultural expansion. His Governor’s report for the fiscal year 1907–1908 stated that the area of cultivated land increased by 15%. The following year, this was augmented by an additional 40%. These lands, which were settled by over 5,000 homesteaders, mostly Ilocanos, were in the towns of Bongabon (then including Rizal), Talavera, Sto. Domingo, Guimba (which still included Muñoz) and San Jose. The influx of settlers from the north explains why many people speak Ilocano in those towns today.

It was also during his term as Governor that his wife, Laureana, died. The Provincial Board then passed a resolution naming the town Laur, after her. Soon after, he married Maura Quijano, the younger sister of Laureana, who had accompanied her from Ilocos after Gen. Tinio’s surrender to the Americans.

Gen. Tinio ran for reelection under the Nacionalista Party in 1908 and won. But there were other things in store for him. His executive ability and decisiveness had not gone unnoticed by the Americans, especially by Forbes who had become Acting Gov. Gen. on May 8, 1909. Months before Forbes assumed the office,

“Manila was being troubled by a series of strikes generally fomented by the shamelessly corrupt labor leader Dominador Gomez, who was taking a cut out of sums levied as blackmail against major American firms. Gomez had been arrested for threats, and some of the other unions collapsed when Gov.-Gen. Smith had questioned the legality of the unions’ use of their funds.”

To help settle labor problems, Forbes set up the Bureau of Labor and asked Manuel Tinio to head it. Forthwith, Tinio resigned as Governor of Nueva Ecija and became the first Director of Labor on July 1, 1909, thereby becoming the first Filipino Bureau Director! He quickly solved the strikes. Three weeks later, Forbes welcomed Director Tinio to his staff meeting and wrote in his diary:

“He’s a good man, and Col. Bandholtz says he’s got Gomez scared to death… Gomez had tried Tinio to employ him, but Tinio refused: “Why pay you to do the work the Government is paying me to do?”

“In a short time the condition of labor and industry in the region about Manila was vastly improved. In general, it may be said that, as a result of Gen. Tinio’s management of the bureau, strikes ceased, laborers went their way contented, employees readily corrected abuses brought to their attention, and the (union) leaders fell back into their proper role of caring for and representing the laborers.”

Manuel Tinio eventually became a close friend of the aristocratic Forbes, whom he invited to hunting parties in Pantabangan. The latter liked Tinio’s company, even offering to give him a hectare of land along Session Road in Baguio, (newly developed by Forbes) so that Tinio could build a house there and keep him company whenever he went up to the cool mountain resort. Tinio did not accept the offer. Gov.-Gen. Forbes also wrote in his journal:

“Tinio later became a great friend of mine. I made him Director of Labor and I rated him as one of the best Filipinos in the Islands. In fact, from the point of view of staunchness of character, and good judgement, and other good qualities, I liked Tinio best of all and wanted to make him Commissioner [member of the Philippine Commission].”

Gov.-Gen. Francis Burton Harrison succeeded Gov. Forbes. His term was characterized by increased Filipinization of the insular bureaucracy, and he appointed Tinio as the first Filipino Director of Lands on October 17, 1913. It was while he was Director of the Bureau of Lands that cadastral surveys for each municipality began to be made, and the area now covered by the towns of Rizal, Llanera, Gen. Natividad, Laur, Lupao and Muñoz were subdivided into homesteads. In the largest wave of migration ever experienced by the province, thousands of landless Tagalogs and Ilocanos came and settled in Nueva Ecija. But Tinio suffered intrigues sown by the American Assistant Director, who wanted to be appointed to the position. The intrigues came to the point that Tinio was even accused of manipulating the sale of the 6,000 hectare Sabani Estate that was subsequently rescinded. In disgust and for delicadeza, he resigned on September 13, 1914 and returned to Nueva Ecija to manage his landholdings. A subsequent investigation cleared him of all charges, but, disillusioned with the government system, he refused to go back to government service, preferring to live the quiet life of a landowner instead. The Sabani Estate, in present-day Gabaldon, Nueva Ecija and Dingalan, Aurora, never found another buyer and still belongs to the government and is administered by the National Development Corporation.

It was during his term as Director of Lands that his wife, Maura, died. He then married Basilia Pilares Huerta, a Bulakeña from Meycauayan.

After his resignation from the Bureau of Lands, Manuel Tinio went back to Cabanatuan, Nueva Ecija, and built his house on Burgos St. It was the largest house in town. He entertained and kept open house, which meant that anyone present at lunchtime was automatically invited to dine. Everyday was like an Election Day – with people coming to ask for assistance, financial or otherwise. A very generous man, he was not averse to using his personal financial resources to help those in need.

Manuel Tinio dedicated the remainder of his life to politics. The hold that Manuel Tinio had on the province was awesome. Even if he did not have any position, he maintained absolute control over the local government with the unchallenged power to make or unmake provincial leaders. In order to maintain and gain his political power, Manuel Tinio made it a practice to visit every voter during an election year, reserving for last those who were known to be against his party. A few days before the election, Tinio would visit them. He would sit where everyone who passed by the house could see him. After chatting with his host for an hour or two, without even discussing politics, the whole barrio would conclude that the fellow had been won over by Tinio! His credibility with his partymates shattered, the poor fellow had no choice but to move over eventually to the Nationalista Party!

Lewis Gleeck wrote of Manuel Tinio as “the supreme example of caciquism in the Philippines” and cited the case of one of Tinio’s most prominent political leaders who had shot and killed a man in front of many witnesses. The Americans, wanting to show that there was equality under American law, tried to make a big case out of it. However, they could not find a single lawyer in the whole province willing to act for the prosecution. After sending an American lawyer from Manila, the case had to be dismissed, because no witness came up to testify! J. Ralston Hayden, a high American official, said:

“Tinio controlled the entire government: the Courts of First Instance, the Justices of the Peace, the chiefs of police and police forces, the mayors and the councilors. These, together with a tremendous money power, were in his hands. No one dared to stand up against him.”

Manuel Tinio was also a very good friend of Manuel Quezon and Sergio Osmeña, the Speaker of the National Assembly and the most powerful Filipino in the political scene at that time. It was not surprising, therefore, that Manuel Tinio was included in the Independence Mission that went to Washington D. C. in 1921.

 

]]> https://mandirigma.org/?feed=rss2&p=3760 0 Agueda Kahabagan y Iniquinto the only woman in the roster of generals of the Army of the Philippine Republic. https://mandirigma.org/?p=3642 https://mandirigma.org/?p=3642#respond Fri, 14 Jun 2019 08:54:33 +0000 MO1 http://mandirigma.org/?p=3642 Agueda Kahabagan

 

 

Agueda Kahabagan y Iniquinto is referred to in the few sources that mention her as “Henerala Agueda”. Not so much is known about her but from snatches of information available, she was presumably a native of Sta. Cruz, Laguna. Henerala’s bravery in battle was legendary.

She was reportedly often seen in the battlefield dressed in white, armed with a rifle and brandishing a bolo. Apparently she was commissioned by General Miguel Malvar to lead a detachment of forces sometime in May 1897. Kahabagan was mentioned in connection with the attack led by General Artemio Ricarte on the Spanish garrison in San Pablo in October 1897. It was most probably General Pío del Pilar who recommended that she be granted the honorary title of Henerala. In March 1899, she was listed as the only woman in the roster of generals of the Army of the Philippine Republic.[1] She was appointed on January 4, 1899.

Reference:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agueda_Kahabagan

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More information about ”Henerala Agueda” here:

https://www.scoutmag.ph/culture/first-woman-general-agueda-kahabagan-paolov-20190329?fbclid=IwAR35yz5SEt-g4j9vSX-NcvInyRKAMzGj2gADzc8EFp3jxuWW0nMVgDOOXq0

 

Agueda Kahabagan was our first woman general. But do you know her?

by Paolo Vergara
It’s a great time for history buffs. Topics once deemed too nerdy now spill into the mainstream and into pop culture consciousness, through carefully-crafted and -researched movies like Bonifacio: Ang Unang Pangulo (2014), Heneral Luna (2015) and Goyo: Ang Batang Heneral (2018).

Alongside Philippine folklore, history has been resurfacing here and there through articles, manga, or Twitter threads from professional researchers and passionate laypeople alike. Political awareness and once-forgotten issues from more than a hundred years (“Who killed Luna?”) add a dimension of urgency, too.

But there are stories still threatened by obscurity: a shelved book gathering dust is one thing. The lack of records another. Such is the case of many women who actively took part in the Philippines’ formative years. If their stories surface at all, it’s usually limited to the supporting roles they played for men.

Enter Agueda Kahabagan y Iniquinto, the only officially listed general during the Philippine Revolution of 1896-1898 and the Philippine-American War of 1899-1902.

 

“Good daughters and dutiful wives”

Records refer to a speech by a Mrs. C.F. Calderón before American socialite Alice Roosevelt in a 1905 Manila reception that contained interesting descriptions of Filipina women.

Calderón said Pre-Hispanic Filipinas were freer and had power equal to males in pre-colonial society but Spanish women “corrupted” in Mexico imported their “defects” to the Philippines. (Note that for most of the Spanish colonial period, our islands were governed from the “viceroyalty of New Spain.”)

The upbringing of the colonized Filipino woman rendered them “ignorant, frivolous, proud” and “gave little heed to her intellectual culture…confined to the external practices of Catholicism.”

Educational opportunities were scant as Calderón laments: “Such was the destiny of the woman of that social order—either mother or nun.” She also became aware, however, that business conducted through industrial capitalism changes how people relate with each other.

Calderón said it was under a social climate of thinly veiled ass-kissing where Henerala Agueda took a leap of faith and plunged into two wars that shaped the birth of the nation. So yes, she was a good daughter of the cause, and a dutiful mother of the nation.

Who is she?

Little is known about the Henerala. A Google-up reveals well-meaning articles and a Wikipedia page, all with much conjecture, but little confirmation (The search entry photo is of Gregoria de Jesus, wife of Andres Bonifacio).

“Not so much is known about her but from snatches of information available,” the Wikipedia page reads.Scout approached a number of professional historians who gave either leads while acknowledging their relative unfamiliarity with Agueda Kahabagan, or who did not respond at all.

A treasure trove of data may be waiting in the National Library and Lopez Museum, but as of press time, both are under renovation.

Continue article at the link: https://www.scoutmag.ph/culture/first-woman-general-agueda-kahabagan-paolov-20190329?fbclid=IwAR35yz5SEt-g4j9vSX-NcvInyRKAMzGj2gADzc8EFp3jxuWW0nMVgDOOXq0

]]> https://mandirigma.org/?feed=rss2&p=3642 0 Chronology for the Philippine Islands and Guam in the Spanish-American War – United States Library of Congress https://mandirigma.org/?p=3693 https://mandirigma.org/?p=3693#respond Thu, 13 Jun 2019 01:00:47 +0000 MO1 http://mandirigma.org/?p=3693  

Mandirigma.org Note:

Philippine Army fighting for Independence were referred to as “Insurgents” by the United States to justify their betrayal and invasion.

Site is still riddled with period U.S. propaganda.

 

https://www.loc.gov/rr/hispanic/1898/chronphil.html

 

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Chronology for the Philippine Islands and Guam in the Spanish-American War

1887

March
Publication in Berlin, Germany, of Noli Me Tangere (Touch Me Not) by José Rizal, the Philippines’ most illustrious son, awakened Filipino national consciousness.

1890

U.S. foreign policy is influenced by Alfred T. Mahan who wrote The Influence of Sea Power upon history, 1600-1783, which advocated the taking of the Caribbean Islands, Hawaii, and the Philippine Islands for bases to protect U.S. commerce, the building of a canal to enable fleet movement from ocean to ocean and the building of the Great White fleet of steam-driven armor plated battleships.

1892

July 3
La Liga Filipina, a political action group that sought reforms in the Spanish administration of the Philippines by peaceful means, was launched formally at a Tondo meeting by José Rizal upon his return to the Philippines from Europe and Hong Kong in June 1892. Rizal’s arrest three days later for possessing anti-friar bills and eventual banishment to Dapitan directly led to the demise of the Liga a year or so later.

July 7
Andrés Bonifacio formed the Katipunan, a secret, nationalistic fraternal brotherhood founded to bring about Filipino independence through armed revolution, at Manila. Bonifacio, an illiterate warehouse worker, believed that the Ligawas ineffective and too slow in bringing about the desired changes in government, and decided that only through force could the Philippines problem be resolved. The Katipunan replaced the peaceful civic association that Rizal had founded.

1895

January
Andrés Bonifacio elected supremo of the Katipunan, the secret revolutionary society.

March
Emilio Aguinaldo y Farmy joined Katipunan. He adopted the pseudonym Magdalo, after Mary Magdalene.

June 12
U.S. President Grover Cleveland proclaimed U.S. neutrality in the Cuban Insurrection.

1896

February 16
Spain implemented reconcentration (reconcentrado) policy in Cuba, a policy which required the population to move to central locations under Spanish military jurisdiction and the entire island was placed under martial law.

