IN the most extreme of cases, “Ignorance of history can lead to chaos and lawlessness,” Dr. Luciano P.R. Santiago wrote 20 years ago in his article “Don Pasqual de Sta. Ana (1762-1827): Indio Hacendero.” He was referring to the landownership conflicts in Angono in the late 1990s. Disputed parcels of land were not public land as claimed but formed part of Hacienda de Angono. The vast estate had been acquired by Don Pasqual de Sta. Ana in 1818.
Cover of ‘Philippine Genealogy & Religious & Art History: The Luciano P. R. Santiago Reader’ (Vibal Foundation and USC Publishing House, 2022)
This essay, which first saw print in the March 2002 issue of the Ateneo de Manila University’s Philippine Studies: Historical and Ethnographic Viewpoints, is one of the 20 essays in Philippine Genealogy & Religious & Art History: The Luciano P. R. Santiago Reader, published by Vibal Foundation and USC Publishing House earlier this month.
One might say that Dr. Santiago (1942-2019), a psychiatrist by profession, sought to “cure” the Filipino public of ignorance of history. Not in a stern, finger-pointing manner, but by tracing lesser known, smaller paths, to discover stories and fates, forgotten or sidestepped by history, like delicate flowers hidden in the shadows of tall trees.
His works, as presented in The Reader, while referring to numerous historical events, is not an outline of such events or grand personalities to memorize for recitation. Rather, the essays expand our knowledge of the lives of Filipinos — the men and women who lived, worked and died in these islands irrespective of race — during the Spanish era.
The personalities researched by Dr. Santiago do not represent the masa or general population. If the author was able to tell the stories of, among others, Don Mariano Bernavé Pilapil (1757-1818), the first Filipino to have obtained a doctoral degree; Doña Remigia Salazar Talusan viuda de López (ca. 1800-ca. 1860), printer-publisher of the first daily newspaper; and Damián Domingo (1796-1834) whose miniature portrait of his sweetheart, whom he had been admiring from a distance, so impressed the lady’s father that the young suitor was allowed to visit her; it is because there were written records detailing various aspects of their lives. The paper trail, however, sometimes abruptly stops due to destruction caused by termites, floods, fires, earthquakes and war. For instance, the municipal hall and almost all the stone houses and nipa huts in central Pila and adjacent barrios “were razed to the ground” by the American invaders in 1899.
Speaking of natural disasters and Laguna’s Pila, the hometown of Dr. Santiago, the entire town was relocated in the early years of the 19th century because of “severe flooding, annually submerging the homes, streets and arable land of the Pileños for as long as three to four months at a time.” The flooding was caused by the “relentless swelling and surging of Laguna de Bay during the rainy season.” Thus we learn that even before the advent of climate change, flooding could be a serious problem. Due to strong opposition from those who didn’t want to move, it took seven years from the time the governor-general first approved the plan till the relocation was enforced.
The essay on Pila also features the — for a Cebuano audience — particularly interesting detail that the father of the late Archbishop of Cebu, Ricardo Cardinal Vidal, was a Pileño who owed his appointment as municipal treasurer of Mogpog, Marinduque, to the governor whose wife belonged to one of Pila’s prominent families.
It is rewarding to read the book from cover to cover. The first cluster of essays, for instance, deals with encomiendas and haciendas and thus gives an introduction to how the Spaniards extracted wealth from the local population and how this system was used to keep the local elites loyal to “the crown and the cross” (the King of Spain and the Church).
An encomienda was a royal grant of the tributes of a particular locality and could be bestowed on a person in recognition of deeds and services rendered by him or his family to the king of Spain. The grant covered two generations. Tributes could also be paid in kind; for instance, the Aetas of Majayjay, Laguna, paid in woven baskets. Writes Dr. Santiago: “Almost all the known holdings conferred on the Filipino elite consisted of tributes from the elusive ‘negrillos (Aetas), both Christian and pagans’ who lived in the mountains, which were obviously difficult to collect” (“The Filipino Indios Encomenderos”). One Pangasinense was for his “conquest of the Igorots” in 1591 and “pacification” of natives and Negrillos of Zambales “rewarded” with an encomienda in some remote mountain inhabited by “Negrillos” — the tributes, predictably, “dwindled to a pittance” over the years. Conquered, pacified, forced to pay tribute notwithstanding, the indigenous peoples were not vanquished.
While the Luciano P.R. Santiago Reader is a useful reference book, more significantly, it is a collection of stories about real people, and how they lived and died under foreign colonization, with the opportunities and restrictions the latter brought. Indeed, the stories within stories, the unexpected details, are what make Dr. Santiago’s articles so captivating.
