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HISTORICAL AND CULTURAL
INTERCONNECTIONS BETWEEN
LATIN AMERICA AND ASIA

Transcultural Nationalism in
Hispano-Filipino Literature

Irene Villaescusa Illán

Historical and Cultural Interconnections between
Latin America and Asia

Series Editors
Ignacio López-Calvo
University of California, Merced
Merced, CA, USA

Kathleen López
Rutgers University
New Brunswick, NJ, USA
This series is devoted to the diversity of encounters between Latin America
and Asia through multiple points of contact across time and space. It welcomes
different theoretical and disciplinary approaches to define, describe, and explore
the histories and cultural production of people of Asian descent in Latin America
and the Caribbean. It also welcomes research on Hispano-Filipino history and
cultural production. Themes may include Asian immigration and geopolitics, the
influence and/or representation of the Hispanic world in Asian cultures, Orien-
talism and Occidentalism in the Hispanic world and Asia, and other transpacific
and south-south exchanges that disrupt the boundaries of traditional academic
fields and singular notions of identity. The geographical scope of the series incor-
porates the linguistic and ethnic diversity of the Pacific Rim and the Caribbean
region. We welcome single-author monographs and volumes of essays from
experts in the field from different academic backgrounds.

About the series editors:

Ignacio López-Calvo is Professor of Latin American Literature at the Univer-
sity of California, Merced, USA and director of the UC Merced Center for the
Humanities. He is author of several books on Latin American and US Latino
literature. He is co-executive director of the academic journal Transmodernity:
Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World.
Kathleen López is Associate Professor in the Department of Latino and
Caribbean Studies and Department of History at Rutgers, The State University
of New Jersey, USA. She is author of Chinese Cubans: A Transnational History
(2013) and a contributor to Critical Terms in Caribbean and Latin American
Thought (2015), Immigration and National Identities in Latin America (2016),
and Imagining Asia in the Americas (2016).

Advisory Board
Koichi Hagimoto, Wellesley College, USA
Evelyn Hu-DeHart, Brown University, USA
Junyoung Verónica Kim, University of Pittsburgh, USA
Ana Paulina Lee, Columbia University, USA
Debbie Lee-DiStefano, Southeast Missouri State University, USA
Shigeko Mato, Waseda University, Japan
Zelideth María Rivas, Marshall University, USA
Robert Chao Romero, University of California, Los Angeles, USA
Lok Siu, University of California, Berkeley, USA
Araceli Tinajero, City College of New York, USA
Laura Torres-Rodríguez, New York University, USA

More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15129
 Irene Villaescusa Illán

Transcultural
Nationalism
in Hispano-Filipino
Literature
Irene Villaescusa Illán
Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis
University of Amsterdam
Amsterdam, Noord-Holland, The Netherlands

Historical and Cultural Interconnections between Latin America and Asia

ISBN 978-3-030-51598-0 ISBN 978-3-030-51599-7 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51599-7

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 Acknowledgements

This book is the result of almost 6 years of work carried out between
Hong Kong, the Philippines and Amsterdam. This means that a great
number of people have been involved, in one way or another, in its
writing. I owe a huge thanks to all of them.
In the summer of 2013, while living in Hong Kong, I went to the
Philippines encouraged by Jose Maria Fons Guardiola, the cultural attaché
of the Cervantes Institute in Manila. Thanks to Jose Maria for receiving
me in Manila and encourage me to do any research on the topic, either
big or small, and for guiding me around the city to visit library archives,
private collections and bookstores. I had the chance of visiting La Soli-
daridad, one of the oldest and few bookstores in Ermita where works in
Spanish are still sold, and the honour of meeting its owner, F. Sionil Jose,
one of the most important contemporary Filipino writers in English. José
was happy to have a conversation with a Spanish visitor in his rusty Spanish
learnt at school. During that stay in Manila, I also had the chance to meet
Isaac Donoso in the Casino Español. From Isaac, I received encourage-
ment to go ahead with this project and learnt multiple anecdotes on what
it is like to do research in or about the Philippines.
The idea of doing research on Hispano-Filipino literature became then
a reality. This book is the result of years of work undertaken at the
University of Amsterdam where I completed my Ph.D. I am thankful to
my supervisors, Esther Peeren and Jeroen de Kloet, for their guidance

v
vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

in the practice of cultural analysis, and also for giving me the opportu-
nity to work in a project from the European Research Council (ERC)
at the Centre for Globalisation Studies and to teach in the Literary and
Cultural Analysis programme. In Amsterdam, during the years of my
Ph.D., I met Simon Ferdinand, my intellectual companion and uncon-
ditional friend, who is now also my English editor. I am grateful for all
the work Simon has helped me with over the years and, especially now,
with this manuscript.
Without a doubt, Transcultural Nationalism would have not existed
without the support and generosity of Jorge Mojarro and Rocío Ortuño
Casanova. I am grateful to Jorge for letting me know where to find the
microfilm of the 1949 edition of Paz Mendoza’s Notas de viaje that I use
in Chapter 3. Years later, Jorge also guided me towards the Casa Villav-
icencio in the village of Taal where I obtained an original copy of the
book. Moreover, I thank Jorge for always sharing and discussing mate-
rials and for inviting me to collaborate in two special issues on Philippine
literature in Spanish. I owe Rocío a debt of gratitude for her kindness,
not only sharing primary texts, but also calls for papers, grant proposals,
work opportunities and tips for travelling in the Philippines. Her enthu-
siasm to participate in seminars organised on Hispano-Filipino literature
in Amsterdam and Utrecht has been equally valuable for learning and
discussing some of the ideas I bring to this book. The contributions of
Redén Valencia Libo-on from the University of Leiden to those seminars
are also worthy of gratitude.
The conference that took place at the University of Antwerp in
December 2018, organised by Rocío and Axel Gasquet, brought together
a community of researchers which has now become a big family. In that
conference, and in other fortunate occasions (such as in the XXI Congreso
de la Asociación Alemana de Hispanistas in Munich in 2017, the ICAS
conference in Leiden in 2019 and the NeMLA in Boston in 2020), I have
had the chance to meet wonderful people and outstanding scholars such
as Paula C. Park, Jody Blanco, Wystan de la Peña, Ruth de Llobet, David
George, Ernest Rafael Hartwell, Eugenio Matibag, Adam Lifshey, Axel
Gasquet, Marlon Sales, Thenesoya Vidina Martín de la Nuez and Beatriz
Álvarez Tardío. I am specially thankful to Beatriz for reading and giving
me insightful comments on my chapter on Adelina Gurrea Monasterio.
This book has developed from the feedback that I have received from
these colleagues during conference presentations, seminars, peer reviews
and email correspondence.
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS vii

I have finished this book while teaching at various institutions in the

Netherlands. Among them, the Amsterdam University College where I
was tremendously lucky to meet my colleagues, and now friends, Belén
Arias Garía, Carmela Artime, Elvira Muñoz, Monllor Palacios and Rosana
Murias. They have been a source of joy and laughter during these years
of full-time teaching and researching. I am grateful for our friendship,
our inspirational conversations and the familiar bond we have created
while living in the Netherlands. I owe huge gratitude to my Amsterdam
family, Becky, Rashid, Alma and Leon, for always supporting me. Very
special thanks to Steven, who has endured with me the last steps towards
the completion of this book offering me revisions, raising questions and
thinking with me.
Versions of parts of chapters in this study have previously appeared in
the following publications:

Chapter 1: “Transcultural Orientalism: Re-writing the Orient from

the Philippines and Latin America” Transpacific Connections of
Philippine Literature in Spanish, Unitas, Manila: University of Santo
Tomas, 2019, pp. 288–317.
Chapter 3: “Un paseo por la modernidad: reflexiones de Paz
Mendoza en Notas de Viaje (1929)”. Revista de Critica Literaria
Latinoamericana. Año XLIV, No 88. Tufts University: Lima-Boston,
2018, pp. 267–290.

