Gemma Cruz Guerrero (1997) has described the "EDSA Revolution" of 1986 "as little more than coup d'Ã ©tat. This was a popular revolt that led to the expulsion of Ferdinand Marcos from the Philippines. She notes that there has been a considerable history in the Philippines of flippancy in using the term "revolution". We, in the USA, too, have similarly been a bit flippant with the term "revolution". We call the American War for Independence (1774-1783) the "Revolutionary War", too. Meanwhile, we recognize that the French Revolution and the Russian Revolutions were much more authentically revolutionary in nature than ours was--or has ever been.
WHAT IS a FILIPINO?
Cruz has also noted that in the Philippines', there has existed a similar semantic trick i with the term "Filipino" as describing an entire people's national identity. [p. 182]
In her "La Revolucion Anticolonial y la Primera Republica", Cruz explains that when the Spaniards first came to colonize the Philippines over 400 years ago, the children of the Spaniards who were born on the archipelago, newly named after a King of Spain, Felipe II, were called "Filipinos". In Mexico or Latin America the term would have been "criollos" for such children of direct Spanish descent. In contrast, "the Spanish called the natives of the island "indios'". [p.182] Only in the late 19th century did the "indios", "mestizos" (mix-bloods) and Chinese inhabitants of those same islands appropriate the term, "Filipino", for their own identities before the Spanish crown and as part of their growing consciousness of who they were as a more modern people or nation.
In Cruz's opinion, in order to understand how the first Republic was founded in East Asia in 1898, it is important to understand these concepts of revolution and the rise of national Filipino identity as experienced by the various leaders of that century.
Looking back on the arrival of Miguel Lopez de Legazpi (in the 16th Century), who arrived some 50 years after Magellan had been killed in Visayas (the central region of today's Philippines), it is important to note that this first major conqueror of the Philippines on behalf of the Spanish crown only managed to conquer the regions of Visayas--i.e. where Cebu is located--and Luzon, where Manila is located. Neither Legazpi nor any other Spanish conquistadores ever conquered the entire region of the southern islands of what is considered Mindanao, which makes up the southern third of today's Philippines.
In fact, the Sulu Kingdom of the Muslims continued to exist separate from the other Filipino islands into the era when the USA first invaded the Philippines at the start of the 20th Century.
Next Page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
