Josh’s Reviews > Brains of the Nation: Pedro Paterno, T. H. Pardo De Tavera, Isabelo De Los Reyes and the Production of Modern Knowledge > Status Update

HIGHLIGHT:

Like their counterparts in Latin America, [19th-century Filipino intellectuals] associated with Európeans, attended European-style schools, entered the modern professions, became proficient in metro politan languages, traveled widely, and avidly consumed Western culture. …

HIGHLIGHT:

“The country, [Clemente J. Zulueta] lamented, has been treated as a mere "appendix" to Spanish history.

NOTE:

Interesting to know that this observation is not recent (as in conceived in the last several decades, rather it is at least 100 years old).

HIGHLIGHT:

For Filipinos, revolution was not just a crash course in warfare, it was a school of learning. The forms of writing and composition corresponded to the exigencies of the time: proclamations, manifestoes, improvisatory theater, verses, and songs. The literature produced was not just war propaganda but texts that aimed to constitute a nation.

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It became a commonplace in carly nationalist polemics to blame Spanish missionaries for destroying precolonial writings bur while there were recorded instances of such destruction it was not widespread.

HIGHLIGHT:

The colonial intellectual is placed in a position where he has to learn and interpellate the discourse of the Other. This made the annotation an exemplary form of nationalist writing.

HIGHLIGHT:

AMONG HIS CONTEMPORARIES, Isabelo de los Reyes had the strongest sense of where he was coming from. In contrast, Pardo was the cosmopolitan outsider and Rizal-though he frequently looked towards Laguna as home—always imagined himself as being of a "nation" instead of a locality or region. …

HIGHLIGHT:

The case of Isabelo de los Reyes is instructive.
He waged a campaign for the ascendancy of reason and freedom, using the opportunities and resources available to him, contending with the obstacles and dangers of working within the colony, and deploying the advantages of his peculiar position. …

HIGHLIGHT:

[Filipino] morality, [Isabelo de los Reyes] says, can be reduced into the following precepts: "to love always and not to harm anybody," "to be just always and refrain from perpetrating abuses," to have "zeal for one's own development and one's neighbor's development and perfection, which is nothing else than the Universal Law of Progress.”

HIGHLIGHT:

In the early nineteenth century, Filipino meant a Spaniard born in the Philippines. By the 1860s, however, the word was increasingly used by natives (indios), Chinese and Spanish mestizos, and creoles to identify themselves as members of an emerging, multiracial community politically set apart from Spanish peninsulares.

HIGHLIGHT:

"An ordained nation, with a responsible and stable government, ATTRACTS FOREIGNERS AND THEIR CAPITAL; in the same manner, a distrustful government in a backward nation repels and scares them away [Pardo's emphasis]."