Thanks to the editors of these publications—Jorge Mojarro, Lulu Reyes

and José Antonio Mazzoti—and to the reviewers for their time and
feedback, which has fed into this study.
Most crucially I am grateful to these series editors, Katherine López
and Ignacio López-Calvo, for the enthusiasm they have shown for this
book. I thank them for sharing their expertise and for their assistance in
editing and formatting the manuscript. Liam McLean and Camille Davis
of Palgrave have actually turned this project into a book. I appreciate their
endless patience and hard work.
Finally, I want to thank my family in Spain who have dealt with me
spending weeks of “holidays” behind my computer. To my brother David,
viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

who always asks the most simple and important questions and for teaching
me how to plant trees and work on my patience. To my Mum and Dad
for supporting me wholeheartedly in anything I set my mind to do, no
matter when and no matter how far.
 Contents

1 Introduction 1
Selected Texts and Authors 5
Researching Hispano-Filipino Literature 9
Filipino Nationalism in Hispano-Filipino Literature 17
Filipino Transculturation 22
The Question of Filipino Identity 27
Chapter Outline 29
Works Cited 37

2 Transcultural Orientalism: Re-Writing the Orient

from Latin America and the Philippines 45
Other Uses of Orientalism 46
Latin American Orientalism 50
Transcultural Orientalism 58
Works Cited 73

3 Nostalgia for the Orient: Images of the Philippines

in the Work of Adelina Gurrea Monasterio 77
Historical Reconciliation 79
Nostalgia for the Philippines 89
Double Cosmovision 97
Works Cited 115

ix
x CONTENTS

4 Travelling the Modern World in Paz Mendoza’s Notas

de Viaje (1929) 119
Travel Literature and (Post)Colonial Theory 122
Departure: The Question of (In)dependence 125
Explorations: Intercultural Exchanges and Stereotyping 128
Visions of Modernity: Cuba, Europe, Japan 137
Returning Home 143
Works Cited 151

5 Translation Strategies in Jesús Balmori’s Los Pájaros

de fuego.Una novela filipina de la guerra (1945) 155
Translating to Betray, Mourn and Survive 161
Translating Time 166
Lovable Japan: Literary Orientalism and the Pleasure
of Misrecognition 175
Lost in Translation 183
Found in Translation 186
Works Cited 192

6 Transcultural Nationalism in Antonio Abad’s El

Campeón (1940) 195
The Cultivation of the Nation 198
Transitory Hours 201
The Victory of the Underdog 205
Cocks and Chicks: Masculinity in National Discourses 216
A New Form of Heroism 223
Works Cited 233

7 Conclusion 235
Works Cited 242

Index 243
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction

In 1898, the US seized the last remaining territories of the Spanish

Empire in the Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean Sea, Guam, Cuba,
Puerto Rico and the Philippines, putting an end to more than 350 years
of Spanish colonialism. The Philippines fought against the US in the
Filipino-American War from 1898 until 1902, but the US annexed the
archipelago, which remained under US control until 1946. Somewhat
paradoxically, it was during the American occupation of the Philippines
that Spanish flourished as a literary language among Hispanised elites,
who used it to communicate an anti-colonial and pro-independence
message, free from both Spanish censorship and American surveillance.
Through proliferating periodicals, magazines and publishing houses,
Spanish-speaking authors expressed their literary creativity and nation-
alist aspirations. In prompting Filipino nationalism in Spanish during
the period of US rule, a generation of writers sought to resist being
assimilated to the language and culture of the new coloniser. What is
more, they asserted a sense of belonging to a global Hispanic commu-
nity, with whom the Philippines shared a colonial history. Attending to
this literary tradition, which has now started to receive critical attention,
offers new interpretations of both the Spanish and US colonial projects
from an Asian perspective. Indeed, the contemporary study of Hispano-
Filipino literature has remapped colonial and literary histories. It brings

© The Author(s) 2020 1

I. Villaescusa Illán, Transcultural Nationalism
in Hispano-Filipino Literature, Historical and Cultural
Interconnections between Latin America and Asia,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51599-7_1
2 I. VILLAESCUSA ILLÁN

into focus various histories of anti-colonial resistance and alliance—such as

that between Cuba and the Philippines—and diverse transpacific networks
and influences—such as the Manila Galleon trade route, which connected
Mexico and the Philippines for over 300 years. To study Philippine liter-
ature in Spanish, therefore, is to study of a global network of Hispanic
cultures.
Recent research on Philippine literature in Spanish, much like on
other literatures from former Spanish colonies (Equatorial Guinea and
Morocco), is no longer the study of peripheralised traditions in relation
to a canon of literature in Spanish.1 Whereas in 2012 David Sentado
could describe Hispano-Filipino writing as “zombie literature”, it is now
seen as a central node in the “Global Hispanophone”. This rubric echoes
the more established concept of the Global Lusophone, Francophone
and Anglophone traditions (Lifshey 2012). Until recently, the study of
Hispanophone literatures has been largely concerned with texts stem-
ming from the Iberian Peninsula and Latin America. This indicates that
the Hispanic Literary World is, in the words of Franco Moretti, “one
but uneven” (2000). And yet, both historically and today, the central
canon of Hispanic literature has been accompanied by lesser-known
literary traditions, located around the world. Against this backdrop,
recognising peripheral literatures in Spanish serves to reconfigure the
Hispanic Literary World. One of this book’s aims is to locate Philippine
literature in Spanish within this literary world by attending to its relation-
ships with other literatures, mostly from Latin America. Mojarro (2018a)
affirms that Hispano-Filipino literature has to be understood as a prolific
but forgotten extension of Spanish-American literature, with which it
shares many features. These connections, he suggests, can be brought
into focus through comparative study. In this way, Mojarro indicates the
need to see Hispano-Filipino literature both as embedded in a particular
historical conjunction of global connections (from which its postcolonial
themes and nationalist concerns emerge) and as an independent corpus
with its own characteristic literary aesthetics. Adhering to a compara-
tive approach, informed by theories of world literature and by means
of cultural analysis, this book recovers a neglected archive of Philippine
literature in Spanish. It analyses Hispano-Filipino works in dialogue with
other texts and a range of cultural and literary theories. Although these
theories are presented individually in each chapter, they all fall under the
general framework of transculturation (which I go on to explain below).
 1 INTRODUCTION 3

In terms of its specific corpus, this book explores the work of jour-
nalist, poet and novelist Jesús Balmori (1887–1946), author Adelina
Gurrea Monasterio (1896–1971), doctor of medicine and travel writer
Paz Mendoza Guazón (1884–1967), and journalist, writer and Spanish
teacher Antonio Abad (1894–1970). My analysis of these writers’ works
lays bare their shared concern with the past, present and future of the
Philippines in the first half of the twentieth century, when the archipelago
was an emerging nation situated at the intersection of various cultures.
On the one hand, this reveals the global entanglements of Philippine
culture and its attempt construct a national imaginary by differentiating
itself from, but also assimilating to, other cultures. On the other, it illu-
minates the contemporaneity of this corpus’s concerns with nationalism
and identity in an age of modern globalisation.
In putting my overarching concept of transculturation in dialogue with
this corpus of literary texts, I take the term to figure what Mieke Bal
has called a travelling concept (2002). As such, the notion of transcul-
turation at stake in this book can be modified and resignified in relation
to particular cultural objects. Broadly speaking, transculturation describes
changes brought about in one culture by the introduction of elements
belonging to another. Fernando Ortiz, the Cuban anthropologist, first
used the term transculturation in 1940 as a means of combining previous
ways of conceptualising transformations brought by contact between
cultures, largely as a result of colonisation. According to Ortiz, transcul-
turation complicates and expands the rather unidirectional and reductive
idea of acculturation (assimilation) by drawing on other terms such as
deculturation (loss) and neoculturation (innovation). Ortiz’s concept was
foundational for Latin American literary studies into the 1990s. Indeed,
it powerfully informed the work of Ángel Rama (1982) and Mary Louise
Pratt (1992). Some Latin American scholars, however, have suggested
that the term’s meaning has been exhausted, claiming that transcultur-
ation is now a never-ending process that occurs everywhere, all of the
time. Instead, they present transculturation as an ideological discourse,
which has appealed to ideals of tolerance and multiculturalism in partic-
ular periods of Latin American political history (Moreiras 2001). Despite
its alleged exhaustion, when put in dialogue with Philippine literature in
Spanish, the concept of transculturation makes it possible to trace and
understand the dynamic, multidirectional flows that have shaped literary
practice and ideological discourse among Spanish-speaking Filipinos.
4 I. VILLAESCUSA ILLÁN

