Spanish Is Something We Filipinos Can Call Ours
Only by knowing Spanish will our citizens be able to know the ‘bible’ of Philippine nationalism. — Miguel Cuenco y Diosomito
A country whose people do not speak the language that united them is doomed from the beginning. Philippine history is almost entirely written in a language which is now alien to us, which was not so back then.
The official languages of the Philippines are English and Filipino, the latter being a standardized version of Tagalog. Outside the Tagalog speaking provinces like Bulacán, Cavite and Laguna, other regional languages like Bicolano, Ilocano, and Hiligaynón are spoken. One must not forget however that Spanish was an official language of the Philippines from 1565 to 1987.
Since we were a part of Spain for almost three and a half centuries, how come the language of Cervantes did not take root here as it did in Hispanoamérica? To name a few reasons; we were geographically distant from Spain. The number of Spanish settlers were few (6,000 Spaniards in contrast to 9,000,000 Filipinos by the end of the 19th century according to Javier Galván, ex-director of Instituto Cervantes in Manila, in his article El boom del español en Filipinas), in which at times a Spanish friar would be the only Spanish speaker at a town, preferring to learn the regional language. Lastly, the spread of the language happened only in 1863 when Queen Isabella II decreed free and compulsory education for the Filipinos, establishing the first public education system in Asia. The product of said decree was the creation of an educated class whose language was Spanish. The ilustrados like the national hero José Rizal, Marcelo del Pilar and Graciano López Jaena, were those who formed the core of Philippine nationalism, expressing their thoughts and aspirations in a common language. Rizal wrote his novels in Spanish to reach the Filipinos of that time. Naturally, when a Tagalog meets his fellow Tagalog, they would speak Tagalog. The same thing goes for the other ethnic groups, but when these groups got together, they had to be understood in Spanish since they did not speak each other’s regional language. Even the leaders of the Philippine Revolution spoke Spanish like Andrés Bonifacio and Emilio Jacinto. Paradoxically, although the revolution was an anti-Hispanic movement the revolutionaries spoke Spanish in order to be able to be understood with the other revolutionary groups that lived in other parts of the Philippines. Even our first president, Emilio Aguinaldo, spoke Spanish and in fact would not have been the leader of the Philippines in that time without knowing the language. It was understood that it was easier to direct the government in Spanish than in Tagalog although the Philippine Revolution was a revolution by Tagalogs and for Tagalogs. Only when did the Spaniards start to lose their control did the other ethnic groups unite in fighting for Philippine independence. One must remember that the fundamental documents of our nationhood were written in Spanish, like our declaration of independence, the Malolos constitution, and the national anthem.
By the time the Americans came to conquer the Philippines, dramatically and ironically the number of Spanish speakers grew although they replaced Spanish for English in public education. Intellectuals like Teodoro Kalaw, Rafael Palma, and Epifanio de los Santos fought to preserve the Hispanic culture against the “saxonization” of the Philippines. Newspapers like El Debate, La Vanguardia, and La Voz de Manila promoted their readers to keep speaking Spanish. Literary awards like the Premio Zóbel were established to promote Philippine letters in Spanish. Certainly there was a flourishing of Fil-Hispanic literature from the 1920s to the 1940s, producing great literary works from authors such as Fernando María Guerrero, Cecilio Apóstol, Jesús Balmori, Flavio Zaragoza Cano, and Claro Recto. In 1962, Carlos Rómulo said the following at a conference in Cavite:
That generation of Recto, which was probably the most exquisite flower the civilization of Spain produced in the Philippines, wrote, spoke, and thought in Spanish. Within the Oriental framework on one hand and the American on the other, it exhibited itself proudly with an intellectual aristocracy. Like a blazon of a coat of arms, its Hispanic culture. In the chambers, in the tribunals, in the legislative cameras, in the newspapers, in the high tribunals of the transitional period, many Filipino magistrates spoke in Spanish, and in Spanish formulated their legal opinions. In the cameras, the most illustrious names, the political leaders of high position, gave speeches in Spanish.