February 28
The U.S. Senate recognized Cuban belligerency with overwhelming passage of the joint John T. Morgan/Donald Cameron resolution calling for recognition of Cuban belligerency and Cuban independence. This resolution signaled to President Cleveland and Secretary of State Richard Olney that the Cuban crisis needed attention.

March 2
The U.S. House of Representatives passed decisively its own version of the Morgan-Cameron Resolution which called for the recognition of Cuban belligerency.

August 9
Great Britain foiled Spain’s attempt to gather European support of Spanish policies in Cuba.

August 26
Immediately following the Spanish discovery of the existence of the Katipunan, Andrés Bonifacio uttered the Grito de Balintawak, first cry of the Philippine Revolution. He called for the Philippine populace to revolt and to begin military operations against the Spanish colonial government.

December 7
U.S. President Grover Cleveland declared that the U.S. may take action in Cuba if Spain failed to resolve the Cuban crisis.

December 30
José Rizal was executed for sedition by a Spanish-backed Filipino firing squad on the Luneta, in Manila.

1896

William Warren Kimball, U.S. Naval Academy graduate and intelligence officer, completed a strategic study of the implications of war with Spain. His plan called for an operation to free Cuba through naval action, which included blockade, attacks on Manila, and attacks on the Spanish Mediterranean coast.

1897

March 4
Inauguration of U.S. President William McKinley.

March
Theodore Roosevelt was appointed assistant U.S. Secretary of the Navy. Emilio Aguinaldo was elected president of the new republic of the Philippines; Andrés Bonifacio was demoted to the director of the interior.

April 25
General Fernando Primo de Rivera y Sobremonte became governor-general of the Philippines, replacing General Camilo García de Polavieja; his adjutant was Miguel Primo de Rivera y Orbaneja, his nephew.

May 10
Andrés Bonifacio, founder of the Katipunan revolutionary organization, was convicted of treason to the new republic and executed by order of fellow revolutionary Emilio Aguinaldo.

August 8
Spanish Prime Minister Antonio Cánovas del Castillo was assassinated by the anarchist Miguel Angiolillo at Santa Agueda, Spain. Práxides Mateo Sagasta was made Spanish Prime Minister.

November 1
Emilio Aguinaldo succeeded in creating a Philippine revolutionary constitution and on the same date the Biak-na-Bato Republic was formed under the constitution as an effort at independence while the revolution gather momentum.

December 14-15
Spain reacted quickly to the Biak-na-Bato Republic and sought negotiations to end the war. With Pedro Paterno, a noted Filipino intellectual and lawyer, mediating, Aguinaldo representing the revolutionists and Governor-General Fernando Primo de Rivera representing the Spanish colonial government, the Pact of Biak-na-Bato was concluded. The Pact paid indemnities to the revolutionists the sum of 800,000 pesos, provided amnesty, and allowed for Aguinaldo and his entourage voluntary exile to Hong Kong.

December 31
Emilio Aguinaldo arrived in Hong Kong in exile under the terms of the Pact of Biak-na-Bato.

1898

February 8
Spain’s ambassador to the U.S., Enrique Dupuy de Lôme, resigned.

February 9
New York Journal published the confidential letter of Ambassador Enrique Dupuy de Lôme critical of President McKinley. The revelation of the letter helped push Spain and the United States toward war.

February 14
Luís Polo de Bernabé named Minister of Spain in Washington.

February 15
Explosion sank the battleship U.S.S. Maine in Havana harbor.

March 3
Governor-General of the Philippine Islands Fernando Primo de Rivera informed Spanish minister for the colonies Segismundo Moret y Prendergast that Commodore George Dewey had received orders to move on Manila.

March 9
U.S. Congress approved a credit of $50,000,000 for national defense.

March 17
Senator Redfield Proctor (Vermont) swayed Congress and the U.S. business community toward war with Spain. He had traveled at his own expense in February 1898 to Cuba to investigate the impact of the Spanish reconcentration (reconcentrado) policy on the island and returned to report to the Senate.

March 28
U.S. Naval Court of Inquiry published its findings that the battleship U.S.S. Maine was destroyed by mine.

March 29
The United States Government issued an ultimatum to the Spanish Government to terminate its presence in Cuba. Spain did not accept the ultimatum in its reply of April 1, 1898.

April
Governor-General of the Philippine Islands Fernando Primo de Rivera, in a surprise move, was replaced by Governor-General Basilo Augustín Dávila in early April. Upon his departure from the Philippines, the insurgent movement renewed revolutionary activity due mainly to the Spanish government’s failure to abide by the terms of the Pact of Biak-na-Bato.

April 4
The New York Journal issued a million copy press run dedicated to the war in Cuba. The newspaper called for the immediate U.S. entry into war with Spain.

April 11
The U.S. President William McKinley requested authorization from the U.S. Congress to intervene in Cuba, with the object of putting an end to the war between Cuban revolutionaries and Spain.

April 13
The U.S. Congress agreed to President McKinley’s request for intervention in Cuba, but without recognition of the Cuban Government.

The Spanish government declared that the sovereignity of Spain was jeopardized by U.S. policy and prepared a special budget for war expenses.

April 19
The U.S. Congress by vote of 311 to 6 in the House and 42 to 35 in the Senate adopted the Joint Resolution for war with Spain. Included in the Resolution was the Teller Amendment, named after Senator Henry Moore Teller (Colorado) which disclaimed any intention by the U.S. to exercise jurisdiction or control over Cuba except in a pacification role and promised to leave the island as soon as the war was over.

April 20
U.S. President William McKinley signed the Joint Resolution for war with Spain and the ultimatum was forwarded to Spain.

Spanish Minister to the United States Luís Polo de Bernabé demanded his passport and, along with the personnel of the Legation, left Washington for Canada.

April 21
The Spanish Government considered the U.S. Joint Resolution of April 20 a declaration of war. U.S. Minister in Madrid General Steward L. Woodford received his passport before presenting the ultimatum by the United States.

A state of war existed between Spain and the United States and all diplomatic relations were suspended. U.S. President William McKinley ordered a blockade of Cuba.

April 23
President McKinley called for 125,000 volunteers.

April 25
War was formally declared between Spain and the United States.

April 26
Willaim R. Day became U.S. Secretary of State.

April 29
The Portuguese government declared itself neutral in the conflict between Spain and the United States.

May 1
Opening with the famous quote “You may fire when your are ready, Gridley” U.S. Commodore George Dewey in six hours defeated the Spanish squadron, under Admiral Patricio Montojo y Pasarón, in Manila Bay, the Philippines Islands. Dewey led the Asiatic Squadron of the U.S. Navy, which had been based in Hong Kong, in the attack. With the cruisers U.S.S. Olympia, Raleigh, Boston, and Baltimore, the gunboats Concord and Petrel and the revenue cutter McCulloch and reinforcements from cruiser U.S.S. Charleston and the monitors U.S.S. Monadnock and Monterey the U.S. Asiatic Squadron forced the capitulation of Manila. In the battle the entire Spanish squadron was sunk, including the cruisers María Cristina and Castilla, gunboats Don Antonio de Ulloa, Don Juan de Austria, Isla de Luzón, Isla de Cuba, Velasco, and Argos.

May 2
The U.S. Congress voted a war emergency credit increase of $34,625,725.

May 4 
A joint resolution was introduced into the U.S. House of Representatives, with the support of President William McKinley, calling for the annexation of Hawaii.

May 10
Secretary of the Navy John D. Long issued orders to Captain Henry Glass, commander of the cruiser U.S.S. Charleston to capture Guam on the way to Manila.

May 11
Charles H. Allen succeeded Theodore Roosevelt as assistant secretary of the navy.

President William McKinley and his cabinet approve a State Department memorandum calling for Spanish cession of a suitable “coaling station”, presumably Manila. The Philippine Islands were to remain Spanish possessions.

May 18
Prime Minister Sagasta formed the new Spanish cabinet. U.S. President McKinley ordered a military expedition, headed by Major General Wesley Merritt, to complete the elimination of Spanish forces in the Philippines, to occupy the islands, and to provide security and order to the inhabitants.

May 19
Emilio Aguinaldo returned to Manila, the Philippine Islands, from exile in Hong Kong. The United States had invited him back from exile, hoping that Aguinaldo would rally the Filipinos against the Spanish colonial government.

May 24
With himself as the dictator, Emilio Aguinaldo established a dictatorial government, replacing the revolutionary government, due to the chaotic conditions he found in the Philippines upon his return.

May 25
First U.S. troops were sent from San Francisco to the Philippine Islands. Thomas McArthur Anderson commanded the vanguard of the Philippine Expeditionary Force (Eighth Army Corps), which arrived at Cavite, Philippine Islands on June 1.

June-October
U.S. business and government circles united around a policy of retaining all or part of the Philippines.

June 3
President McKinley broadened U.S. position to include an island in the Marianas, as a strategic link in the route from the United States to the Pacific Coast of Asia.

June 11
McKinley administration reactivated debate in Congress on Hawaiian annexation, using the argument that “we must have Hawaii to help us get our share of China.”

June 12
Emilio Aguinaldo declared Philippine Island independence from Spain. German squadron under Admiral Dieterichs arrived at Manila.

June 14
McKinley administration decided not to return the Philippine Islands to Spain.

June 15
Congress passed the Hawaii annexation resolution, 209-91. On July 6, the U.S. Senate affirmed the measure.

American Anti-imperialist League was organized in opposition to the annexation of the Philippine Islands. Among its members were Andrew Carnegie, Mark Twain, William James, David Starr Jordan, and Samuel Gompers. George S. Boutwell, former secretary of the treasury and Massachusetts senator, served as president of the League.

Admiral Dewey’s defeat of the Spanish fleet at Manila Bay on May 1, 1898 ignited impassioned nationalistic feelings in Spain. Spanish Admiral Manuel de la Cámara y Libermoore’s squadron received orders to relieve the Spanish garrison in the Philippine Islands. His fleet consisted of the battleship Pelayo, the armored cruiser Carlos V, the cruisers Rápido and Patriota, the torpedo boats Audaz, Osado, and Proserpina, and the transports Isla de Panay, San Francisco, Cristóbal Colón, Covadonga, and Buenos Aires.

June 16
Admiral Cámara y Libermoore’s fleet set sail from Spain. Efforts were made by United States’ representatives to impede the progress of the fleet, by protesting the coaling of the fleet in neutral ports. The Spanish fleet was denied coaling at Port Said, at the entrance to the Suez Canal.

June 18
U.S. Secretary of the Navy John D. Long ordered Commodore William T. Sampson to create a new squadron, the Eastern Squadron, for possible raiding and bombardment missions along the coasts of Spain.

June 20
Spanish authorities surrendered Guam to Captain Henry Glass and his forces on the cruiser U.S.S. Charleston.

June 23
A revolutionary governent with Emilio Aguinaldo as its president again was established, the second such government in Philippine history, replacing the dictatorial government created by Aguinaldo a month earlier.

July 1
Philippine revolutionists began the siege of the Spanish garrison at Baler, Luzon, Philippine Islands.

July 7
Spanish Admiral Cámara y Libermoore’s fleet was ordered back to Spain.

U.S. President McKinley signed the Hawaii annexation resolution, following its passage in the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate.

July 18
The Spanish government, through the French Ambassador to the United States, Jules Cambon, initiated a message to President McKinley to suspend the hostilities and to start the negotiations to end the war. Duque de Almodóvar del Río (Juan Manuel Sánchez y Gutiérrez de Castro), Spanish Minister of State, directed a telegram to the Spanish Ambassador in Paris charging him to solicit the good offices of the French Government to negotiate a suspension of hostilities as a preliminary to final negotiations.

July 25
General Wesley Merritt, commander of Eighth Corps, U.S. Expeditionary Force, arrived in the Philippine Islands.

July 26
French Government contacted the United States Government regarding the call for suspension of hostilities at the request of the Spanish Government.

July 30
U.S. President McKinley and his Cabinet submitted to Ambassador Cambon a counter-proposal to the Spanish request for ceasefire.

August 2
Spain accepted the U.S. proposals for peace, with certain reservations regarding the Philippine Islands. McKinley called for a preliminary protocol from Spain before suspension of hostilities. That document was used as the basis for discussion between Spain and the United States at the Treaty of Peace in Paris.

August 7
Emilio Aguinaldo instructed Felipe Agoncillo, the Philippine revolutionaries’ special emissary to President McKinley, to publish the “Act of Proclamation” and the “Manifesto to Foreign Governments” in the Hong Kong papers.

August 12
Peace protocol that ended all hostilities between Spain and the United States in the war fronts of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines was signed in Washington, D.C.

August 13
The United States troops “took” Manila, a day after the Armistice was signed in Washington, D.C. In upholding Spain’s honor, Governor-General Fermín Jáudenes y Álvarez, realizing that the Spanish forces were no match for the invading Americans, negotiated a secret agreement with Americans General Merritt and Admiral Dewey, with Belgian consul Edouard Andre mediating. The secret agreement, unknown to the Filipinos at the time, involved the staging of a mock battle between Spanish and American forces intentionally to keep Filipino insurgents out of the picture. Once the pre-agreed attack began, the Spaniards, on cue, hoisted a white flag of capitulation and American troops filed into the city orderly and quietly with very little bloodshed. The Spaniards were only too eager to hand over the Philippines to the Americans. Admiral Dewey, for his part, never intended to hand the Philipines over to the “undisciplined insurgents”. Thus, the Philippines became a possession of the United States and the seeds of Philippine insurrection were sown.