In this book, I understand Filipino transculturation not only as the

outcome of colonial imposition, but also in terms of an active desire for
cultural transformation among the colonised to be put to anti-colonial
ends and to affirm a new cultural identity. Indeed, Philippine literature
in Spanish engages with a number of other cultures beyond the colonis-
er’s in a period of modern globalisation. Drawing on Ortiz, Rama and
Pratt’s ideas about transculturation, I look at the agency that processes of
transculturation accord to the subjugated culture. Rather than passively
incorporating what is imposed on them, Filipino (post)colonial writers
actively and creatively rework and reimagine received ideologies. With
this in mind, I trace the forms of transculturation—encompassing assim-
ilation, loss, innovation—that appear in selected literary texts. I explore
how the Philippines has been constantly transformed, whether according
to the model of its various colonisers’ cultures or other global actors (such
as Mexico, Cuba and Japan). Each of these global cultures interacts with
one another in Hispano-Filipino literature so as to form a distinct national
imaginary of the Philippines—which is inevitably transcultural.
During the American occupation, the community of Spanish-speaking
Filipinos represented one of the subjugated cultures. Nevertheless, their
position at the top of the colonial hierarchy is of particular interest with
regard to their role as passive (transcultured) but also active (transcul-
turating) agents of the Philippines’ cultural landscape. Their agency was
manifested in the flourishing of literary and journalistic publications in
Spanish in the first part of the twentieth century, a period known as the
“golden age” of Philippine literature in Spanish. This book shows how
the transculturation of Philippine culture (as it was experienced, promoted
and expressed by the Spanish-speaking Filipino elite) produced a range of
contrasting and ambiguous sentiments, including feelings of bereavement,
affirmation and betrayal with respect to the cultures with which they were
in contact. The selected corpus navigates and negotiates its attachments
to, and detachments from, diverse cultural points of reference, above all
the Hispanic heritage derived from language and mestizaje, US market
culture, an admiration of Japan as ideal modern Asian nation and the
indigenous Filipino cultures (which are often represented only superfi-
cially). From a theoretical perspective, my analysis shows how these early
and mid-twentieth-century Filipino texts in Spanish expand and compli-
cate signal concepts and themes in postcolonial studies. Indeed, these
writings develop notions of orientalism, identity, language, translation and
transcultural nationalism in new and often unexpected directions. In so
 1 INTRODUCTION 5

doing, Hispano-Filipino writers not only work towards intercultural trans-

lation, but turn transculturation into an active, future-oriented process
of cultural and social change, which they put at the service of nation
building.

Selected Texts and Authors

Jesús Balmori (1887–1946) is one of the most interesting authors of
this period. He was a journalist, a poet and fiction writer. Under the
pseudonym of Batikuling, he wrote columns for La Vanguardia and The
Excelsior that reacted to events and satirised the US government and
Spanish-speaking Filipinos who assimilated to the American way of life.
Balmori’s work has been discussed by early critics of Hispano-Filipino
literature, such as the Spanish intellectual Wenceslao Retana (1862–1924)
and, more recently, by Isaac Donoso (2010) and Adam Lifshey (2011,
2016). In addition to two other novels, he wrote Los pájaros de fuego,
una novela filipina de la guerra (Birds of Fire, a Filipino War Novel)
during the Second World War. To me, this is a unique account of years
leading up to the Japanese raid of Manila in 1945. The novel was not
published until 2010, when Isaac Donoso produced an annotated edition
as part of the Cervantes Institute’s literary revival project, Colección de
Clásicos Hispanofilipinos . The novel tells the story of an aristocratic family
of Spanish descent living in Manila in the period before the Japanese occu-
pation (1942–1945). I discuss Balmori’s novel in Chapter 5. Additionally,
I analyse examples of Balmori’s poetry in Chapter 2, focusing on three
poems contained in the collections Rimas Malayas (Malayan Rhymes,
1904) and Mi casa de Nipa (My house of Nipa, 1941).
The other novel that I analyse in this book is Antonio Abad’s El
Campeón (The Champion, 1940). Abad (1894–1970) was one of the
most committed hispanistas of the period of US rule in the Philippines.
He was Professor of Spanish at various universities, as well as a jour-
nalist and author. El Campeón is a fable about Filipino cockfighting set
on the island of Cebu, the author’s rural birthplace. Abad spent most
of the 1940s in Cebu, having fled the agitation of life in Manila in
the years leading up to the Second World War. In the context of this
book, Cebu counterbalances the urban context of Manila, as described in
both Balmori’s Pájaros and Abad’s previous novel La Oveja de Nathan
(Nathan Sheep, 1926). Exploring the rural setting in El Campeón allows
me to compare transcultural processes brought about by cultural contact
6 I. VILLAESCUSA ILLÁN

in rich cosmopolitan centres (such as Manila in Pájaros ) with the life in

rural Cebu.
If Philippine literature written in Spanish occupies a peripheral posi-
tion in Hispanic letters, women’s contributions to it represent a periphery
within the periphery. Few critical works have paid rigorous attention to
Filipino women’s writing in Spanish. Works of literary historiography that
have focused on women’s writing have a tendency to list female authors
and their works with little critical discussion of the works themselves.2
The task of anthologising works by female authors is crucial for any
research that aims to reconstitute this scattered archive. However, it is
also necessary to critically assess the potential and literary value of these
works and explore how they relate to the historical contexts in which they
emerged. This book aims to fill this gap by engaging with the work of two
Filipino women, Paz Mendoza Guazón and Adelina Gurrea Monasterio.3
The following female writers, who were active during the US occu-
pation, were awarded the Zóbel Prize of literature for works written in
Spanish: Maria Paz Mendoza Guazón (1884–1967), Inés Villa (1900–
1988), Evangelina Guerrero Zacarías (1904–1949), Adelina Gurrea
Monasterio (1896–1971) and Nilda Guerrero Barranco (1906–1990).4
Although they did not receive literary awards, the columnist Paz Zamora
Mascuñana (1888–1978) and suffragist Pura Villanueva Kalaw (1886–
1954) were also prolific writers of both fiction and non-fiction in this
period.5 Villanueva Kalaw led the first successful plebiscite for women’s
vote in 1937.6 These women played a central role in the “golden age”
of Hispano-Filipino literature. Along with their male contemporaries,
they experienced the linguistic and cultural transition from Spanish to
English and the overlap of residual Hispanic and new US discourses
on nationhood and womanhood. The first decades of the twentieth
century were therefore a period of rapid and thoroughgoing transforma-
tion in the Philippines. Movements of educational, social and political
reform emerged in tandem with a liberal and progressive spirit, which
fostered national aspirations and prompted people to reconsider gender
discourses. Men and women had to reconfigure their roles in the soon-
to-be-independent Filipino nation that the US had promised.
In her essay, La mujer filipina (The Philippine Woman, circa 1958),
Adelina Gurrea Monasterio calls upon women to participate in public
life. Women, she argues, should embrace new opportunities for educa-
tion and professional development: “… el tiempo no retrocede: se ha
hecho carrera y hay que alcanzar metas. Y la mujer tiene que lanzarse a
 1 INTRODUCTION 7

la calle para llegar a las suyas. Hay que decir adiós, a lo que se va yendo”
(2) (Time does not go back: we [Filipinos] are given career opportunities
and we must achieve goals. Women must go out into the street to attain
theirs. We must say goodbye to what is departing). Paz Mendoza Guazón,
along with other feminists such as Pura Villanueva Kalaw (1886–1954)
and Sofía de Veyra (1876–1953), challenged both patriarchal and colo-
nial oppression by retrieving an image of freedom and equality from the
pre-Hispanic past. Mendoza argues that in pre-modern Filipino societies
women occupied power positions alongside men. With the onset of colo-
nialism, she claims, the physical and mental vigour of indigenous women
was replaced with ideas about virtuous conduct, fragility and femininity—
what she calls the “womanly woman charms” (My Ideal Filipino Girl
1931: 43).7 Adelina Gurrea Monasterio and Paz Mendoza Guazón were
both prolific writers. In discussing their work in this book, I emphasise
how women’s writing during the US occupation contributed to discourses
advocating independence, modernisation and nation building.
Adelina Gurrea Monasterio’s Cuentos de Juana: narraciones malayas
de las islas filipinas (Juana’s Stories: Malayan Legends of the Philippine
Islands, 1943) is a collection of short stories set on the central islands
of Los Negros in the colonial Philippines, where the author grew up
with her family. At the age of twenty-five, she moved to Spain and would
never return to live in the Philippines again. Cuentos de Juana recounts
her childhood memories and the stories that her nanny, a Malay Filipina
called Juana, told her and her siblings. In addition to Cuentos de Juana,
in Chapter 3, I also analyse some of Gurrea’s poems from the collec-
tions En Agraz (Before Time, 1968) and Más Senderos (More Paths,
1867), as well as a play titled Filipinas: Auto histórico-satírico (Philippines:
a Historical-Satirical Allegory, 1951).
Paz Mendoza’s Notas de viaje (Travel Notes) were first published in
1929 and re-published in 1949. I located this work during my field-
work in the Philippines. The notes comprise comments and reflections
that Mendoza recorded on a trip around the world (in which she visited
the US, Cuba, Europe and the Middle East) that lasted for almost two
years. Mendoza was one of the first women to graduate in Medicine
from the University of the Philippines. She was a Professor of Medicine
and leading voice in early feminist movements in the Philippines. She
wrote essays and columns in Spanish-language newspapers and magazines
published in Manila, and spoke at public institutions. She travelled the
8 I. VILLAESCUSA ILLÁN