But this flourishing was stopped with the beginning of the Second World War, in which the Japanese invaded the Philippines and insisted that Filipinos speak Tagalog, removing Spanish and English from daily life under Japanese dominion. When American forces returned in 1945, they went to Manila to liberate it from the Japanese, but instead of surrendering, the Japanese committed many atrocities on the population, ensuring the city would not survive the destruction they initiated. The Japanese raped and murdered numerous civilians, in which among the foreign communities, the Spanish community suffered the worst. Without respecting that Spain and other countries were neutral, the Japanese killed their citizens, angering the leaders of those respective countries. During the battle many Filipino Spanish speakers died and Spanish speaking districts like Ermita and Intramuros burned. The destruction of Manila signaled the disappearance of the Spanish language in the Philippines. The center of the Hispanic culture of the Philippines had disappeared.
Despite this reality, Spanish fought to survive in daily Filipino life. Many newspapers closed and Fil-Hispanic writers lost their audience. The Cuenco law, which mandated the teaching of Spanish as an obligatory subject in universities, was passed to ignite interest in the language for the youth but it backfired, owing to the ineffective teaching of the language in which it killed any motivation to earn the language of the Filipino heroes. Without the proper teaching by the professors, the students simply wanted to pass the subject without knowing the significance of the language in the history of the Philippines. There were protests calling for the repeal of the Cuenco law, reasoning that the subject was not important for them. In 1987, Spanish was removed from the constitution as an official language during the presidency of Corazón Aquino.
Nicomedes “Nick” Joaquín, the greatest writer of Filipino literature in English despite being a native Spanish speaker, had this to say about the change from Spanish to English in his article A Note on Recto’s Play:
The shift from Spanish to English was a fatal blow to our cultural growth; our literary development suffered, –and is still suffering–, for literature is the very soul of language and we were made to abandon the language in which our literature had developed and to begin all over again in English.
What happened after the war was that instead of creating a coexistence of the Hispanic and American cultures, the former was discarded and the latter accepted wholesale. For that we had lost the potential progress of our literature and self-conscience as a nation.
It is unfortunate we have to read our literature and history with use of translations, and even more tragic is that readers from Spain and Hispanoamérica appreciate our writers more than we do. Sen. Camilo Osías once said in the Philippine Senate:
The Filipino who wants to know the true history of the Philippines must read the original works written in Spanish.
However, not all is lost since there are still Filipinos who speak Spanish. These Filipinos helped keep the language in their respective ways, whether it be for work, to have a new hobby, or to preserve the Hispanic culture of the Philippines. If we could take English from the United States and make it ours, why not do the same for Spanish? After all, Recto said the following:
…because Spanish, for whose conservation and spread we fight, which is reduced to the end of our Hispanism, is something which has come to be our own, consubstantial, for rights of history and spirituality, for reasons of the present and demands of the future, that without it the inventory of our patrimonial values will remain greatly reduced and all prefiguration of the future of our nationhood disjointed…
The third president of the Philippines, José Laurel y García, would almost say the same thing, including an attack against English:
On the other hand, and almost by irony, the true liberation of the Filipino individual equally depends on his learning and use of the same Spanish language or Castellano, this language being the vehicle of his history and national identity. Sad will be the day when Spaniards, and wealthy Hispano-Americans, stopped supporting us in our efforts to conserve this common language in these islands against English. So many Spaniards, like the Hispano-Americans and Filipinos, we will have lost, by the time the Spanish language completely disappears from these islands, the pride of what we are, the dignity of people, our own love, self-respect, decency in everything, because all, together, we will have equally admitted that we are no longer what we should be and that we are mired in the greatest disgrace of all time: disunity and disorganization against a common enemy who forces us to use his foul language.
Laurel and Recto knew the significance of the language in the formation of our nationhood and so did his contemporaries as well. If they lived in the Philippines of today, they would wonder what had happened in order to arrive at this situation in which Spanish had disappeared almost totally but at the same time would be relieved upon knowing that Spanish is going to be spoken again in the Philippines.
Although it was not spoken by all Filipinos, it became the language that unified the various ethnic groups of the Philippines in their search for national unity. Culturally and historically, Spanish is the most important language that we have and only by knowing it can we truly know who we are.