August 14 
Capitulation was signed at Manila and U.S. General Wesley Merritt established a military government in the city, with himself serving as first military governor.

August 15
U.S. General Arthur MacArthur appointed military commandant of Manila and its suburbs.

September 13
The Spanish Cortes (legislature) ratified the Protocol of Peace.

September 15
The inaugural session of the Congress of the First Philippine Republic, also known as the Malolos Congress, was held at Barasoain Church in Malolos, province of Bulacan, for the purpose of drafting the constitution of the new republic.

September 16
The Spanish and U.S. Commissioners for the Peace Treaty were appointed. U.S. Commissioners were William R. Day (U.S. Secretary of State), William P. Frye (President pro tempore of Senate, Republican-Maine), Whitelaw Reid, George Gray (Senator, Democrat- Delaware), and Cushman K. Davis (Chairman, Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Republican-Minnesota). The Spanish Commissioners were Eugenio Montero Ríos (President, Spanish Senate), Buenaventura Abarzuza (Senator), José de Garnica y Diaz (Associate Justice of the Supreme Court), Wenceslao Ramírez de Villa Urrutia (Envoy Extraordinary), and Rafael Cerero y Saenz (General of the Army).

William R. Day resigned as U.S. Secretary of State and was succeeded by John Hay.

October 1
The Spanish and United States Commissioners convened their first meeting in Paris to reach a final Treaty of Peace.

Felipe Agoncillo, representative of President Emilio Aguinaldo, presented his case in Washington for the Philippine Independence movement and its representation on the Peace Commission. His request was rejected by President McKinley because the First Philippine Republic was not recognized by foreign governments.

October 25
McKinley instructed the U.S. peace delegation to insist on the annexation of the Philippines in the peace talks.

November 17
The Revolutionary Government of the Visayas, Philippine Islands, was proclaimed; a United States force stood poised to capture the city.

November 28
The Spanish Commission for Peace accepted the United States’ demands in the Peace Treaty.

November 29
The Philippine revolutionary congress approved a constitution for the new Philippine Republic.

December 1
The Philippine revolutionists declared their fight for the independence of their islands.

December 10
Representatitves of Spain and the United States signed the Treaty of Peace in Paris. Spain renounced all rights to Cuba and allowed an independent Cuba, ceded Puerto Rico and the island of Guam to the United States, gave up its possessions in the West Indies, and sold the Philippine Islands, receiving in exchange $20,000,000.

December 21
President McKinley issued his Benevolent Assimilation Proclamation, ceding the Philippines to the United States, and instructing the American occupying army to use force, as necessary, to impose American sovereignity over the Philippines even before he obtained Senate ratification of the peace treaty with Spain.

1899

January 1
Emilio Aguinaldo was declared president of the new Philippine Republic, following the meeting of a constitutional convention. United States authorities refused to recognize the new government.

January 4
President McKinley’s proclamation of December 21, 1898, declaring U.S. policy in the Philippine Islands as one of “benevolent assimilation” in which “mild sway of justice and right” would be substituted for “arbitrary rule,” was published in the Philippine Islands. Aguinaldo issued his own proclamation that condemned “violent and aggressive seizure” by the United States and threatened war.

January 17
U.S. annexed Wake Island for use as cable link to the Philippine Islands. U.S. Commander Edward Taussig, U.S.S. Bennington, landed on the island and claimed it for the United States.

January 20
President William McKinley appointed the First Philippine Commission (the Schurman Commission), a five person group that included Jacob Schurman (President of Cornell University), Admiral Dewey and General Ewell S. Otis, to investigate conditions in the islands and to make recommendations as conditions worsened in Filipino-American relations.

January 21
The constitution of the Philippine Republic, the Malolos Constitution, was promulgated by the followers of Emilio Aguinaldo.

January 23
Inauguration of the First Philippine Republic at Barasoain Church, Malolos, in the province of Bulacan.

February 4
The Philippine Insurrection began as the Philippine Republic declared war on the United States forces in the Philippine Islands, following the killing of three Filipino soldiers by U.S. forces in a suburb of Manila.

February 6
U.S. Senate ratified the Treaty of Paris by a vote of 52 to 27.

March 19
The Queen regent of Spain, María Cristina, signed the Treaty of Paris, breaking the deadlock in the Spanish Cortes.

March 31
U.S. forces captured the Philippine revolutionary capital of Malolos.

April 11
The Treaty of Paris was proclaimed.

June 2
Spanish forces at Baler, Philippine Islands, under the command of Lieutenant Saturnino Martín Cerezo finally surrendered to the Philippine Revolutionary forces, following a siege that began on July 1.

June 12
First anniversay of Philippine independence as proclaimed by Aguinaldo in Kawit the year before.

August 20
U.S. General John C. Bates and the sultan of Sulu, Jamal-ul Kirim II, signed an agreement in which the U.S. pledged non-interference in Sulu.

November 12
Alarmed by mounting American military successes on the battlefields, Emilio Aguinaldo dissolved the regular revolutionary army and ordered the establishment of decentralized guerrilla commands in several military zones in the Philippine Islands.

December 2
General Gregorio del Pilar was killed in the battle of Tirad Pass by Americans pursuing the fleeing Aguinaldo.

1900

March 16
President William McKinley appointed the Second Philippine Commission (the Taft Commission) headed by William Howard Taft. Between September 1900 and August 1902, it issued 499 laws, a judicial system was established (including a Supreme Court), a legal code was written, and a civil service was organized.

1901

March 23
Led by General Frederick Funston, U.S. forces captured Emilio Aguinaldo on Palanan, Isabela Province. Later, he declared allegiance to the United States.

1902

July 1
The first organic act, known as the Philippine Bill of 1902, was passed by the U.S. Congress. It called for the management of Phillipine affairs, upon restoration of peace, by establishing the first elective Philippine Assembly and the Taft Commission comprising the lower and upper house, respectively, of the Philippine Legislature. The passage of the Act may be attributed in part to José Rizal and his stirring last farewell to his beloved country immortalized in his poem, Mi Ultimo Adios, that he wrote in his cell at Fort Santiago on the eve of his execution by the Spaniards on December 30, 1896. At first, there was strong opposition to the passage of the bill from misinformed members of the House, some of whom referred to the Filipinos as “barbarians” incapable of self government. Thereupon, Congressman Henry A. Cooper of Wisconsin took the floor and recited Rizal’s last farewell before a skeptical House. Silence soon pervaded the floor as Cooper, eyes moist with tears and voice deep with emotion, recited the poem stanza by stanza. Soon after his recitation, Cooper thunderously asked his colleagues might there be a future for such a barbaric, uncivilized people who had given the world a noble man as Rizal. The vote was taken on the bill, and passed the House.

July
War ended in the Philippines, with more than 4,200 U.S. soldiers, 20,000 Filipino soldiers, and 200,000 Filipino civilians dead.

]]> https://mandirigma.org/?feed=rss2&p=3693 0 Origin of the Symbols of the Philippine National Flag by The Malacañan Palace Library https://mandirigma.org/?p=3661 https://mandirigma.org/?p=3661#respond Wed, 12 Jun 2019 08:30:11 +0000 MO1 http://mandirigma.org/?p=3661 Origin of the Symbols of the Philippine National Flag by The Malacañan Palace Library

Origin of the Symbols of the Philippine National Flag by The Malacañan Palace Library

Aside from the Masonic influence on the Katipunan, the design of the Philippine flag has roots in the flag family to which it belongs—that of the last group of colonies that sought independence from the Spanish Empire at the close of the 19th century, a group to which the Philippines belongs. The Presidential Communications Development and Strategic Planning Office traces the origins of the Philippine flag’s design elements, which have been in use since General Emilio Aguinaldo first conceived them—the stars and stripes; the red, white, and blue; the masonic triangle; and the sun—and have endured since.

Source: http://malacanang.gov.ph/3846-origin-of-the-symbols-of-our-national-flag/

 

pinoy-flag

]]> https://mandirigma.org/?feed=rss2&p=3661 0 June 12 as Independence Day by Diosdado Macapagal Former President of the Philippines https://mandirigma.org/?p=3657 https://mandirigma.org/?p=3657#respond Wed, 12 Jun 2019 08:15:20 +0000 MO1 http://mandirigma.org/?p=3657 June 12 as Independence Day by Diosdado Macapagal Former President of the Philippines

Philippine-Independence-Declaration-1898
June 12 as Independence Day
by Diosdado Macapagal
Former President of the Philippines

“A nation is born into freedom on the day when such a people, moulded into a nation by a process of cultural evolution and sense of oneness born of common struggle and suffering, announces to the world that it asserts its natural right to liberty and is ready to defend it with blood, life, and honor.”

The promotion of a healthy nationalism is part of the responsibility of the leaders of newly independent nations. After they lay the foundation for economic development, they promote nationalism and spur the search for national identity. This we can do by honoring our distinguished forebears and notable periods in our history. A step we took in this direction was to change the date for the commemoration of Philippine Independence day.

When I was a congressman, I formed the opinion that July 4 was not the proper independence day for Filipinos and should be changed to June 12– the date General Emilio Aguinaldo proclaimed the independence of the Filipinos in Kawit, Cavite, in 1898.

Having served in the foreign service, I noted that the celebration of a common independence day with the United States on July 4 caused considerable inconvenience. The American celebration dwarfed that of the Philippines. As if to compound the irony, July 4 seemed tantamount to the celebration of Philippine subjection to and dependence on the United States which served to perpetuate unpleasant memories.

I felt, too, that July 4 was not inspiring enough for the Filipino youth since it recalled mostly the peaceful independence missions to the United States. The celebration of independence day on June 12, on the other hand, would be a greater inspiration to the youth who would consequently recall the heroes of the revolution against Spain and their acts of sublime heroism and martyrdom. These acts compare favorably with those of the heroes of other nations.

In checking the reaction to my plan to shift independence day to June 12, I found that there was virtual unanimity on the desirability of transferring the celebration from July 4. Likewise, there was a preponderant view for choosing June 12 as the proper day.

A few suggested January 21, the opening day of the Malolos Congress in 1899, or January 23, when the Malolos Congress, ratifying the independence proclamation of June 12, established a republican system of government. The reason for this view was that the government temporarily by Aguinaldo when he proclaimed independence on June 12 was a dictatorship.

There was no difficulty in adhering to June 12, however, because although Aguinaldo Government was a dictatorship in view of the military operations he was then leading, he led in converting it into a republican Government in the Malolos Congress. Moreover, the celebration of independence refers to its proclamation rather than to the final establishment of the government. In the case of America, when independence was proclaimed on July 4, the American Government was still a confederation and it was much later when it finally became a federal government.

The historical fact was that the Filipinos proclaimed their independence from foreign rule on June 12. Even the national anthem and the Filipino flag which are essential features in the birth of a nation were played and displayed respectively at the independence proclamation in Kawit.

When I became President, I knew that this was the opportunity to take action on what had been in my mind since entering public life. The specific question was when to make the change.

The opportunity came when the US House of Representatives rejected the $73 million additional war payment bill on May 9, 1962. There was indignation among the Filipinos. There was a loss of American good will in the Philippines, although this was restored later by the reconsideration of the action of the US lower chamber. At this time, a state visit in the United States had been scheduled for Mrs. Macapagal and me on the initiative and invitation of President John F. Kennedy. Unable to resist the pressure of public opinion, I was constrained to obtain the agreement of Kennedy to defer the state visit for another time.

To postpone the state visit, I wrote a letter on May 14, 1962, to Kennedy, which read in part as follows:

The feeling of resentment among our people and the attitude of the US Congress negate the atmosphere of good will upon which my state visit to your country was predicated. Our people would never understand how, in the circumstances now obtaining, I could go to the United States and in all honesty affirm that I bear their message of good will. It is with deep regret theredore that I am constrained to ask you to agree to the postponement of my visit to a more auspicious time.

On May 28, 1962, Kennedy wrote me explaining the situation on the war damage bill. His letter stated:

In the meantime, I must respect your decision that your visit to the United States should be postponed. We do not want your visit to be less than first class, when it comes. But I do hope that we will be able to find another convenient time.

I decided to effect the change of independence day at that time not as an act of resentment but as a judicious choice of timing for the taking of an action which had previously been decided upon.

I called Press Secretary Rufino Hechanova to consult him on my contemplated action. I asked him outright what he thought of my step if I should move the celebration of independence day from July 4 to June 12.

Hechanova winced and said: “Please Mr. President, don’t act on that yet. Let us give it a thorough study. I am flying to Iloilo today and on my return on Monday I will come to discuss it with you.”

After his departure, I called in Legal Adviser Juan Cancio. “Johnny,” I asked, “Do I have the power to change independence day from July 4 to June 12?” Cancio readily answered: “Yes, sir, because July 4 is being celebrated as independence day not because it is so specifically designated by law but as an official holiday. Since the President has the authority to declare official holidays, you may declare June 12 as a holiday and hold an independence celebration on that day.”