world twice, writing extensive notes that she sent back to the Philip-
pines, where they were published in newspapers. Although she travelled
at her own expense, the University of the Philippines and the government
encouraged her to collect materials for educational purposes. Mendoza’s
travelogue demonstrates the cosmopolitanism of some of these authors
and their commitment to developing the Philippines into a modern nation
on a par with those that Mendoza observed in other parts of the world,
such as Germany, Norway or Cuba.
Taken together, the works I discuss in this book offer a variety of
voices, of men and women, writing from Spain and the Philippines. They
describe a variety of both urban and rural contexts, which, in the case of
Mendoza, encompass countries across the world. Gurrea’s poems, play
and short story and Mendoza’s travelogue offer a counter perspective
and complement to Balmori and Abad’s novels, enlarging the focus of
this book in terms of both gender and genre. What is more, writing from
Spain and various other places around the world, Gurrea’s and Mendoza’s
texts provide a vantage point on the Philippines from outside, thus facili-
tating a global view of the Philippines. Across their differences, all of the
texts are explicitly concerned with defining Filipino cultural and national
identity. This was only heightened by the moment in which they were
written, when the Spanish language and the colonial heritage connected
to it were being threatened by the presence of the US in the archipelago
and the promise of impending independence (the Republic of the Philip-
pines was finally established in 1946). To my knowledge, this is the first
monograph in English or Spanish to undertake detailed analyses of the
four authors’ work in relation to each other, and alongside a number of
other works by Filipino authors writing in Spanish in the same period.
In the remainder of this introduction, I continue first by outlining the
main currents of research on Hispano-Filipino literature, before contex-
tualising my corpus in relation to Filipino nationalism. Then, a brief
discussion of certain enduring anxieties about Filipino identity, many of
which persist today, will serve to illustrate the relevance of these authors’
attempts to negotiate their Hispanic selves among a plurality of identities.
This leads me to explain the theoretical concept at the heart of this book,
Filipino transculturation.
 1 INTRODUCTION 9

Researching Hispano-Filipino Literature

A body of rigorous literary criticism concerned with the study of Philip-
pine literature in Spanish has emerged in the last ten years. That said,
the field does continually refer back to key precedents that date to the
beginning of the twentieth century, such as the remarkable contribu-
tions from the Spanish literary critic Wenceslao Retana (1862–1924).8 In
2008, Beatriz Álvarez Tardío published a study on the presence of Philip-
pine literature in the Spanish literary canon (“La literatura hispano-filipina
en la formación del canon literario en lengua española”). Wystan de la
Peña dedicated a chapter exclusively to Philippine literature in Spanish in
Maureen Ihrie and Salvador Oropesa’s World Literature in Spanish: An
Encyclopedia, which appeared in 2011. He surveys different movements
and authors, and briefly discusses a number of works, including two short
stories by Evangelina Guerrero Zacarías, the only female author to be
nominated to take a position in the Academia Filipina in 1947. Around
the same time, two volumes edited by Isaac Donoso were published:
Literatura Hispano Filipina actual (2011) and Historia cultural de la
lengua española en Filipinas: ayer y hoy (2012). Together, they present
a series of historical and literary essays on Hispano-Filipino literature,
covering key histories and genres in the field, as well as works by the
most relevant authors from the sixteenth century onwards. Both volumes
include excerpts from novels and full poems.
Most recently, Jorge Mojarro (2018b) has published a historical survey
of critical works that focus on Hispano-Filipino literature from the twen-
tieth century. His review starts with an article written by the Filipino
Cristóbal Epifanio de los Santos (1871–1928) in 1914. This is followed
by an article written more than twenty years later: Teófilo del Castillo
y Tuazon’s A Brief History of Philippine Literature, dating from 1937.
Three decades later, in 1964, Estanislao B. Alinea published the first
history of Hispano-Filipino literature to classify works according to histor-
ical periods. According to Mojarro, the timeline that Alinea established
for Hispano-Filipino literature runs in parallel with the history of the
Philippines. In calibrating literary developments with political history
in this way, Mojarro argues, Alinea missed an opportunity to establish
an organised corpus of authors according to purely aesthetic or literary
criteria (677). Alinea’s timeline can be summarised in the following way:
the lobbying period (laborantismo) that ran from 1876 until 1896; the
10 I. VILLAESCUSA ILLÁN

revolutionary period beginning with Rizal’s death in 1896 and contin-

uing until Apolinario Mabini’s death in 1903; the golden age between
1903 and 1942; and finally, the decadent period, which begins with the
Japanese occupation and lasts until the end of the war in 1945 (Mojarro
662). Mojarro may be right to point out shortcomings in Alinea’s simul-
taneously historical and literary periodisations. Nevertheless, I would
suggest that it is productive to take historical developments into account
because this makes it possible to understand how Filipino nationalists put
Spanish to new, anti-colonial purposes. Indeed, in this period, Spanish
stopped being the language of the colonial oppression and continued
instead as the language of (class) prestige in the emerging nation. What
is more, attending to the literature in conjunction with political history
helps account for thematic developments, not least the form of nation-
alism that emerged during periods of Spanish colonialism, US rule and
national independence which I discuss in the third section of this intro-
duction. Luis Mariñas’s Literatura filipina en castellano (1974) and Ortiz
Armengol’s Letras en Filipinas (1999) are more widely read and cited
than Alinea’s book. Ortiz Armengol presents a chronological account of
Spanish works that include references to the Philippines, beginning with
travel chronicles and continuing up until classic modern authors such as
Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936), Emilia Pardon Bazán (1851–1921)
and Ramón del Valle-Inclán (1866–1936) among others.9
In addition to the works described above, journal articles dedicated
exclusively to Philippine literature in Spanish have been featured in maga-
zines. These include Revista Filipina:Revista trimestral de Lengua y
Literatura Hispano Filipina, an online magazine launched by Edmundo
Farolán Romero in 1997; Kritica Kultura, an open-access magazine
published by the University of Ateneo in Manila; Unitas , the journal
of the University of Santo Tomas in the Philippines; and two journals
published in the US, Transmodernity by the University of California and
the Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana by Tufts University.
The Cervantes Virtual Centre of the University of Alicante hosts many
works of Philippine literature in Spanish as well as a number of texts of
literary criticism. Launched in 2019, Filiteratura is a database of literary
texts from or about the Philippines written in Spanish. It was created by
a team of digital humanities experts led by Rocío Ortuño Casanova and
is hosted at the University of Antwerpen.
The necessity to establish a genealogy and historical overview of
Philippine literature in Spanish explains that both historically and today,
 1 INTRODUCTION 11

research still largely focuses on offering panoramic views of the field.

