Plaridel by Nick Joaquin
When the propaganda we know appears, the scene has shifted from the Philippines to Spain, and the leading role has passed from Creole to Indio. Yet this is not quite accurate. For in Marcelo H. del Pilar the two strains have become one.
In Del Pilar, there’s a confluence of the two streams of the Propaganda, as the very name of his newspaper, Solidaridad, attests. There can now be no talk of Creole and Indio, only Filipinos; and his own person Del Pilar carries the synthesis. A Spanish Barba cerrada decorates a man in whose veins runs the blood of the old Tagalog nobility. Born into the gentry, he moves as confidently in the cockpit.
He alone of the propagandists possesses both Tagalong and Spanish, far surpassing Rizal in his mastery of both tongues. Rizal is still arguing about the Filipino’s competence; Del Pilar has already accepted that as a fact. It was easy self-confidence that made Filipinos in Spain prefer, as a leader, the unself-conscious Del Pilar to the preachy, rather puritanical Rizal. Del Pilar’s hegira to Spain in 1888 marks a turning point: the Propaganda has shifted battlefield, from Manila to Madrid; and the shift is an advance. The earlier movement was local. But as the age of affluence unrolled the Filipinos got the nerve to appeal to a higher and higher authority. The local friar lost value as an intermediary. Why go to him when one could appeal directly to the provincial of his order in Manila? Or why appeal to the provincial when one could go straight to the archbishop? Or why bother with the clerics at all when one could see the Governor-General? For the new rich wielded enough power to unlock the higher doors. The Peninsulars could not but notice that wealthy hacienderos who came to Manila were received with respect and treated with honor by the heads of the great British and American commercial houses in the city. In 1998, Binondo gobernadorcillos smarting from a social slight marched to the Palace and got the Governor-General to reaffirm their right, at public functions, to be seated in the place of honor.
Del Pilar, after spurring the principalia of Bulacan t petition the Governor-General to oust the friars, tops the enormity by sending a similar petition to the Queen-Regent herself! And the career of the Propaganda from 1888 on is lobbying in Madrid to force action by Court, Cabinet, and Cortes. How effective was the lobbying? Del Pilar seems to have turned pessimistic toward the end and to have leaned toward the more radical ideas of the Katipunan. But the pessimism is explicable as despair not over the value of the Propaganda but over the means to keep it going. He urged that La Solidaridad should not be discontinued even if a revolution broke out, since the Philippines would then have all the more need for a voice in Madrid. In other words, he was a revolution not as a rupture with Spain but as a sort of club with which to make Madrid listen and act. But how successful was the Propaganda? Could it have achieved its aims by campaigning—with the World alone, not the Sword? Was the revolution unnecessary? Rizal certainly thought so; he called the Revolution “ absurd and inopportune”. Mabini and his group certainly thought so; they rejected the Katipunan and set up the Cuerpo de Compromisarios, which was committed to raising funds to continue the Propaganda. Would they have done so if they thought the Propaganda futile? But what justified their faith? The fact that the Propaganda had reached the very throne in Madrid is already an indication of its success. It had enlisted the sympathies of prominent Spanish politicians like Morayta, Azcarraga, and Rafael Maria de Labra. And it could claim credit for tangible tokens of reform- the Maura Law, for instance, which reorganized municipal governments in the Philippines and laid down regulations for elections; the various tariff reforms; and the introduction of the Civil, Penal, Criminal, and Commercial Codes to replace the Laws of the Indies under which the Islands had been ruled for three centuries. Normal schools9 the present Assumption Convent as one) were being opened to train native teachers in Spanish- the reply to the propagandists’ demand for assimilation, hispanization, and popular education. ( The graduates of these normal schools were to become the first teachers in the Americans’ public schools.) All these changes augured an inevitable general reform. Even the most vexing problems of all—secularization and the friars—could have had only one solution, for the temper in Madrid was increasingly anti-clerical. Time and the times were on the side of the Propaganda. But if it was succeeding, why did it lack for funds? Its very success could explain this. As reforms began to tricle in, the rich folk in the Philippines may have believed that the battle was already won and lost interest in the campaign. Remember: the Propaganda was being financed by the wealthy, and by the wealthy during a time of boom, when the usual feeling is: Don’t rock the boat! A second reason is dishonesty; funds intended for the Propaganda were embezzled, and this further dampened the desire to contribute.
But the third reason is the golden age itself. The gilded soil whence came the Propaganda suffered a slight blight toward the end of the century. By becoming a producer and exporter, the Philippines had entered the global economy and become subject to its shocks. Our currency, for instance, was silver; and when the Americans began working the Nevada and Colorado silver mines in the 1870s, the value of silver dropped, as did the value of our money, resulting in mild inflation. Moreover, in the 1880s, there was a series of great typhoons, earthquakes, and plagues. The kadang-kadang appeared, and ruined coffee in Batangas, coconuts in the Tagalog region. These calamities did not immediately affect the boom, but the 1890s were not as prosperous as, say, the 1850s. As a result, Philippine capitalists, faced with their first “depression”, became least eager to finance patriotic causes, like Propaganda. Economics explains its rise and economics explains its crisis. And the dip in the economic graph during the 1890s hastened the Revolution.
Nevertheless, the picture of poor Del Pilar dying of hunger in a garret is not a symbolic picture of the Propaganda in 1896. The Propaganda did not die then. Quezon and the resident commissioners were but continuing the Propaganda Movement. It had merely shifted battlefield again, this time from Madrid to Washington, but it was still lobbying for the Filipino.
If the Propaganda goes back beyond 1880 on the one hand, it continues, on the other hand, beyond 1896; and the postwar nationalist movement of the 1950s was its latest phase—with the battle being fought again where the Conde Filipino it: on native soil.
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