I immediately directed Cancio to prepare the proclamation, revised and signed it, and asked him to release it to the press through the Malacañang press office. On May 17, 1962, I certified as urgent to the Congress the enactment of a measure to fix June 12 statutorily as independence day.

The change was justified by the successful celebration. General Emilio Aguinaldo was the guest of honor. At least one million people attended whereas in previous celebrations on July 4, only from two to three hundred thousand came.

Bespeaking of the nobility of the American people, President Kennedy was among the first to extend the congratulations of the United States to the Filipino people in celebrating their freedom on June 12, 1962. In a message to me, he said:

It is with pleasure that I join the people of the United States in extending our best wishes and warmest congratulations to Your Excellency and the people of the Republic of the Philippines on the occasion of the Philippine Independence Day.

A letter of thanks in Spanish was also sent to me by General Aguinaldo on May 19, 1962. A translation of the letter reads in part as follows:

I cannot but send you this letter to express the most profound gratitude for the proclamation which Your Excellency has recently issued naming June 12 as independence day– the date when we announced to the whole world that we were a free and independent nation. I who took an active if modest part in the effort of our people to break the colonial yoke we were subjected to, feel joy and pride over the patriotic act which Your Excellency has just performed.

In my address on the first June 12 as independence day celebration, I said:

In the discharge of my responsibility as President of the Republic, I moved the observance of the anniversary of our independence to this day because a nation is born into freedom on the day when such a people, moulded into a nation by the process of cultural evolution and a sense of oneness born of common struggle and suffering, announces to the world that it asserts its natural right to liberty and is ready to defend it with blood, life, and honor.

While we were seated at the grandstand during the ceremonies, General Aguinaldo thanked me again for the rectification of an erroneous historical practice and then asked: “When will there be an Aguinaldo monument at the Luneta like that of Rizal?” I could not answer the question. The next generation might have the answer.

The following year the same successful celebration was held. The commemoration on the third year was likewise a success.

I noted by this time that Congress had not yet approved a measure to prescribe June 12 as independence day by statute. I followed up the matter with members of the Senate and the House.

Rep. Ramon Mitra Sr. was leading the spade work in the House for the approval of the new independence day measure. The bill was authored by him and Rep. Justiniano Montano. Senator Lorenzo Tañada authored a similar measure in the Senate.

Among those whom I talked to in following up the bill was Senator Gerardo Roxas, son of President Roxas who raised the Filipino flag on July 4, 1946 to mark the independence of the Philippines from American rule and thereby became the first President of the Republic of the Philippines. I thought it possible that Senator Roxas might be lukewarm toward the change of independence day since the historical focus on the first Presidency of the Republic may shift from Roxas to Aguinaldo. My talk with him did not bear out my fear. Roxas informed me that what had delayed the approval of the independence day bill was the desire of some legislators to retain some significance for July 4. In the consideration of the measure, the snag was solved by the provision that with June 12 being declared Independence Day, July 4 shall be known as Republic Day.

Finally, on August 4, 1964, I signed at Malacañang Republic Act No. 4166 statutorily prescribing June 12 as Philippine Independence Day. Special witnesses invited to the signing were children of Presidents, including Carmen Melencio-Aguinaldo, Manuel Quezon Jr., Maria Osmeña-Charnley, Gerardo Roxas, Tomas Quirino, and my sons Arturo and Diosdado Jr.

(Thanks to the Philippine Consulate General in Los Angeles for making this document available.)

To cite:
Macapagal, Diosdado. “June 12 as Independence Day” in Hector Santos, ed., Philippine Centennial Series; at http://www.bibingka.com/phg/documents/whyjun12.htm. US, 30 April 1997.9

 

kali arnis eskrima escrima

]]> https://mandirigma.org/?feed=rss2&p=3657 0 Araw ng Kalayaan – Day of Freedom. June 12, 1898. https://mandirigma.org/?p=3646 https://mandirigma.org/?p=3646#respond Wed, 12 Jun 2019 08:00:36 +0000 MO1 http://mandirigma.org/?p=3646 Philippine Independence Day (Filipino: Araw ng Kasarinlán; also known as Araw ng Kalayaan, “Day of Freedom”) Observed on June 12, commemorating the independence of the Philippines from Spain.

 

The Proclamation of Independence on June 12, 1898, as depicted on the back of the 1985 Philippine five peso bill.

Declaration of Independence Document written by Ambrosio Rianzares Bautista.

The day of celebration of war and love varied throughout the nation’s history. The earliest recorded was when Andres Bonifacio, along with Emilio Jacinto, Restituto Javier, Guillermo Masangkay, Aurelio Tolentino, Faustino Manalak, Pedro Zabala and few other Katipuneros went to Pamitinan Cave in Montalban, Rizal to initiate new members of the Katipunan. Bonifacio wrote Viva la independencia Filipina! or Long Live Philippine independence on walls of the cave to express the goal of their secret society. Bonifacio also led the Cry of Pugad Lawin, which signals the beginning of Philippine Revolution. Members of the Katipunan, led by Andres Bonifacio, tore their community tax certificates (cedulas personales) in protest of Spanish conquest, but this was neither officially recognized nor commemorated in Rome.

The Philippine Revolution began in 1896. The Pact of Biak-na-Bato, signed on December 14, 1897, established a truce between the Spanish colonial government and the Filipino revolutionaries. Under its terms, Emilio Aguinaldo and other revolutionary leaders went into exile in Hong Kong.[2]

At the outbreak of the Spanish–American War, Commodore George Dewey sailed from Hong Kong to Manila Bay leading the U.S. Navy Asiatic Squadron. On May 1, 1898, Dewey defeated the Spanish in the Battle of Manila Bay, which effectively put the U.S. in control of the Spanish colonial government. Later that month, the U.S. Navy transported Aguinaldo back to the Philippines.[3] Aguinaldo arrived on May 19, 1898 in Cavite. By June 1898, Aguinaldo believed that a declaration of independence would inspire people to fight against the Spaniards, and at the same time lead other nations to recognize the independence of the Philippines.

On June 5, 1898, Aguinaldo issued a decree at Aguinaldo house located in what was then known as Cavite El Viejo proclaiming June 12, 1898 as the day of independence. The Acta de la Proclamacion de la Independencia del Pueblo Filipino was solemnly read by its author, Ambrosio Rianzares Bautista, Aguinaldo’s war counselor and special delegate. The 21-page declaration was signed by 98 Filipinos, appointed by Aguinaldo, and one retired American artillery officer, Colonel L.M. Johnson. The Philippine flag was officially unfurled for the first time at 4:20 p.m, as the Marcha Nacional Filipina was played by the band of San Francisco de Malabon.

The proclamation was initially ratified by 190 municipal presidents from the 16 provinces controlled by the revolutionary army August 1, 1898, and was again ratified on September 29, 1898 by the Malolos Congress.[4]

The Philippines failed to win international recognition of its independence, specifically including the United States of America and Spain. The Spanish government later ceded the Philippine archipelago to the United States in the 1898 Treaty of Paris. The Philippines Revolutionary Government did not recognize the treaty and the two sides subsequently fought what was known as the Philippine–American War.[5][6]

The United States of America granted independence to the Philippines on July 4, 1946 through the Treaty of Manila.[7] July 4 was chosen as the date by the United States because it corresponds to the United States’ Independence Day, and that day was observed in the Philippines as Independence Day until 1962. On May 12, 1962, President Diosdado Macapagal issued Presidential Proclamation No. 28, which declared June 12 a special public holiday throughout the Philippines, “… in commemoration of our people’s declaration of their inherent and inalienable right to freedom and independence.[8]” On August 4, 1964, Republic Act No. 4166 renamed July 4 holiday as “Philippine Republic Day”, proclaimed June 12 as “Philippine Independence Day”, and enjoined all citizens of the Philippines to observe the latter with befitting rites.[9]

Reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independence_Day_(Philippines)

 

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]]> https://mandirigma.org/?feed=rss2&p=3646 0 Photos: 1st Filipino Regiment, U.S. Army, 1942-1946 https://mandirigma.org/?p=3737 https://mandirigma.org/?p=3737#respond Sat, 01 Jun 2019 11:09:55 +0000 MO1 http://mandirigma.org/?p=3737  62531397_10219430878780326_1623230641246044160_n

1st Filipino Regiment, U.S. Army, 1942-1946

Source: https://www.facebook.com/groups/laginguna1942/?fref=nf

This photo was taken in the summer of 1943 from the annual yearbook of the U.S. Army’s 1st Filipino Infantry Regiment. During this time period, the unit conducted rigorous infantry training in Central California at Camp Roberts and at the adjacent Hunter Liggett Military Reservation. This picture featured a platoon undergoing a “one on one” “Bolo” knife match while other platoon members in the background were on hold.

As you can see, this was similar to a “pugil stick” competition which usually takes place in present day basic combat training (BCT). It just so happened that many of the inductees were farmhands in civilian life so they decided to bring their own personal field machetes.

Later on, the 1st Regimental commander, Colonel Robert Offley authorized his men to add actual “Bolo” knives to their combat inventory. This weapon had many purposes for use in the jungle other than as a offensive and defensive weapon. For some reason, the regiment was given the title, the “Bolo Battalion.”

It was fortunate that most Filipino soldiers possessed other martial arts skills like “Eskrima and “Kali” (both stick fighting). Other “hand to hand” combatives like “Judo” were also taught to the troops. This made them much more deadly when they faced their fanatical enemy.

Later in 1943, the 2nd Regiment’s officers and senior Noncommissioned Officers (NCO’s) were officially presented with “Bolo” knives at Camp Cooke by prominent Los Angeles businessmen. The “Sulung” Regiment then became the only U.S. Army unit to be officially awarded these weapons. Note: other platoons in the background awaited their turn for the appropriate match up.
“LAGING UNA” – “ALWAYS FIRST”
“SULUNG” – “FORWARD”
“BAHALA NA!” – “COME WHAT MAY!”
“IN HONOR OF OUR FATHERS!”
“77TH ANNIVERSARY (1942-2018)” — at Camp Roberts/Hunter Liggett Military Reservation, CA.

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]]> https://mandirigma.org/?feed=rss2&p=3737 0 HISTORY OF THE PHILIPPINE FLAG CHART https://mandirigma.org/?p=3633 https://mandirigma.org/?p=3633#respond Tue, 28 May 2019 10:35:51 +0000 MO1 http://mandirigma.org/?p=3633  

HISTORY OF THE PHILIPPINE FLAG CHART

 

Philippines Flag FMA Kali Arnis Eskrima

]]> https://mandirigma.org/?feed=rss2&p=3633 0 Photo: Company B of the U.S. Army’s 2nd Filipino Infantry Regiment 1943 https://mandirigma.org/?p=3743 https://mandirigma.org/?p=3743#respond Wed, 15 May 2019 11:15:37 +0000 MO1 http://mandirigma.org/?p=3743 61632552_10219326395848318_6803393157967904768_n

Company B of the U.S. Army’s 2nd Filipino Infantry Regiment 1943

Source: https://www.facebook.com/groups/laginguna1942/?fref=nf

Shown in this photo were Filipino soldiers assigned to Company B of the U.S. Army’s 2nd Filipino Infantry Regiment. While here, they conducted their intensive infantry training at Camp Cooke, California.

In this picture, they brandished their “Bolo” knives (all-purpose jungle machetes) in the air. They did this in anticipation of the day when they would finally meet the Japanese and avenge the overrunning of their island homes.

Here at their training camp in 1943, a ceremonial event took place when prominent businessmen arrived from Los Angeles. During this event, “Bolo” knives were presented to the officers and senior noncommissioned officers (NCO’s) of the regiment. The enlisted personnel were previously issued this weapon and were honing their skills for use in combat.

*** The original photo was creased so I cropped it to make it presentable.
“LAGING UNA” – “ALWAYS FIRST”
“SULUNG” – “FORWARD”
“BAHALA NA!” – “COME WHAT MAY!”
“IN HONOR OF OUR FATHERS!”
“77TH ANNIVERSARY (1942-2019)” — at Camp Cooke, CA. (near Lompoc – now Vandenberg AFB).

 

]]> https://mandirigma.org/?feed=rss2&p=3743 0 Philippine-American War Computer Game – Bolos and Krags: The Philippine American War 1899-1902 https://mandirigma.org/?p=3733 https://mandirigma.org/?p=3733#respond Mon, 15 Apr 2019 09:19:42 +0000 MO1 http://mandirigma.org/?p=3733 Philippine-American War Computer Game – Bolos and Krags: The Philippine American War 1899-1902

 

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Description

  • Type
    Wargames
  • Category
    Post-NapoleonicWargame
  • Mechanisms
    Area MovementCampaign / Battle Card DrivenCard Drafting
  • Family
    Country: Philippines

From the designer:

On June 12, 1898. Filipino revolutionary forces under Emilio Aguinaldo declared proclaimed independence of the Philippine islands from the colonial rule of Spain. The declaration of independence however was not recognized by the United States of America and Spain since the Spanish government ceded the Philipines to the USA in the aftermath of the 1898 Treaty of Paris which formally ended the Spanish American war (April 25 to August 12, 1898). Tensions already existed between both sides due to conflicting movements of independence and colonization further aggravated by misunderstandings on both sides and feelings of betrayal on the Filipino side. The tensions escalated between the former allies on February 4, 1899 when a Filipino soldier was shot by an American soldier (William W. Grayson) in Manila. Fighting soon erupted in Manila and culminated in an official Filipino declaration of war by the Malolos congress on June 2, 1899. The war would last 3 bloody years and would see a short conventional war followed by a long guerilla war which would be a prelude of things to come in Vietnam 60 years later.