Moreover, many works in this research area are concerned to trace
Hispano-Filipino literature from its beginnings to the present day, locate
works in libraries in the Philippines, the US and Spain as well as private
collections, and digitalise texts so as to create a globally accessible archive.
Although this book has benefited enormously from existing archival and
historical research, in analysing a small number of selected works in
detail, it takes a different approach to the study of Philippine literature
in Spanish.
This brief review of the literature, which I expand upon at various
points in the chapters, has led me to question the notion of “zombie liter-
ature”. As I mentioned above, David Sentado uses the term to describe
Philippine literature in Spanish. In an article published in the trilingual
cultural magazine Perro Berde,10 Sentado lamented that the death of
spoken Spanish in the Philippines would extinguish this singular literature:

Languages, like religions, live on heresies, they grow and develop from
their mistakes. A dead language, where no one has the right to make
mistakes, is also closed to changes involving innovations that strengthen
and extend the language in use. That is the tragedy of the Philippine
variety of Spanish language. This is also the tragedy of Philippine literature
in Spanish. Without native speakers, with no readers or public platforms,
the few writers in Spanish that persist are torn between embracing the
internet and continue living off a ghastly tradition. The result is what some
Philippine-Spanish writers called zombie literature. (Sentado 50)

Whereas heresies stir up change and evolution, Sentado argues, silence

kills a language. Although it should be said that some Filipinistas insist
on keeping Hispano-Filipino literature going, the sporadic publications
that see the light thanks to their efforts are perhaps not enough to claim a
living tradition.11 “Zombie literature”, then, may be an appropriate term
for Hispano-Filipino literature, considering that zombies are the living
dead: dead given the insignificant number of contemporary Filipinos that
write in Spanish but alive in that there is an emerging interest in reading
and researching Philippine literature in Spanish.
In the contemporary Philippines, Spanish is studied as a foreign
language. Like everywhere else in Asia, students learning Spanish are
motivated by a desire to enhance their professional profiles, especially
given that it is spoken in Latin America and Spain, and widely used in
12 I. VILLAESCUSA ILLÁN

the US. Beyond pedagogical contexts, Spanish is associated with a deca-

dent colonial past characterised by Catholic oppression. These negative
connotations were cemented by American propaganda during the US
occupation. Despite this, Spanish is also related to the earliest nation-
alist movements in the Philippines, led by José Rizal (1861–1896). A
young medical doctor, Rizal is best known for being one of the Philip-
pines’ first nationalist writers, who used the colonial language to challenge
Spanish colonialism. He became a national hero after being executed by
the Spanish, who considered his novels Noli me Tangere (Touch me Not,
1887) and El Filibusterismo (Subversion, 1891) to be anti-clerical and
subversive. Indeed they were. They revealed the decadence and corrup-
tion of the colonial government, which had become a puppet of the
clergy. The story goes that Rizal, while waiting for his execution in prison,
wrote a poem titled “Mi último adios” (My Last Farewell, 1896), which
was found in his jacket pocket. The poem became a patriotic anthem.
Indeed, its opening verses are still quoted in Spanish by Filipinos, many
of whom were obliged to memorise and recite it before Spanish stopped
being compulsory in schools in 1987.
Most Filipinos (not just the elderly) can quote the opening verse of
Rizal’s poem. However, fewer are aware of that twenty-five per cent of
their everyday vocabulary either stems directly from Spanish—zapatos,
cuchara, platito, puede (shoes, spoon, little plate, be able to)—or consists
of free phonetic transcriptions of Spanish. This can be seen, for example,
in the greeting kumostá, derived from ¿cómo está? (how are you?) and
words like kultura nasyonal, kargo de konsiyensiya, rebolusyon (national
culture, guilt, revolution) (in Donoso 2012: 336). Some commentators
compare the role of Spanish in the Philippines to that of classical Latin in
romance languages. Spanish, they claim, “is the Latin of the Philippines:
nobody speaks it anymore, but it is behind everything we say”.12
The Philippines is composed of approximately 7000 scattered islands,
populated by different ethnic groups that speak a range of languages.
These have been catalogued into seventy different linguistic groups and
are spoken in three hundred dialects (Ortiz Armengol 1999: 12). The
Philippines has undergone many linguistic and cultural turns, of which
Spanish colonisation, which resulted in the emergence of a Hispano-
Filipino literature, is only one. The arrival of the US in 1898 implied a
decline in the use of Spanish. The difficulties of this transition were keenly
felt by a group of writers who had undergone their education in Spanish
but reached intellectual maturity when it was of little use. It was likely
 1 INTRODUCTION 13

that their own children would be unable to read their texts. Moreover, the
country’s colonial past, the various independence movements and world
wars that punctuated the twentieth century and the Philippines’ complex
geography and multiple languages have contributed to the peripherality of
all Filipino literatures—including those in major Filipino languages such
as Cebuano, Ilocano, Pampango and more (see Ortiz Armengol 1999).
In the early twentieth century, a minority (Spanish-speaking Filipino
writers) made use of Spanish, a major global language, in a minor loca-
tion (the Philippines). Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari describe a similar
structure with regard to Kafka’s use of German in their article “What
is Minor Literature?” (1983). Deleuze and Guattari write that “a minor
literature is not the literature of a minor language but the literature a
minority makes in a major language” (1983: 16). Building on this argu-
ment, Daniel W. Smith and Greco (1997) adds that in using German
instead of Czech, Kafka was not “writing in a minor language” but rather
inventing “a minor use of the major language” (xlviii). The creation of
minor literatures in major languages is political, as Deleuze and Guattari
emphasise:

The three characteristics of minor literature are the deterritorialization

of the language, the connection of the individual and the political, the
collective arrangement of utterance. Which amounts to this: that “minor”
no longer characterizes certain literatures, but describes the revolutionary
conditions of any literature within what we call the great (or established).
Everyone who has had the misfortune to be born in the country of a major
literature must write in its tongue, as a Czech Jew writes in German, or as
an Uzbek Jew writes in Russian. (19)

Filipino authors used Spanish to express their political aspirations and

imagine an independent nation. As such, they encapsulate the way in
which minor literatures function in major languages as presented by
Deleuze and Guattari. They articulate new voices in a dominant language.
In The World Republic of Letters (2004), Pascale Casanova offers
another theoretical framework through which Hispano-Filipino literature
can be situated in the context of world and Hispanic literature. Together
with David Damrosch and Franco Moretti, Casanova picked up the
discussion of world literature that began with the classic texts by Goethe
and Marx. In What is World Literature? (2003), Damrosch defines world
literature as the circulation, production, reception and translation of
14 I. VILLAESCUSA ILLÁN

literary works that travel outside national borders. Moretti approaches the
topic from a more socio-economic point of view. Following Immanuel
Wallerstein’s “world systems theory”, Moretti presents world literature as
being like international capitalism in that it is “a system that is simultane-
ously one and unequal: with a core and a periphery (and a semi periphery)
that are bound together in a relationship of growing inequality” (2000:
56). Although here Moretti agrees with other theorists that there is now
one world literature (in the singular sense of Goethe’s Weltliteratuur), he
stresses that it “is profoundly unequal” (56).
Casanova draws on Pierre Bourdieu’s sociological concepts of habitus
and field (1977) so as to suggest the existence of a global literary space.
Whereas Moretti argues that the relationship between economic centres
and peripheries is reflected in the uneven value accorded to literary works,
Casanova suggests that this global literary space is partly autonomous
in relation to economic and political power structures, and is organised
according to its own literary logic:

Let us say that a mediating space exists between literature and the world:
a parallel territory, relatively autonomous from the political domain, and
dedicated as a result to questions, debates, inventions of a specifically
literary nature. Here, struggles of all sorts—political, social, national,
gender, ethnic—come to be refracted, diluted, deformed or transformed
according to a literary logic, and in literary forms. (Casanova 71–72)

Casanova’s literary world is characterised by an uneven circulation of

works of the literature according to their perceived literary value (what
she calls “literariness”), which functions as a form of cultural capital in
Bourdieu’s sense.
Another literary theorist to draw from Bourdieu is Ortuño Casanova
(2017), whose work investigates the reasons why literary production in
Spanish flourished in the twentieth-century Philippines to such a degree
that the national canon was in Spanish during the early decades of the
twentieth century, despite the majority of Filipinos rarely speaking or
reading Spanish. The canonisation of works in Spanish, she argues, was
not solely driven by the freedom of expression permitted by the US
government (which led to the proliferation of new newspapers, magazines
and private publishers that I mentioned earlier) and the establishment of
a literary prize in Spanish, the Zóbel Prize. Instead—and this is where
 1 INTRODUCTION 15

Bourdieu comes in—she points to the prestige of the “cultural bour-

geoisie titles”, for which the most recognised Spanish-speaking authors
wrote:

The credentials of the bourgeois cultural elite are reaffirmed by the obser-
vation that 31 of the writers [she includes in her study] had white-collar
careers: 12 lawyers, 2 judges, 6 doctors, 3 pharmacists and 8 made a living
primarily in journalism. Among the 13 who taught at established univer-
sities, 6 were full-time professors. On the other hand, 4 were secondary
school teachers. These professions, according to Bourdieu, possess a higher
level of cultural capital and thus, have more credibility and distinction
(1984). The cultural capital socially attributed to them would then be
a product of a habitus, and of the construction of taste in these social
classes. … But there is even more … The politicians of that period were
considered national heroes. They were known for being the makers of the
nation and for being part of the founding myth, and had inclinations that
countered the trends at the time. Among the actions that challenged the
status quo was writing in Castilian Spanish instead of in English. (66–67
emphasis in the original)

Put briefly, writing in Spanish was a sign of status (conceived of as “taste”

or “distinction”). The literature in Spanish, therefore, held more literary
capital than in other languages. Moreover, writing in a European language
promised to bring Filipino writers closer to other centres of literary
prestige. According to Casanova, the fact that different literatures have
historically been assigned different degrees of cultural capital means that
the World Republic of Letters takes the form of a system of centres and
peripheries, with Paris as the most central metropolis:

The world of letters is a relatively unified space characterized by the

opposition between the great national literary spaces, which are also the
oldest—and, accordingly, the best endowed—and those literary spaces that
have more recently appeared and that are poor by comparison. (83)

At the risk of reproducing Eurocentric rhetorics, Casanova maps out the

World Republic of Letters, tracing the ongoing tensions among centres
and peripheries. Since peripheral literatures have little currency of their
own, they have to rely on the power of a centre to grant them “literari-
ness”. Peripheral literatures can be centralised, but only by engaging with
central models through forms of assimilation or differentiation. What is
16 I. VILLAESCUSA ILLÁN

more, centralisation can only occur if the centre’s prominent authors or

publishers endorse emergent peripheral literatures.
I will discuss the debate over world literature, and Cananova’s theory
of the dependent relationship between the periphery and the centre,
in more detail in Chapter 2. Keeping these debates in mind, in this
book I set out to explore the transcultural strategies of assimilation and
differentiation through which works in my corpus engaged with various
models of literariness. In this way, I mean to position Hispano-Filipino
literature in relation to the European centre (primarily Spain, but also
France) and another Spanish-language region, namely Latin America. I
will show how concerns about language, translation and circulation are
crucial in the selected Hispano-Filipino texts both within their imme-
diate linguistic community (of Filipino Spanish-speakers) and also beyond
them, in literary world space at large. The texts in the Hispano-Filipino
classics collection, for example, have been re-published in Spanish without
being translated into Tagalog or English. This means that most Filipinos
are unable to read texts that constituted part of their national canon. At
the same time, the collection has very little visibility in major Spanish-
speaking markets, largely because they have not been published as a
commercial endeavour. In fact, Gurrea’s Cuentos de Juana, Balmori’s
Pájaros de fuego and Antonio Abad’s El campeón cannot be bought, but
are rather distributed by the Cervantes Institute. As such, they stand
outside both the financial and literary market, and they do not really
circulate beyond their national borders, to use Damrosch’s terms. More-
over, the “national border” of Hispano-Filipino literature is a complex
space. Since 2017, however, the Cervantes Digital Library has made them
available open access, along with many other works of Philippine liter-
ature in Spanish. This initiative has given Hispano-Filipino literature a
new (digital) life. Instead of enabling market circulation, it enables those
curious readers who know about the existence of this literary tradition to
access the texts, regardless of where they are in the world. Hopefully, this
will foster further research.
In addition to presenting an argument about the role of the litera-
ture in prefiguring certain aspects of Filipino national identity, the other
important aim of this book has been to retrieve a largely untapped reper-
toire of lesser-known works of Philippine literature. In writing this book
in English, whereas my corpus is in Spanish, I hope to bring these works
to the attention of a wider public. I have both reproduced passages in the
original Spanish and translating them into English. Accordingly, those
 1 INTRODUCTION 17

who can understand written Spanish can get a taste of what it is like to
read Hispano-Filipino literature. Most of the translations are mine; I have
chosen to provide literal rather than interpretative translations so as to
remain close to the original wording. I take full responsibility for any
possible mistakes and awkward renderings in the English translations.

Filipino Nationalism
in Hispano-Filipino Literature
As I have mentioned before, the majority of works written in Spanish by
Filipinos date from the first decades of the twentieth century coinciding
with the end of Spanish colonialism (1565–1898) and the American
period (1898–1946). These works belong to the so-called golden age
and follow the writings of an earlier generation of writers, the ilustrados
or enlightened. Among these ilustrado writers stand Pedro Paterno
(1857–1911), TH. Pardo de Tavera (1857–1925), Isabelo de los Reyes
(1864–1938) and José Rizal (1861–1896) who addressed the question
of independence and Filipino nationalism on the basis of European ideas.
Having received a Western education from the Jesuits and the Domini-
cans in Manila, and having travelled extensively to study and work in
Europe, these educated Filipinos adopted similar methodologies to Euro-
pean scholars to conceptualise nationalism in the Philippines. Megan C.
Thomas (2012) calls this first generation of Filipino scholars who wrote
in Spanish “Orientalists, Propagandists and Ilustrados”. She argues that
they not only appropriated knowledge and methodological tools coming
from the colonial metropolis (such as Orientalism and nineteenth-century
social sciences such as anthropology, philology, history and folklore) to
configure their nationalist thought, but also used these for liberatory
projects that delineated alternative political paths to Filipino nation-
alism—for instance, in rethinking the possibility of articulating nationalist
thought beyond the word “nation” and alternatively “expressed in terms
of ‘people’, ‘culture’ or ‘race’” (Thomas 2012: 8).
Thomas’s work highlights the complexity of conceiving a nation in the
context of the Philippines at a time when it was not yet independent.
The absence of a nation-state means that Filipino nationalism must be
understood primarily as a cultural and literary phenomenon. The schol-
arly work of the ilustrados in the 1880s and 1890s was among the first
Spanish-language writings seeking to study the Philippines and to surpass
the discourses of the colonisers: “In the case of the Philippines, these
18 I. VILLAESCUSA ILLÁN

‘European’ knowledges [human sciences] were largely absent from the

coloniser’s repertoire and travelled to ‘the colony’ on the colonized’s
terms” (Thomas 2012: 4). Unlike in other contexts, in which the colo-
nial metropolis would be the preferred destination for the few colonised
who were allowed to travel, study and work abroad, Filipinos not only
went to Madrid but also and often to “Paris, London, Berlin, Leiden
and elsewhere were modern sciences were advanced” (Thomas 2012: 15).
Significant here is to note that Rizal’s novels were published in Berlin and
Ghent, Belgium. The epistemological transference of European thought
to the Philippines frequently overlooked Spain, as Thomas explains:
“young colonial subjects positioned themselves as modern scholars and
intellectuals in a broader field in which their colonizers, the Spanish, often
lagged behind” (4). This is only partially true, at the end of the nineteenth
century, while in France, England and Germany a bourgeoisie had estab-
lished itself, in Spain a weak upper class had just emerged in an almost
illiterate and reactionary country that was barely industrialised, immersed
in economic and social decadence, and still boasting of an empire that
was already in decline. However, early Filipino ilustrados did nurture their
thoughts with the work of influential Spanish scholars and authors (from
Blasco Ibáñez to Unamuno), whose perspective on nationalism was quite
different from that of the majority of the impoverished Spanish (and non-
urban European) population and the clergy that controlled the country.
With their influences coming from various parts of Europe (and also from
Latin America as I discuss in Chapter 2 of this book), the label “worldly
colonials” that Thomas uses is apt.
The title of Resil B. Mojares’s book The Brains of the Nation: Pedro
Paterno, T.H. de Tavera, Isabelo de los Reyes and the Production of Modern
Knowledge (2006) summarises the historical context and the mood in
which this early generation of Filipino intellectuals grew up, as well as
outlining their concern with finding a place for the Philippines within
European ideologies of nationalism and modernity. Mojares establishes
their status as cosmopolitan ilustrados through their biographies and so
does Benedict Anderson. The latter demonstrates the influence of the
global connections shared by José Rizal and Isabelo de los Reyes as early
as during the Philippine Revolution (which started in 1896 against the
Spanish colonisers and ended with a war lost to the US in 1898). The
life and work of Isabelo de los Reyes open Anderson’s book Under Three
Flags: Anarchism and the Anti-Colonial Imagination (2005), illustrating
how these embryonic (Anderson entitles the prologue “The Rooster’s
 1 INTRODUCTION 19

Egg […]”) scholarly Filipinos engaged with emerging European academic

disciplines, among which folklore was considered a “new science” (12),
an early modern way of thinking about the humanities and, therefore,
of studying the Philippines. Making their country of birth an object
of study (or of the literary imagination) through Western sciences in
a Western language would be a way to construct it as a nation with
specific features—of local knowledge (“saber popular” Anderson 2005:
12)—that all Filipinos would recognise as their own. While Spanish served
their ambition to place the Philippines on the global map, they ignored,
however, that most Filipinos could not understand this language.
Anderson not only highlights the exchanges between Rizal, his coun-
trymen and others in the Philippines and Europe, but also links the Philip-
pine Revolution to developments in other Spanish colonies, specifically
Cuba:

The near-simultaneity of the last nationalist insurrection in the New

World (Cuba, 1895) and the first in Asia (the Philippines, 1896) was
no serendipity. Natives of the last important remnants of the Spanish
empire, Cubans … and Filipinos did not merely read about each other,
but had crucial personal connections and, up to a point, co-ordinated their
actions—the first time in world history that such trans global co-ordination
became possible. (2005: 2)

Anderson points out how global interconnectedness allowed for an

exchange of ideas available in circulating printed texts that prompted
nationalist ideologies to arise simultaneously, in this case connecting the
last remnants of the Spanish Empire. Koichi Hagimoto’s monograph
Between Empires: Martí, Rizal, and the Intercolonial Alliance (2013)
furthers Anderson’s chapter on the Filipino independence movements
from a transpacific perspective, discussing specifically various works of
the Filipino José Rizal with those of the Cuban José Martí.13 The focus
of this book is on a later generation of Filipino intellectuals situated
within a very different historical juncture in which Spanish had been
replaced by American imperialism and the Philippines faced the threat
of Japanese imperialism but continued to use Spanish as the language
of Filipino nationalism. After all, the worst colonial oppressors in the
eyes of Spanish-speaking Filipinos, the clergy (which Rizal called the
“cancer of the country” in the subtitle of Noli Me Tangere), had left.
Even though the colonial structure on which the Church had a strong
20 I. VILLAESCUSA ILLÁN

hand was still very much in place, the Hispano-Filipino writers of the
golden age could, in their nationalist writing, be nostalgic about mother
Spain rather than angry at her. Writing in Spanish, Filipinos continued
the legacy of their forefathers (for Mojares, the “brains of the nation”)
but also affirm their sense of belonging to a global Hispanic commu-
nity. Becoming part of the heirs of an alma latina that marked the
difference with the American spirit on the basis of binaries such as
idealism/materialism, Quijote/Sancho or Ariel/Caliban, Filipinos posi-
tion themselves among the peoples who, with honour ideals (a certain
amount of madness), raised against a new capitalist empire.14 John Blanco
(2004: 97) explains that José Martí’s canonical essay “Nuestra America”
is at the root of the rise against US imperialism, and that discursively,
it took shape in José Enrique Rodó’s Latin American cultural aesthetic
or Arielismo, and Darío’s Calibanism.15 This game of differentiation
emerges in the Filipino texts I analyse here as a split between the spir-
itual dimension of the Hispanic heritage (idealistic and honourable) and
the material aspect of American liberalism (materialistic and mundane).
The writers that I study here, as members of the second generation
of Spanish-speaking authors, then differ from the earlier one and share
with Tagalog writers of the same period a feeling of mistrust and rejec-
tion towards the Americanization of the Philippines.16 They feared that
a new forced transculturation would erase their “native” culture, which,
for Spanish-speaking Filipinos, was predominantly Hispanic. According
to literary critic Bienvenido Lumbera, the second generation of Tagalog
writers was still too young during the Philippine Revolution to be “deeply
imbued with the militant temper of their elders” (1984: 34). Conse-
quently, in their literary works, they toyed with the themes of “Country”
(nationalism) and “Love” (universal dramas or more personal topics),
showing a “definite preference for the theme of Love” (1984: 34).
Lumbera focuses on poets writing in Tagalog and makes no reference
to Spanish-language authors, who, I will show in this study, occupied
a different position. For Filipino authors writing in Spanish in the first
half of the twentieth century, personal literary expression and aesthetics
(“love”) do not overshadow that of nationalist concerns (“Country”)
but the two become fused in expressing an intimate desire to love one’s
country by understanding its past history and imagining it in the present
and in the future. In the works I study here, such literary imagination
writes the Philippines, most insistently, as an independent, transcultural
 1 INTRODUCTION 21

realm which maintains its alma hispánica, its Catholic beliefs and, in some
cases, embraces modernity.
In the works of Balmori, Abad, Gurrea and Mendoza that I study
here, Filipino nationalism, specifically the necessity of defining a shared
identity capable of serving as a ground for a sense of belonging and a
vision of the future, occupies a prominent position, which is not surprising
given the fact that independence seemed on the horizon. The question
of conceding independence to the Philippines already arose in 1902,
just after the Filipino-American War (1898–1902), but was abandoned
with the establishment of the Insular Government of the Philippine
Islands (1902–1935), followed by a Filipino Commonwealth (1935–
1946) interrupted by the Japanese occupation during Second World
War (1942–1945). The archipelago finally became the Republic of the
Philippines in 1946 with Manuel Roxas (1892–1948) as the president.17
I argue that the writers I discuss express their concerns about the past,
present and future of the Philippines not by means of militant political
nationalism but through a form of cultural nationalism. I follow the defi-
nition of cultural nationalism provided by Eric Woods (2014) collecting
the key ideas about cultural nationalism to which I return to in Chapter 6
in relation to Abad’s novel El Campeón:

Cultural nationalism generally refers to ideas and practices that relate to the
intended revival of a purported national community’s culture. If political
nationalism is focused on the achievement of political autonomy, cultural
nationalism is focused on the cultivation of a nation. Here the vision of
the nation is not a political organisation, but a moral community. As such,
cultural nationalism sets out to provide a vision of the nation’s identity,
history and destiny. The key agents of cultural nationalism are intellectuals
and artists, who seek to convey their vision of the nation to the wider
community. The need to articulate and express this vision tends to be felt
most acutely during times of social, cultural and political upheaval resulting
from an encounter with modernity. (Woods 2014: 1)

In line with this definition, I see the literature as a tool by which Filipino
intellectuals articulate their vision of the Philippines’ identity, history and
destiny in the convoluted historical moment they live in. These writers are
caught between empires, ruled by a neo-colonial government and aspire
to become part of the global modernity they feel is emerging elsewhere.
Their vision of the nation is, however, limited by the concerns of their
own community of Spanish-speaking, upper-class Filipinos. As cultural
22 I. VILLAESCUSA ILLÁN

nationalists, these authors convey a strong attachment to the Hispanic

heritage (mostly in terms of religion and language), which they believe
should underpin the future independent nation. At the same time, as I will
show, they are critical of their own tendency to look to other (modern)
nations, most notably Japan and the US, for models to emulate instead of
engaging with the Filipino reality. The form of Filipino cultural nation-
alism articulated in the selected literary texts from the early twentieth
century projects the imagination of the nation onto the future, asking
how the Philippines can become modern. The different texts come up
with different answers as to whether it should achieve nationhood on
its own terms as a transcultural realm with a double history of colo-
nialism or by following the model of already established nation-states,
based on creating a homogeneous identity. It is the complex cultural
entanglements implied by the doubly colonised context of the Philip-
pines, acknowledged by all the authors I discuss, that prompt me to use
the notion of transcultural nationalism to understand the variety of some-
times conflicting and sometimes harmonious cultural elements of Filipino
nationalism manifested in the literary texts.

Filipino Transculturation
Over three hundred years of Spanish colonial rule (1565–1898) and circa,
another fifty of American occupation (1898–1946) produced complex
processes of transculturation in the Philippines that Magellan could not
have foreseen when he landed on Cebu in 1521, opening a new global
trade route. The Cuban anthropologist and philosopher Fernando Ortiz
coined the term transculturation to describe the cultural transformations
that took place amongst the indigenous, the European and the African
populations in Cuba. Transculturation for Ortiz emphasises the agency
of all cultures in contact; unlike acculturation, often used to denote the
effect of colonisation on the colonised culture, it includes a sense of both
what is lost (through deculturation) and what is created in the process of
transformation (through neoculturation):

I am of the idea that the word transculturation better expresses the

different phases of the process of transformation from one culture to
another because this does not consist merely in acquiring another culture,
which is what the English word acculturation really implies, but the process
also necessarily involves the loss or uprooting of a previous culture, which
 1 INTRODUCTION 23

could be defined as deculturation. In addition, it carries the idea of the

consequent creation of new cultural phenomena, which could be called
neoculturation. (Ortiz 1995: 102–103, my emphasis)18