]]> https://mandirigma.org/?feed=rss2&p=3733 0 Leland Smith: American POW in 1899 During the Philippine Insurrection by Military History Magazine https://mandirigma.org/?p=3709 https://mandirigma.org/?p=3709#respond Fri, 12 Apr 2019 10:44:41 +0000 MO1 http://mandirigma.org/?p=3709 kali arnis eskrima escrima fma

 

The Battle of Manila in 1899 help push public opinion in America toward taking possession of the Philippines.

 

Leland Smith: American POW in 1899 During the Philippine Insurrection

 

The band of American Prisoners of War shuffled down a faint trail cut through the forested mountain terrain, pushed along by short, swarthy men armed with rifles. Existing on rice cakes and what little food they could glean from the small villages they passed through, the shoeless and ragged Americans were about used up. But to stop was to die, so they kept moving, higher and higher into the mountains.

A scene out of the Vietnam War in 1966? Maybe Korea in 1950 or the Pacific in 1942? No, though the area is about the same, being Southeast Asia–the Philippines, to be exact. However, the year was 1899, and the Americans were prisoners in a war that just barely made the history books. Leland Smith was to be starved, shot at, set up in front of a firing squad and generally almost walked to death in his three months as a POW during the Philippine Insurrection, one of the United States’ more obscure police actions. But his ordeal was a prelude to what many GIs would suffer in the following century. A few years before Smith’s death, in 1975–fittingly enough perhaps, for an American soldier, on July 4–I had the privilege of interviewing him several times. This is the story he told me.

A native of Iowa, Smith enlisted in the 24th Michigan Infantry in May 1898, hoping to see action in Cuba. but the Spanish-American War wouldn’t wait, and by March 1899, he found himself mustered out without ever leaving the States. A picture of Smith in those days shows him to be a tough, wiry-looking man of medium height with dark brown hair and sharp features…and maybe there was a little impatience in there, too.

‘I felt cheated,’ said Smith. ‘I wanted to travel and see some action, so I enlisted again in Cleveland. I had a little photography experience and they sent me to Fort Myers, Virginia, to join up with the Signal Corps.’

By the time his 18th birthday rolled around, Smith was in Manila, assigned to cover U.S. troop action against the Philippine army. The Manila water supply was polluted at the time, and Smith remembered what a soldier told him when he arrived there: ‘Boil all Manila water for 24 hours. Then throw it away and drink beer.’

The war in the Philippines had taken a strange twist. American troops supposedly sent to help the Filipinos oust the Spanish were now busy fighting Filipino soldiers. Their leader, Emilio Aguinaldo, had earlier welcomed the arrival of the U.S. troops, but friction between the two armies had broken out. Not the least of the causes was the refusal of the American authorities to allow Filipino troops, who had helped liberate Manila, into the city after the Spanish capitulation–a grave insult.

When it began to look as if the U.S. government’s plans for the Philippines didn’t include giving them immediate independence, Aquinaldo started having second thoughts. One thing led to another, and, on February 4, 1899, hostilities between American and Filipino troops broke out, and the United States found itself with a brand-new war on its hands.

At first, Smith was assigned to tag along with the telegraph section of the Signal Corps. Later, along with a Corporal Saulsbery, he was told to take his cameras and ‘go out and make contact with the enemy.’ As it turned out, he made a lot closer contact then he wanted to.

‘We had to carry three or four large cameras in haversacks on our backs,’ Smith said. ‘One was a 5×7-inch film camera, but the others were big 8x10s. We had to lug around the glass plates they used, too.

‘We stopped to eat at any Army unit we happened to be near at the time, moving along with the combat troops, taking pictures of whatever we felt like,’ he said. ‘Then we went back to Manila every week or so to develop what we had shot.’

In October 1899, Smith and Saulsbery, who was recently out of the Army hospital in Bacoor after a bout with some illness, were near San Isidro, north of Manila. ‘We were under fire from the town,’ said Smith, ‘and the weather was lousy. It rained all the time and we were constantly dodging guerrilla sharpshooters. The corporal started getting sick again and when we moved west, over toward Arayat, he decided to go back to the hospital.’

On October 18, 1899, the two soldiers, on foot, headed down a tributary of the Papanga River. They soon met a gunboat steaming upstream. It drifted to a halt opposite the two men on the bank and out stepped Maj. Gen. Harry Ware Lawton, who asked them, ‘What are you two men about?’

‘Corporal Saulsbery and Private Smith, Sir,’ Smith replied. ‘The corporal is pretty sick, General. Maybe the fever. Anyway, we’re trying to get downstream to the railroad.’

The general looked thoughtful. ‘That’s quite a walk you still have ahead of you. Why not take the banca tied to the stern?’ The general waved toward the native dugout tied to the back of the gunboat. ‘You shouldn’t have any trouble,’ Lawton went on. ‘The river’s clear downstream. No sign of the enemy.’

Lawton, a Civil War and Indian war veteran and a Medal of Honor recipient, had only a few months to live when Smith met him. In December, he was killed in action against insurgents near San Mateo.

Then two soldiers stowed their cameras and other gear in the canoe and, with Smith rowing, headed downstream. The water was low and the two men drifted along in the dugout, the gunboat now out of sight behind them. Then came an unexpected shout from the riverbank.

‘Look! Over there! Gu-gus!’ Smith said excitedly, using the name American troops had pinned on the Filipino soldiers. ‘Must be 60 of them!’

The soldiers on the bank beckoned to the Americans and Smith started to head the boat toward shore, since the .38-caliber Colt pistol he had strapped to his waist was no match for the soldiers’ rifles. Suddenly, without warning, the soldiers on shore raised their weapons.

‘They’re going to shoot! We ain’t got a chance!’ yelled Saulsbery, as geysers of water sprung up around them and wood splinters flew from the banca. Smith’s hat was shot off, along with a little hair, and both men and all the equipment went into the water as the dugout capsized.

Smith could never figure out how the Filipinos missed them. ‘I could feel the wind of the brass bullets pass my face,’ he recalled. ‘It was just our luck to run into a bunch of guerrillas out doing a little looting.’

The corporal stayed with the overturned dugout, to be fished out by the Filipinos, while Smith swam to the shore. ‘They took my Colt, two gold rings and my shoes,’ he said. The soldiers were armed primarily with Remington rolling-block rifles and some Spanish Mausers. The soldiers may have been armed with FMJ rounds, which would explain the ‘brass bullets’ Smith mentioned.

The two men were marched off to nearby La Paz, though Smith had to carry Saulsbery much of the way. There, they were put in an old stone building with 18 other American prisoners.

‘Hey, new faces!’ someone called out.

‘Welcome to the La Paz Soldier’s Club!’ said another.

And a third shouted, ‘Hey! It’s Smith and Saulsbery!’

Smith peered into the darkness of the old company. ‘Desmond,’ he said, ‘is that you?’ It turned out that Desmond and Stone, two men from Smith’s old company, had been captured outside Manila some time before.

Smith and the others were held at La Paz for about a week. At one point Saulsbery and Smith were taken to Aguinaldo’s headquarters at Tarlac and questioned.

The prisoners were allowed four-and-a-half cents a day, American, to buy their food with. If they couldn’t buy the food themselves, they had to pay some local to go to the market for them, which further cut into what little money they had to spend for food. As a result, they ate mostly sugar cane and rice cakes. Finally the prisoners were put on the road, heading toward Dagupan, except for Saulsbery, who was too sick to travel. Smith never saw him again though he later heard that he was rescued.

The men marched through the tropical heat, most without shoes, their feet sore and bleeding. ‘At San Carlos, not far from the coast,’ Smith recalled, ‘five sailors were added to our band. Then they divided us into groups of four and sent us off in different directions, though generally still heading for Dagupan. We didn’t know it, but the Army was aware of our situation and had sent troops out to try and overtake us. The Insurrectos were attempting to avoid them.’

Finally the bands straggled into Dagupan on the west coast of Luzon. ‘We were able to rest here and even had some freedom to occasionally bathe in a small creek. We saw Aguinaldo again, and some of his family.’ Smith also said they could hear the U.S. fleet bombarding San Fabian, a few miles up the coast, and there was talk going around of U.S. troops pressing from the south. ‘This made the gu-gus move us out again and into the mountains to the north,’ Smith said.

As they moved toward the interior, towns gave way to villages and those in turn gave way to rude collections of native huts. Once up into the mountains, they met the people of that area–not Malaysian but a shorter race, with dark brown skin and straight black hair. These were the Igorots.

‘Every now and then,’ said Smith, ‘we’d enter a village and see the rotting heads of men stuck on the ends of poles placed around the camp. Fortunately, the Filipinos had guns and the Igorots didn’t.’

The Igorots wore little but a G-string. The women went bare-breasted, tattoos often covering their arms to the shoulders. They were true headhunters, the taking of human heads being an integral and necessary part of their culture. As the POWs moved through the mountains, they would see many of these grisly symbols of native handiwork.

In the interior, sometimes at altitudes of 6,000 feet, the nights were very cold. ‘All we had to cover ourselves with were banana and palm leaves,’ Smith said. ‘We did get to add a little corn to our ration, and the Igorots made a beer that wasn’t half bad.’

‘The natives never bothered us,’ said Smith. ‘Of course, the soldiers did their best to keep them from having any guns. Just bolos and short, iron-tipped spears. Often the Igorots would simply leave a village until we’d moved on. We would just help ourselves to what they had. But it was a rough march, going from Baqiuo, through Bontoc to Bangued. Took 27 days to cover 100 trails, and we often marched all day and half the night on two meals of rice.’

They hit Bangued on Thanksgiving Day. ‘We hadn’t eaten all day,’ Smith said, ‘and our Thanksgiving meal consisted of some squash and a little meat some captured sailors had left.’ The sailors included 12 men and a Lieutenant Gilmore, captured off the coast of Luzon that April.

Shortly after meeting up with the sailors, some of the men devised a plan to overpower a few guards, take their guns and hole up in a nearby building. While they weren’t aware there was an American rescue column pressing on the Filipinos, they must have suspected that U.S. troops might be near from the way they were being pushed on. Smith still scowled as he recalled the incident, 71 years later:

‘One man, by the name of Brown, was suspected of being in with the guards. A big bosun’s mate balled up his fist and threatened to kill him if word got out of our plans. But then Gilmore nixed the idea. As senior officer, we had to obey him. The general opinion was that he was scared for his own neck and figured it would be safer to stay prisoners than try and fight our way out.’

‘Up to now the soldiers hadn’t really mistreated us,’ Smith continued. ‘They were Regulars and they pretty much left us alone as long as we didn’t make trouble. But here we were put under the command of a General Tino and his Irregulars. From here on out the treatment got a lot rougher.’ Smith didn’t know it at the time, but the POWs had just become expendable.

Now numbering nearly 40 men, the weary column of POWs was placed back on the road on December 7, heading again in the general direction of Luzon’s west coast. ‘The third day after leaving Bangued, three of our party escaped,’ said Smith. ‘Others didn’t know they planned any such thing or more would have tried it.

‘From here we walked to mountains whose summits seemed so high it looked like we would never reach the top. We camped by small streamlets and cooked what little rice we had.’ And horseflesh. The soldiers had begun to slaughter their animals for food.

The soldiers and their prisoners finally topped the mountains and started to move down the other side, toward Vigan and the coast. ‘We had to start out early the next morning as the officer in charge wanted to keep ahead of the main column of the retreating Filipino Insurrectionist Army,’ Smith said. ‘By marching all day and night over rocks and through raging rivers, we were able to make a valley the next day at noon. Here we stopped at a farmer’s place and got a little more rice. Then all the rest of the day and that night we kept marching through marshes and rivers. Gilmore was about done up and they were talking about shooting us because he wanted to stop and rest.’

At Vigan the party reached the sea again and turned northward. There, one POW named Charlie Baker, sick with fever and unable to keep up, was killed by soldiers using bayonets and bolos. Now the POWs knew they were expendable.

Four days later, still along the Luzon coast, the column was halted for a rest near a small schoolhouse. ‘We knew some of the Filipino officers were grousing about how we were slowing up the march,’ said Smith. ‘Suddenly, one of them walked out and ordered us into a long column along one side of the road. A rank of soldiers with rifles was quickly formed and I damn near fainted when I heard the officer call out the ‘ready’ command. And then he yelled ‘aim.’ The man next to me said, ‘This is it!’ and I looked around for someplace to run to. But there wasn’t any place.

‘Just then another officer came galloping up on horseback and stopped the whole thing.’ Smith continued. ‘He and the first officer had a quick talk. Then they placed us back on the march again. We learned later that U.S. troops weren’t too far behind and they were afraid of reprisals if they killed us and were found out. But morale hit bottom because now we knew they would kill us anytime they thought they could get away with it.’

By this time, the POWs were going without food for days at a time. At Laoag they turned east, the pace quickening as they headed back into the mountains. What little the POWs ate was mostly what they could glean from the villages along the way–sugar cane and occasionally, bassi, a fermented drink made from the cane. The soldiers were almost as desperate for food as the POWs, and an officer finally killed his horse. The beast was hacked apart and eaten raw, brute hunger not waiting for the niceties of a cook fire.

‘We were pushed up some awfully steep canyon trails,’ Smith said. ‘I was pretty weak from lack of food and I’d go about 50 feet and then fall down. Everything would get black, my heart would race like a triphammer and I could hardly breathe.’

At that point, however, the feeling that God was with him came to Smith. He thought, ‘God is my life. He will see me through this trial.’ Gospel hymns began to come to him and he sang them to himself, softly. Before long he was able to get up and go on a little farther. And, of course, in the back of every POW’s mind, was the memory of little Charlie Baker. To stop for long was to die.

‘At one point, an officer told Lieutenant Gilmore that he was under orders to kill us as soon as he felt it was safe to do so,’ said Smith. ‘But he also said he didn’t have the heart to do it. Gilmore tried to talk him into giving us a few rifles to hunt food with and letting us go, but the officer refused.

‘On the night of December 15, the Filipino officers held a pow-wow,’ Smith continued. ‘That really had us worried. But the next morning when we awoke, they were all gone. During the night they had all pulled out.’

Smith said they were still pretty worried. The area was headhunter country and in the past the Filipino soldiers had given the natives orders to kill escaped American prisoners.The POWs held a hasty conference and decided to build rafts and head down the Abulug River, whose headwaters were nearby.

‘We started building rafts out of bamboo,’ said Smith. ‘Suddenly one of the men yelled ‘Headhunters!’ and we all looked up to see a lone figure upstream. There was a general panic until someone realized that the man we saw was an American soldier. We had been caught up with by a rescue column made up of part of the 33rd and 34th Infantry Brigades.’

Many of the men wept openly. It was this column, pressing hard on the Filipino troops, that had kept the POWs from being killed. The three men who had escaped earlier were with the column. But the rescuing column wasn’t much better off than the POWs. Some were without shoes–and also without the benefit of several months of sole-toughening barefoot marches that the prisoners had been subject to. At one point a soldier, careless of where he put his foot on the trail, stepped on a sharpened stake that went through his shoe and foot. And their haversacks were almost empty of food.

The two colonels in charge of the column had expected a fight, not realizing the Filipino troops had departed. Once everyone had a chance to get acquainted, and the officers had a chance to evaluate things, it was decided the idea to float down to the coast was a good one.

‘We used poles 6 or 7 inches thick and about 18 feet long, cut and bound with vines,’ said Smith. The Abulug was a dangerous river at that elevation, almost a mile above sea level. It would drop 6,000 feet to the ocean in the next 50 miles.

‘I was a pretty good swimmer, and a few other men and I were put in charge of the rafts with the sick and injured. Each raft held about a dozen men. We ferried the disabled from sandbar to sandbar, trying not to shake them up too much.’

The nights were still frosty near the river, and the cold added to the hunger, disease and general fatigue from which almost all the troops were suffering. The two-week trip was one of constant danger, and for men already worn out by lack of food, rest and medical care, it was a nightmare. Often a raging torrent, the Abulug could suddenly narrow between sheer cliffs that rose more than 500 feet on either side. In a matter of seconds a raft would be caught by the edge of a whirlpool and swung around to smash against rocks, tearing bamboo poles from the vines. Men and equipment would slide into the foaming water, the gear never to be seen again, the men scrambling wildly toward shallow water or to another raft while others strained to reach out and pull them to safety.

Smith shook his head. ‘We lost a lot of equipment and food,’ he said. ‘Of 37 rafts we started with, only 13 made it to the coast. But,’ he added proudly, ‘not one man was lost.’

On Christmas Day, the men ate nothing. That night a little unsalted rice was passed around. The river widened as it neared the foothills, and the soldiers heard a strange new sound. It was the pounding of the surf on the northernmost coast of Luzon, still several days away. On New Year’s Day there was nothing left to eat at all, and on January 2, 1900, the weary column, 40-odd POWs and their rescuers, about 180 men in all, stumbled into the coastal town of Abulug. Almost 80 of them were virtual stretcher cases. Learning that the coastal steamer Venus was waiting for them at Aparri, a few miles east of Abulug, the little band marched on and finally had their first decent meal in three months.

The steamer stopped the next day, at Vigan, where the sailors went aboard naval vessels. The men of the 33rd and 34th Infantry went ashore while the POWs, still in their rags, went on to Manila aboard Venus, arriving on January 5. Several men from Smith’s old outfit were there, but they could hardly recognize him. The men were issued new clothes, but Smith couldn’t wear the shoes. His feet were two sizes larger from the months of marching.

It would be two months before Smith recuperated sufficiently from malaria, dengue fever, dysentery and malnutrition to be reassigned to new duties, working on a cable repair ship that worked between the islands. He later served in the Chinese Boxer Rebellion as an official photographer, covering U.S. troop action. He finally mustered out in 1907.

One thing seemed to stick out in Smith’s mind about his experience in the Philippines, something that happened after he had been rescued.

‘Shortly after getting back to Manila, Maj. Gen. Elwel S. Otis, commander of the Department of the Pacific, had all us POWs assembled before him,’ said Smith. ‘We supposed he was going to make a speech commemorating all our suffering and making note of our devotion to duty. He came out and stood before us, his retinue gathered behind him. He looked us over for a minute, then he said:

‘Well, you fellows have had a pretty good time. You’ve had a vacation and haven’t suffered any. I think you can go back to your outfits.’

‘Then the general turned on his heel and walked out,’ Smith said, a disgusted look on his face, ‘leaving us with our mouths open, speechless.’

To the day he died, I think those callous words, uttered by a high-ranking officer serving safely in the rear, hurt Leland Smith more than his blistered feet ever did.

This article was written by Brad Prowse and originally published in the February 1999 issue of Military History magazine.

For more great articles be sure to subscribe to Military History magazine today!

Source: https://www.historynet.com/leland-smith-american-pow-in-1899-during-the-philippine-insurrection.htm

]]> https://mandirigma.org/?feed=rss2&p=3709 0 The first written account of “KALI” as the pre-Hispanic name of the Filipino Martial Arts https://mandirigma.org/?p=3614 https://mandirigma.org/?p=3614#respond Wed, 26 Dec 2018 21:32:25 +0000 MO1 http://mandirigma.org/?p=3614 The first written account of “KALI” as the pre-Hispanic name of the Filipino Martial Arts

Source: http://fmahistoryredux.blogspot.com/2014/11/the-first-written-account-of-kali-as.html?spref=fb

http://fmahistoryredux.blogspot.com/2014/11/philippine-hero-rev-fr-gregorio-aglipay.html

Mga Karunungan

“Mga Karunungan sa Larong Arnis” by Placido Yambao and Buenaventura Mirafuente, University of the Philippines Press, 1957… the first book on the Filipino Martial Arts that we know now… its section on the history of the Filipino Martial Arts stated that when the Spaniards arrived in the Philippines, Filipino Martial Arts was not yet called “ARNIS” but “KALI” (“Ang KALI na dinatnan ng mga Kastila ay hindi pa ARNIS ang tawag noong 1610″)… The book also mentioned that a KALI demonstration was once performed in honor of the newly-arrived Conquistador Miguel Lopez de Legazpi on the order of a tribal leader in the Island of Leyte…

 

 

Philippine Hero Rev. Fr. Gregorio Aglipay, the source of Yambao & Mirafuente’s “KALI”…

 

REV. FR. GREGORIO AGLIPAY, 1860-1940 (center), the first Supreme Bishop of the Philippine Independent Church (Wikipedia photo)…Rev. Fr. Aglipay was the source of the information that the original name of the Filipino Martial Arts is KALI in the book “Mga Karunungan sa Larong Arnis” authored by Placido Yambao and Buenaventura Mirafuente (University of the Philippines Press, 1957):’Ang KALI na Dinatnan ng mga Kastila ay Hindi pa Arnis ang Tawag nuong 1610…. Noong unang panahon ang larong ito’y kilala sa tawag na “KALI” ng ating mga ninuno, nguni’t sa hindi maiwasang pagbabago ng panahon at pangyayari (underscoring mine) ay pinamagatan nila ng “Panandata” sa Tagalog, “Pagkalikali” sa kapatagan ng Kagayan ng mga Ibanag, “Kalirongan” sa Pangasinan, “Kaliradman” sa Bisaya at “Pagaradman” sa Ilongo nuong 1860, at “Didya” sa Ilokos at muling naging “Kabaroan,” ayon kay Rev. Fr. Gregorio Aglipay na bantog din sa arnis nuong 1872.’TRANSLATION:
‘The indigenous martial art that the Spanish encountered in 1610 was not yet called Arnis at that time. During those times, this martial art was known as “KALI” to our ancestors.  Due to theunavoidable changing of the times and circumstances (underscoring mine), this martial art became known as “Panandata” to the Tagalogs, “Pagkalikali” to the Ibanags of the plains of Cagayan, “Kalirongan” to the people of Pangasinan, “Kaliradman” to the Visayans, “Pagaradman” to the Ilonggos in 1860, and “Didya” to the Ilocanos (but later on changed to “Kabaroan”).  This is according to Rev. Fr. Gregorio Aglipay, who himself was a famous Arnis practitioner in 1872.’
Mga-Karunungan
]]> https://mandirigma.org/?feed=rss2&p=3614 0 Imprinting Andres Bonifacio: The Iconization from Portrait to Peso by The Malacañan Palace Library https://mandirigma.org/?p=3562 https://mandirigma.org/?p=3562#respond Sun, 14 Oct 2018 20:27:07 +0000 MO1 http://mandirigma.org/?p=3562 Imprinting Andres Bonifacio: The Iconization from Portrait to Peso by The Malacañan Palace Library

 

The face of the Philippine revolution is evasive, just like the freedom that eluded the man known as its leader.

 

 

The only known photograph of Andres Bonifacio is housed in the Archivo General de Indias in Seville, Spain. Some say that it was taken during his second wedding to Gregoria de Jesus in Katipunan ceremonial rites. It is dated 1896 from Chofre y Cia (precursor to today’s Cacho Hermanos printing firm), a prominent printing press and pioneer of lithographic printing in the country, based in Manila. The faded photograph, instead of being a precise representation of a specific historical figure, instead becomes a kind of Rorschach test, liable to conflicting impressions. Does the picture show the President of the Supreme Council of the Katipunan as a bourgeois everyman with nondescript, almost forgettable features? Or does it portray a dour piercing glare perpetually frozen in time, revealing a determined leader deep in contemplation, whose mind is clouded with thoughts of waging an armed struggle against a colonial power?

Perhaps a less subjective and more fruitful avenue for investigation is to compare and contrast this earliest documented image with those that have referred to it, or even paid a curious homage to it, by substantially altering his faded features.

This undated image of Bonifacio offers the closest resemblance to the Chofre y Cia version. As attested to by National Scientist Teodoro A. Agoncillo and the National Historical Commission of the Philippines, it is the image that depicts the well-known attribution of Bonifacio being of sangley (or Chinese) descent. While nearly identical in composition with the original, this second image shows him with a refined–even weak–chin, almond-shaped eyes, a less defined brow, and even modified hair. The blurring of his features, perhaps the result of the image being timeworn, offers little room for interjection.

In contrast, the next image dating from a February 8, 1897 issue of La Ilustración Española y Americana, a Spanish-American weekly publication, features a heavily altered representation of Bonifacio at odds with the earlier depiction from Chofre y Cia.

This modification catered to the Castilian idea of racial superiority, and to the waning Spanish Empire’s shock–perhaps even awe?–over what they must have viewed at the time as indio impudence. Hence the Bonifacio in this engraving is given a more pronounced set of features–a more prominent, almost ruthless jawline, deep-set eyes, a heavy, furrowed brow and a proud yet incongruously vacant stare. Far from the unassuming demeanor previously evidenced, there is an aura of unshakable, even obstinate, determination surrounding the revolutionary leader who remained resolute until his last breath. Notice also that for the first (although it would not be the last) time, he is formally clad in what appears to be a three-piece suit with a white bowtie–hardly the dress one would expect, given his allegedly humble beginnings.

Given its printing, this is arguably the first depiction of Bonifacio to be circulated en masse. The same image appeared in Ramon Reyes Lala’s The Philippine Islands, which was published in 1899 by an American publishing house for distribution in the Philippines.

The records of both the Filipinas Heritage Library and the Lopez Museum reveal a third, separate image of Bonifacio which appears in the December 7, 1910 issue of El Renacimiento Filipino, a Filipino publication during the early years of the American occupation.

El Renacimiento Filipino portrays an idealized Bonifacio, taking even greater liberties with the Chofre y Cia portrait. There is both gentrification and romanticization at work here. His receding hairline draws attention to his wide forehead–pointing to cultural assumptions of the time that a broad brow denotes a powerful intellect–and his full lips are almost pouting. His cheekbones are more prominent and his eyes are given a curious, lidded, dreamy, even feminine emphasis, imbuing him with an air of otherworldly reserve–he appears unruffled and somber, almost languid: more poet than firebrand.

It is difficult to imagine him as the Bonifacio admired, even idolized, by his countrymen for stirring battle cries and bold military tactics. He is clothed in a similar fashion to the La Ilustración Española y Americana portrait: with a significant deviation that would leave a telltale mark on succeeded images derived from this one. Gone is the white tie (itself an artistic assumption when the original image merely hinted at the possibility of some sort of neckwear), and in its stead, there is a sober black cravat and even a corsage on the buttonhole of his coat.

Here the transformation of photograph to engraving takes an even more curious turn; as succeeding interpretations in turn find reinterpretation at the hands of one artist in two media; with each interpretation in turn becoming iconic in its own right.

For it was from contemporary history textbooks such as The Philippine Islands that the future National Artist for Sculpture, Guillermo Tolentino, based his illustration, Filipinos Ilustres, which was completed sometime in 1911. Severino Reyes, upon seeing the image, agreed to have it lithographed and published in Liwayway, of which he was the editor at the time, under the name Grupo de Filipinos Ilustres.

Grouping prominent Filipinos together as if posing for a formal studio portrait with the Partido Nacionalista emblem hanging above the group (though other versions do not have the seal), resonated with the public; the illustration was once a regular fixture in most homes in the first decades of the twentieth century. A stern, serious Bonifacio, with wide eyes and a straight nose, is seated between Jose Rizal and Marcelo H. del Pilar.

Filipinos Ilustres would inspire other depictions from around the same period–notably, Manuel Artigas’ Andres Bonifacio y el Katipunan.

The Artigas image is decidedly patrician in both dress and mien, with larger but still almond-shaped eyes but with a slightly more aquiline nose, complemented by prominent cheekbones and a defined jaw. Already far-removed from the original, this gentrified and respectable portrait almost betrays Bonifacio’s class background and visually thrusts him into the exclusive club of ilustrados–the reformists who sought change from above instead of slashing revolution.

The first depiction of Bonifacio on Philippine banknotes (part of the English series of currency issued by the Central Bank of the Philippines from 1949 to 1969 and printed by the British printing company Thomas De La Rue & Co. Ltd.) mirrored both the Artigas rendition and a sculpture by Ramon Martinez. The twenty-peso bill had both Bonifacio and Emilio Jacinto on the obverse. On the reverse is a near-photographic depiction of Martinez’ Balintawak monument, which was unveiled on September 3, 1911. Though he originally intended to commemorate the fallen heroes of the 1896 Revolution in general, this soon became the image of one particular man, Bonifacio, that lingered in the minds of many.

It is almost as if, in the face of conflicting representations, the engravers of the banknote decided to avoid controversy by simply depicting both. For here, the gentrified Bonifacio appears, while the increasingly more iconic–yet ironically not actual (because the statue was never explicitly intended to portray Bonifacio)– sculpture is portrayed on the reverse of the banknote.

However, it would be the El Renacimiento Filipino adulteration, despite its provenance, that would be lent credibility throughout the years with its use in Philippine currency, starting with banknotes issued under the Pilipino series, in circulation from 1969 to 1973.

The Bagong Lipunan series of President Ferdinand E. Marcos, which was in circulation from 1973 to 1985, would follow this design with simple alterations.

This would likewise be featured alongside the portrait of Apolinario Mabini on the ten-peso bill released in 1997, which the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas has since demonetized.

Bonifacio’s image undergoes another re-imagining altogether in Philippine coinage–following conventions established, this time in sculpture, by Guillermo Tolentino.

There was, however, a re-ordering of the hierarchy of heroes. While Rizal was enshrined as the foremost hero by the construction of the Rizal Monument, the second (in scale and artistic ambition) grander monument was that of Bonifacio in 1933. In contrast, there were no monuments dedicated to Emilio Aguinaldo, very much alive, mired as he was in the partisan politics of the 1920s. The era of monumentalism for Aguinaldo would begin only in the 1960s, with the transfer of Independence Day to June 12 in 1962, the renaming of Camp Murphy to Camp Aguinaldo in 1965, and Aguinaldo’s donation of his mansion to the Filipino People shortly before his death. President Marcos consciously adopted the Malolos Republic–with its unicameral legislature and strong presidency– as the historical antecedent for his regime, inaugurating the Interim Batasan Pambansa on June 12, 1978; and transferring the start of official terms to June 30 from Rizal Day (which had been the date since 1941). The looming centennial of the Proclamation of Independence kept the spotlight on Aguinaldo, and with it, the promotion of Aguinaldo in the hierarchy of banknotes: formerly it had been Rizal on the basic unit of currency, the Peso, followed by Bonifacio on two pesos. With the abolition of the two peso coin, Bonifacio was reduced in rank, so to speak, to share the ten peso banknote while Aguinaldo was promoted, so to speak, to the five peso coin.

In 1983, Emilio Aguinaldo replaced Bonifacio on the five-peso bill, and the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas minted a unique, octagonal two-peso coin featuring Bonifacio. This was in circulation from 1983 to 1990, re-released in a smaller, circular form from 1991 to 1994. Bonifacio is more stern and masculine in profile, with a kerchief knotted around his neck.

The current bimetallic 10-peso coin, first minted in 2000, is similar in design to the 10-peso bill with Bonifacio and Mabini.

The image on the coins is most likely sourced from the 45-foot tall bronze monument that bears his name in the City of Caloocan, sculpted by Guillermo Tolentino, who was already middle-aged by this time–the second time the artist had featured Bonifacio in his art.

Here, at what was once the entrance to Manila before the era of the expressway, stands a calm Bonifacio, dressed in an embroidered Barong Tagalog and knotted kerchief, with a bolo in one hand, a revolver in the other, surrounded by Jacinto and two other Katipuneros, symbolizing the Cry of Pugad Lawin.

Tolentino’s work was the culmination of extensive research and consultations not just with Bonifacio’s living contemporaries, but also with the occult through seances and espiritistas. The artist also based his sculpture on Bonifacio’s sister Espiridiona.

The Bonifacio of Tolentino was done in the classical sense, expressing almost no emotion–a cool, calculating, even serene leader in the midst of battle. Napoleon Abueva, a student of Guillermo Tolentino, offers an alternative interpretation: that Bonifacio’s quiet dignity and confidence evokes the resilient spirit of Filipinos.

The monument itself was a purely Filipino project from start to finish, proposed by Bonifacio’s fellow revolutionary leader Guillermo Masangkay in the Philippine Legislature, and funded by Act No. 2760 s. 1918, which also enacted Bonifacio Day as a national holiday. Inaugurated on Bonifacio’s birthday in November 30, 1933, it presaged the transition to independence.

This is in stark contrast to the aforementioned Martinez monument in Balintawak, which was transferred to Vinzons Hall in the University of the Philippines Diliman campus in 1968. Here, a lone figure stands barefoot with his arms outstretched, mouth open in a silent cry to arms. In one hand, a bolo, in the other, the flag of the Katipunan. He is clothed in red pants and an unbuttoned camisa chino.

This image of Bonifacio would endure in popular consciousness, appearing in even the unlikeliest of places, such as in cigarette boxes.

National Artist for Painting Carlos V. Francisco seemingly strikes a balance between both renditions in his famous mural Filipino Struggles Through History, 1964. While the fiery revolutionary in camisa chino and rolled-up red pants resemble the monument that previously stood in Balintawak, he also holds a bolo and a revolver, reflecting the research undertaken by Tolentino.

Amidst the bustling environs of Divisoria in Manila, another side of the President of the Supreme Council is given prominence–poring over a piece of parchment, here is the Bonifacio who wrote impassioned manifestos that rallied the masses. The Katipunan flag waves in the background.

Discrepancies abound even in the commemorative memorabilia released for the Bonifacio centenary in 1963. While the Philippine Postal Corporation evoked the defiant Katipunero of Ramon Martinez’s creation, the BSP chose to follow the serene figure of Tolentino’s monument. Notice that on the stamps marking Bonifacio’s Centenary, he is in what is considered the trademark, though hardly definitive, Katipunero attire; while the coin shows him clad in a suit and tie.

Commemorative memorabilia were likewise released for his death centenary in 1997. The stamps would now feature the various monuments that have been erected to pay tribute to Bonifacio–the calm Bonifacio of Tolentino’s creation, the fiery Bonifacio in Martinez’s sculpture and the pensive Bonifacio that stands in Tutuban.

Written accounts are similarly inconclusive when it comes to the physical characteristics of Bonifacio–none of his contemporaries nor the historians who specialized in the study of the Katipunan are able to provide a concrete description of Bonifacio.

Through the multiple visualizations and renditions of Bonifacio, we may never truly know how he looked. But revolutions are waged not by faces–rather, by the faceless hundreds and thousands who took up arms with the notable and the noted. In death, a definitive image of Bonifacio remains elusive, which presents a concluding irony: that the man unfortunate in battle, achieved his true glory not through the sword, but the pen, through the manifestos and letters that ignited revolutionary ardor, sustaining the revolution in times of adversity, and, regardless of the eventual means for achieving independence, lives on in the hearts and minds of every Filipino who has read the words of Maypagasa–Bonifacio’s nom-de-guerre, which encapsulated in one word, what he himself sought to represent and inspire in his countrymen.

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Source: http://malacanang.gov.ph/2942-imprinting-andres-bonifacio-the-iconization-from-portrait-to-peso/

Bonifacio

 

 

 

 

peso-andresbill

]]> https://mandirigma.org/?feed=rss2&p=3562 0 Novel: Noli Me Tangere by José Rizal. First Published in Berlin, Germany 1887 https://mandirigma.org/?p=3553 https://mandirigma.org/?p=3553#respond Sun, 14 Oct 2018 20:12:53 +0000 MO1 http://mandirigma.org/?p=3553 JoseRizal-1

 

Noli Me Tangere is a novel by Filipino polymath José Rizal and first published in 1887 in Berlin, Germany. Early English translations used titles like An Eagle Flight and The Social Cancer, but more recent translations have been published using the original Latin title.

Though originally written in Spanish, it is more commonly published and read in the Philippines in either English or Filipino. Together with its sequel (El Filibusterismo), the reading of Noli is obligatory for high school students all throughout the archipelago.

References for the novel

Jose Rizal, a Filipino nationalist and medical doctor, conceived the idea of writing a novel that would expose the ills of Philippine society after reading Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. He preferred that the prospective novel express the way Filipino culture was backward, anti-progress, anti-intellectual, and not conducive to the ideas of the Age of Enlightenment. He was then a student of medicine in the Universidad Central de Madrid.

In a reunion of Filipinos at the house of his friend Pedro A. Paterno in Madrid on 2 January 1884, Rizal proposed the writing of a novel about the Philippines written by a group of Filipinos. His proposal was unanimously approved by the Filipinos present at the party, among whom were Pedro, Maximino and Antonio Paterno, Graciano López Jaena, Evaristo Aguirre, Eduardo de Lete, Julio Llorente and Valentin Ventura. However, this project did not materialize. The people who agreed to help Rizal with the novel did not write anything. Initially, the novel was planned to cover and describe all phases of Filipino life, but almost everybody wanted to write about women. Rizal even saw his companions spend more time gambling and flirting with Spanish women. Because of this, he pulled out of the plan of co-writing with others and decided to draft the novel alone.

Plot

Having completed his studies in Europe, young Juan Crisóstomo Ibarra y Magsalin came back to the Philippines after a 7-year absence. In his honor, Don Santiago de los Santos, a family friend commonly known as Captain Tiago, threw a get-together party, which was attended by friars and other prominent figures. One of the guests, former San Diego curate Fray Dámaso Vardolagas belittled and slandered Ibarra. Ibarra brushed off the insults and took no offense; he instead politely excused himself and left the party because of an allegedly important task.

The next day, Ibarra visits María Clara, his betrothed, the beautiful daughter of Captain Tiago and affluent resident of Binondo. Their long-standing love was clearly manifested in this meeting, and María Clara cannot help but reread the letters her sweetheart had written her before he went to Europe. Before Ibarra left for San Diego, Lieutenant Guevara, a Civil Guard, reveals to him the incidents preceding the death of his father, Don Rafael Ibarra, a rich hacendero of the town.

According to Guevara, Don Rafael was unjustly accused of being a heretic, in addition to being a subservient — an allegation brought forth by Dámaso because of Don Rafael’s non-participation in the Sacraments, such as Confession and Mass. Dámaso’s animosity against Ibarra’s father is aggravated by another incident when Don Rafael helped out on a fight between a tax collector and a child fighting, and the former’s death was blamed on him, although it was not deliberate. Suddenly, all of those who thought ill of him surfaced with additional complaints. He was imprisoned, and just when the matter was almost settled, he died of sickness in jail. Still not content with what he had done, Dámaso arranged for Don Rafael’s corpse to be dug up from the Catholic church and brought to a Chinese cemetery, because he thought it inappropriate to allow a heretic a Catholic burial ground. Unfortunately, it was raining and because of the bothersome weight of the body, the undertakers decide to throw the corpse into a nearby lake.

Revenge was not in Ibarra’s plans, instead he carried through his father’s plan of putting up a school, since he believed that education would pave the way to his country’s progress (all over the novel the author refers to both Spain and the Philippines as two different countries, which form part of a same nation or family, being Spain the mother and the Philippines the daughter). During the inauguration of the school, Ibarra would have been killed in a sabotage had Elías — a mysterious man who had warned Ibarra earlier of a plot to assassinate him — not saved him. Instead the hired killer met an unfortunate incident and died. The sequence of events proved to be too traumatic for María Clara who got seriously ill but was luckily cured by the medicine Ibarra sent.

After the inauguration, Ibarra hosted a luncheon during which Dámaso, gate-crashing the luncheon, again insulted him. Ibarra ignored the priest’s insolence, but when the latter slandered the memory of his dead father, he was no longer able to restrain himself and lunged at Dámaso, prepared to stab him for his impudence. As a consequence, Dámaso excommunicated Ibarra, taking this opportunity to persuade the already-hesitant Tiago to forbid his daughter from marrying Ibarra. The friar wished María Clara to marry Linares, a Peninsular who had just arrived from Spain.

With the help of the Governor-General, Ibarra’s excommunication was nullified and the Archbishop decided to accept him as a member of the Church once again. But, as fate would have it, some incident of which Ibarra had known nothing about was blamed on him, and he is wrongly arrested and imprisoned. The accusation against him was then overruled because during the litigation that followed, nobody could testify that he was indeed involved. Unfortunately, his letter to María Clara somehow got into the hands of the jury and is manipulated such that it then became evidence against him by the parish priest, Fray Salví. With Machiavellian precision, Salví framed Ibarra and ruined his life just so he could stop him from marrying María Clara and making the latter his concubine.

Meanwhile, in Capitan Tiago’s residence, a party was being held to announce the upcoming wedding of María Clara and Linares. Ibarra, with the help of Elías, took this opportunity to escape from prison. Before leaving, Ibarra spoke to María Clara and accused her of betraying him, thinking that she gave the letter he wrote her to the jury. María Clara explained that she would never conspire against him, but that she was forced to surrender Ibarra’s letter to Father Salvi, in exchange for the letters written by her mother even before she, María Clara, was born. The letters were from her mother, Pía Alba, to Dámaso alluding to their unborn child; and that María Clara was therefore not Captain Tiago’s biological daughter, but Dámaso’s.

Afterwards, Ibarra and Elías fled by boat. Elías instructed Ibarra to lie down, covering him with grass to conceal his presence. As luck would have it, they were spotted by their enemies. Elías, thinking he could outsmart them, jumped into the water. The guards rained shots on him, all the while not knowing that they were aiming at the wrong man.

María Clara, thinking that Ibarra had been killed in the shooting incident, was greatly overcome with grief. Robbed of hope and severely disillusioned, she asked Dámaso to confine her into a nunnery. Dámaso reluctantly agreed when she threatened to take her own life, demanding, “the nunnery or death!”[2] Unbeknownst to her, Ibarra was still alive and able to escape. It was Elías who had taken the shots.

It was Christmas Eve when Elías woke up in the forest fatally wounded, as it is here where he instructed Ibarra to meet him. Instead, Elías found the altar boy Basilio cradling his already-dead mother, Sisa. The latter lost her mind when she learned that her two sons, Crispín and Basilio, were chased out of the convent by the sacristan mayor on suspicions of stealing sacred objects. (The truth is that, it was the sacristan mayor who stole the objects and only pinned the blame on the two boys. The said sacristan mayor actually killed Crispín while interrogating him on the supposed location of the sacred objects. It was implied that the body was never found and the incident was covered-up by Salví).

Elías, convinced that he would die soon, instructs Basilio to build a funeral pyre and burn his and Sisa’s bodies to ashes. He tells Basilio that, if nobody reaches the place, he come back later on and dig for he will find gold. He also tells him (Basilio) to take the gold he finds and go to school. In his dying breath, he instructed Basilio to continue dreaming about freedom for his motherland with the words:

“     I shall die without seeing the dawn break upon my homeland. You, who shall see it, salute it! Do not forget those who have fallen during the night.”     ”

Elías died thereafter.

In the epilogue, it was explained that Tiago became addicted to opium and was seen to frequent the opium house in Binondo to satiate his addiction. María Clara became a nun where Salví, who has lusted over her from the beginning of the novel, regularly used her to fulfill his lust. One stormy evening, a beautiful crazy woman was seen at the top of the convent crying and cursing the heavens for the fate it has handed her. While the woman was never identified, it is suggested that the said woman was María Clara.

Publication history

Rizal finished the novel on December 1886. At first, according to one of Rizal’s biographers, Rizal feared the novel might not be printed, and that it would remain unread. He was struggling with financial constraints at the time and thought it would be hard to pursue printing the novel. A financial aid came from a friend named Máximo Viola. Rizal at first, however, hesitated but Viola insisted and ended up lending Rizal P300 for 2,000 copies; Noli was eventually printed in Berlin, Germany. The printing was finished earlier than the estimated five months. Viola arrived in Berlin in December 1886, and by March 21, 1887, Rizal had sent a copy of the novel to his friend Blumentritt.[3]

On August 21, 2007, a 480-page then-latest English version of Noli Me Tangere was released to major Australian book stores. The Australian edition of the novel was published by Penguin Books Classics, to represent the publication’s “commitment to publish the major literary classics of the world”.[4] American writer Harold Augenbraum, who first read the Noli in 1992, translated the novel. A writer well-acquainted with translating other Hispanophone literary works, Augenbraum proposed to translate the novel after being asked for his next assignment in the publishing company. Intrigued by the novel and knowing more about it, Penguin nixed their plan of adapting existing English versions and instead translated it on their own.[4]

Reaction and legacy

Noli Me Tangere was Rizal’s first novel. He was 26 years old at the time of its publication.

This novel and its sequel, El filibusterismo (nicknamed El Fili), were banned in some parts of the Philippines because of their portrayal of corruption and abuse by the country’s Spanish government and clergy. Copies of the book were smuggled in nevertheless, and when Rizal returned to the Philippines after completing medical studies, he quickly ran afoul of the local government. A few days after his arrival, Governor-General Emilio Terrero summoned Rizal to the Malacañang Palace and told him of the charge that Noli Me Tangere contained subversive statements. After a discussion, the Governor General was appeased but still unable to offer resistance against the pressure of the Church against the book. The persecution can be discerned from Rizal’s letter to Leitmeritz:
“     My book made a lot of noise; everywhere, I am asked about it. They wanted to anathematize me ['to excommunicate me'] because of it… I am considered a German spy, an agent of Bismarck, they say I am a Protestant, a freemason, a sorcerer, a damned soul and evil. It is whispered that I want to draw plans, that I have a foreign passport and that I wander through the streets by night…     ”

Rizal was exiled to Dapitan, then later arrested for “inciting rebellion” based largely on his writings. Rizal was executed in Manila on December 30, 1896 at the age of thirty-five.

Rizal depicted nationality by emphasizing the qualities of Filipinos: the devotion of a Filipina and her influence on a man’s life, the deep sense of gratitude, and the solid common sense of the Filipinos under the Spanish regime.

The work was instrumental in creating a unified Filipino national identity and consciousness, as many natives previously identified with their respective regions. It lampooned, caricatured and exposed various elements in colonial society. Two characters in particular have become classics in Filipino culture: Maria Clara, who has become a personification of the ideal Filipina woman, loving and unwavering in her loyalty to her spouse; and the priest Father Dámaso, who reflects the covert fathering of illegitimate children by members of the Spanish clergy.

The book indirectly influenced a revolution, even though the author actually advocated direct representation to the Spanish government and a larger role for the Philippines within Spain’s political affairs. In 1956, the Congress of the Philippines passed the Republic Act 1425, more popularly known as the Rizal Law, which all levels of Philippine schools to teach the novel as part of their curriculum. Noli Me Tangere is being taught to third year secondary school students, while its sequel El filibusterismo is being taught for fourth year secondary school students. The novels are incorporated to their study and survey of Philippine literature.

Major characters

Ibarra

Juan Crisóstomo Ibarra y Magsalin, commonly referred to the novel as Ibarra or Crisóstomo, is the protagonist in the story. Son of a Filipino businessman, Don Rafael Ibarra, he studied in Europe for seven years.  Ibarra is also María Clara’s fiancé. Several sources claim that Ibarra is also Rizal’s reflection: both studied in Europe and both persons believe in the same ideas. Upon his return, Ibarra requested the local government of San Diego to construct a public school to promote education in the town.

In the sequel of Noli, El filibusterismo, Ibarra returned with different character and name: he called himself as Simoun, the English mestizo.

María Clara
María Clara de los Santos y Alba, commonly referred to as María Clara, is Ibarra’s fiancée. She was raised by Capitán Tiago, Binundok’s cabeza de barangay and is the most beautiful and widely celebrated girl in San Diego.  In the later parts of the novel, María Clara’s identity was revealed as an illegitimate daughter of Father Dámaso, former parish curate of the town, and Doña Pía Alba, wife of Capitán Tiago. In the end she entered local covenant for nuns Beaterio de Santa Clara. In the epilogue dealing with the fate of the characters, Rizal stated that it is unknown if María Clara is still living within the walls of the covenant or she is already dead.

The character of María Clara was patterned after Leonor Rivera, Rizal’s first cousin and childhood sweetheart.

Capitán Tiago

Don Santiago de los Santos, known by his nickname Tiago and political title Capitán Tiago is a Filipino businessman and the cabeza de barangay or head of barangay of the town of Binundok. He is also the known father of María Clara.

In the novel, it is said that Capitán Tiago is the richest man in the region of Binondo and he possessed real properties in Pampanga and Laguna de Bay. He is also said to be a good Catholic, friend of the Spanish government and was considered as a Spanish by colonialists. Capitán Tiago never attended school, so he became a domestic helper of a Dominican friar who taught him informal education. He married Pía Alba from Santa Cruz.

Padre Dámaso

Dámaso Verdolagas, or Padre Dámaso is a Franciscan friar and the former parish curate of San Diego. He is best known as a notorious character who speaks with harsh words and has been a cruel priest during his stay in the town.  He is the real father of María Clara and an enemy of Crisóstomo’s father, Rafael Ibarra.  Later, he and María Clara had bitter arguments whether she would marry Alfonso Linares or go to a convent.[13] At the end of the novel, he is again re-assigned to a distant town and is found dead one day.

In popular culture, when a priest was said to be like Padre Dámaso, it means that he is a cruel but respectable individual. When one says a child is “anak ni Padre Damaso” (child of Padre Dámaso), it means that the child’s father’s identity is unknown.

Elías

Elías is Ibarra’s mysterious friend and ally. Elías made his first appearance as a pilot during a picnic of Ibarra and María Clara and her friends.[14] He wants to revolutionize the country and to be freed from Spanish oppression.

The 50th chapter of the novel explores the past of Elías and history of his family. In the past, Ibarra’s great-grandfather condemned Elías’ grandfather of burning a warehouse which led into misfortune for Elías’ family. His father was refused to be married by his mother because his father’s past and family lineage was discovered by his mother’s family. In the long run, Elías and his twin sister was raised by their maternal grandfather. When they were teenagers, their distant relatives called them hijos de bastardo or illegitimate children. One day, his sister disappeared which led him to search for her. His search led him into different places, and finally, he became a fugitive and subversive.

Filosofo Tacio

Filosofo Tacio, known by his Filipinized name Pilosopo Tasyo is another major character in the story. Seeking for reforms from the government, he expresses his ideals in paper written in a cryptographic alphabet similar from hieroglyphs and Coptic figures hoping “that the future generations may be able to decipher it” and realized the abuse and oppression done by the conquerors.

His full name is only known as Don Anastacio. The educated inhabitants of San Diego labeled him as Filosofo Tacio (Tacio the Sage) while others called him as Tacio el Loco (Insane Tacio) due to his exceptional talent for reasoning.

Doña Victorina

Doña Victorina de Espadaña, commonly known as Doña Victorina, is an ambitious Filipina who classifies herself as a Spanish and mimics Spanish ladies by putting on heavy make-up.[12] The novel narrates Doña Victorina’s younger days: she had lots of admirers, but she didn’t choose any of them because nobody was a Spaniard. Later on, she met and married Don Tiburcio de Espadaña, an official of the customs bureau who is about ten years her junior.  However, their marriage is childless.

Her husband assumes the title of medical doctor even though he never attended medical school; using fake documents and certificates, Tiburcio practices illegal medicine. Tiburcio’s usage of the title Dr. consequently makes Victorina assume the title Dra. (doctora, female doctor). Apparently, she uses the whole name Doña Victorina de los Reyes de de Espadaña, with double de to emphasize her marriage surname.  She seems to feel that this awkward titling makes her more “sophisticated.”

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