In this study, I consider the idea of attachment as pointing to either accul-

turation (the acquisition of some aspects of another culture) or neocultur-
ation (the creation of something new from the combination of cultures
in contact), whereas detachment is linked to deculturation (the loss or
abandonment of aspects of one’s own or other cultures). Even though
in my analysis of the texts I attempt to look at the processes of transcul-
turation (acculturation/deculturation) apart from each other, seemingly
creating another binary set, that of attachment/detachment, my inten-
tion is to go beyond these binaries. My aim is to show that the works I
study show the deep entanglements that exist between split categories
such as coloniser/colonised, modern/(post)colonial, Asian/Hispanic,
central/peripheral, and that despite the struggle that appear in the texts
with regard to these identitarian tags, Hispano-Filipino literature reveals
the possibilities of living in the borders of those categories.
Part of Ortiz’s interest in conceptualising transculturation is to avoid
downplaying the actions of the marginalised, in which case he talks of a
failed transculturation. Following this affirmation of agency on the part of
the non-dominant, Mary Louise Pratt (1992) describes transculturation
as expressing a method of cultural reinvention. For her, transculturation
indicates

how subordinated or marginal groups select and invent from materials

transmitted to them by a dominant or metropolitan culture. While subju-
gated people cannot readily control what emanates from the dominant
culture, they do determine to various extents what they absorb into their
own, and what they use it for. (6)

The interplay that occurs between cultures in contact results in an appro-

priation and reinvention of dominant practices by the subordinated.
Pratt raises the question of how metropolitan modes of representa-
tion are received and adapted on the periphery. She indicates that one
can speak of a transculturation that proceeds from the colonies to the
metropolis. The argument that European-Western development has never
been “detached” from the world’s others, and particularly not from its
colonies, has also been put forward by other scholars, who have stressed
24 I. VILLAESCUSA ILLÁN

“the reciprocal condition of two geographical ‘entities’ such as ‘Asia’ and

‘Europe’” (Brosius and Wenzlhuemer 2011: 4). Using transculturation
as a lens through which to analyse cultural phenomena implies leaving
the firm ground of clearly defined concepts, particularly those associ-
ated with “origin”, “indigeneity” and “authenticity”, which, as Brosius
and Wenzlhuemer explain, “carry with them highly problematic elements
of essentialism and reduction, and have always done so” (9), in favour
of a form of research that uses Georges Marcus’ concept of “multi-
sited ethnography”, which underlines the existence of multi-centred
modernities (8).
The most important aspect of transculturation in these definitions is
the role it assigns to the cultures perceived as weaker, insisting that
the subjects of those cultures have agency in the ways they receive
and appropriate the dominant culture. An example of transcultura-
tion in the context of the Philippines can be found in the syncretism
between Spanish Catholicism and local Filipino religious practices, which
produced a vernacular Filipino Catholicism. The best-known practice
of this syncretism is that of Pasyon, the crucifixions that take place
during Easter parades, but it also exists on a more everyday level, for
instance in the combination of religious faith with gambling activities like
cockfighting, as I will discuss in Chapter 6 in relation to Abad’s novel.
Vicente Rafael (1988) explains the process by which Catholic transcul-
turation happened in the Philippines by using the metaphor of fishing.
According to him, the act of catching fish is comparable to catching
the meaning of a word carried out by actively listening to the Catholic
preachers as they spoke to the indigenous audiences from the pulpit.
Filipinos thus appropriated Catholicism by attaching their own imaginings
to those words that they could not fully understand, filling the semiotic
vacuum with new meanings.
Pratt further expands the term transculturation with regard to the
cultural transformations that are enabled by travel writing in Imperial
Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (2010), revealing the basis
on which travel writing was appropriated by colonialism as it formulated
discourses on difference and contributed to the politics of colonial expan-
sion. She locates transculturation in what she coins as “contact zones”,
that is, the spaces, real or imaginary, where cultural contact takes place.
In her own words: “I use this term to refer to social spaces where cultures,
meet, clash and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly
 1 INTRODUCTION 25

asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their after-

maths as they lived out in many parts of the world today” (Pratt 1992:
34). In this study, I show how the Philippines appears in the literary works
that I analyse as a contact zone where the outcome of the transformative
contact is determined by the specific cultures involved and the relation-
ships specific (groups of) people are able to develop to these cultures.
For instance, in Gurrea’s Cuentos de Juana, Filipino-Malayan mythology
meets the Catholic faith. In the eyes of the Spanish, the former is consid-
ered a form of superstition, but in the experience of the mestizo children
growing up with both cultures (in a differently shaped and experienced
contact zone) it becomes entangled with Catholicism and, as such, causes
new meanings and forms of knowledge to emerge.
Since Ortiz developed the idea of transculturation in the 1940s
(although he first mentioned it in his 1923 essay Cuban Counterpoint of
Tobacco and Sugar), it has been widely appropriated by other scholars.19
Ángel Rama, in his book Transculturación narrativa en América Latina
(1982), focuses on the work of transcultured writers (escritores tran-
sculturados) who, in the fashion of the Peruvian writer José María
Arguedas, used European narrative techniques with vernacular languages
and themes, creating the genre known as indigenismo. According to
Rama, Arguedas’s indigenismo is best illustrated by his novel Yawar Fiesta
(1941), in which he attempts to reveal the transcultural fabric of Hispanic-
Andean Peru by juxtaposing the “local” and the “foreign” voices that
enter into conflict around the practice of Andean-style blood sport.20 For
Rama, another form of literary transculturation that also draws from indi-
genismo is magic realism in the manner of Gabriel García Marquez. In
this chapter, I explain how Hispanic modernism, as transported to the
Philippines from Latin America, can also be read as a form of transcul-
turation, re-appropriating the orientalist, exoticising aesthetics of French
modernism.
My use of transculturation in this project combines elements from
Ortiz, Pratt and Rama’s conceptualisations, allowing me to understand
Filipino transculturation not only as the outcome of colonial exchanges
(Ortiz 1995; Pratt 1992) and global modernity-coloniality (a pair that
for Walter Mignolo is inseparable),21 but also in terms of an active desire
for transformation. That transculturation exists in more passive and more
active forms is conveyed by the difference between the adjectives tran-
scultured and transcultural. The Hispano-Filipino writers I discuss in this
26 I. VILLAESCUSA ILLÁN

study, I will suggest, are not only transcultured writers (Rama) but also,
to different degrees, transcultural or even transculturating ones.
Arianna Dagnino (2012, 2013) uses the term “transcultural litera-
ture” to refer to the literature written while living across various cultures,
languages and even national territories as a consequence of contemporary
global mobility. The transcultural writers Dagnino refers to are estab-
lished writers, mostly part of a global elite that is “on the move” by
choice.22 If Ortiz and Pratt understood transculturation as the result of
forced cultural contact brought about by colonialism, Dagnino sees it as
an effect of the increased mobility that globalisation and late capitalism
engendered. It is not my intention to equate colonialism with globalisa-
tion as that would mean neglecting the violence of colonialism. However,
what is relevant for my project is the position Dagnino assigns to the
transcultural writer as particularly capable of discerning complex processes
of cultural transformation and making them accessible to others through
their writing:

Transcultural writers seem to be tuned into a different wavelength and thus

are able to capture the first still embryonic, still incoherent, still mostly
unexpressed or intercepted symptoms (signals) of a different emerging
cultural mood/mode. In other words, these writers are developing an alter-
native discourse that in any case is perceived by both mainstream parts
(let us call them the assimilationist and the multiculturalist stances) as
destabilising the perceived status quo. (2012: 4)

Dagnino emphasises these writers’ transcultural sensibility (at the risk,

however, of undervaluing the sensibility of other “types” of writers),
which she links to their capacity to recognise cultural patterns and quickly
apprehend cultural moods. The Hispano-Filipino writers selected for this
study reveal certain aspects of this type of transcultural writing condi-
tions. First, as part of a creole elite, Hispano-Filipino writers from the first
and second generation are cosmopolitans (educated, multilingual, multi-
ethnic, well-travelled and wealthy), and second, being caught in a position
of outsider/insider in most of the cultures they inhabit enables them, like
the writers cited by Dagnino, to infuse their writing with a new “cultural
mood/mode”, in this case one of transcultural nationalism.
Dagnino argues that looking through a transcultural lens provides a
vision in which “all cultures look decentered in relation to other cultures
 1 INTRODUCTION 27

including one’s own” (Dagnino 2012: 2). There is a sense of out-

of -placeness in transcultural writing where the presence of foreign and
familiar voices from different cultures is alternatively centred and decen-
tred in relation to the self. The proliferation of selves and others—and the
way certain cultures shift from being accepted as part of the self to being
rejected as foreign to it—is at the core of transcultural writing and appears
in all the works of Hispano-Filipino literature I look at in this study.
Reading Hispano-Filipino literature as efforts of transculturation empha-
sises how this literary tradition moves, consciously and unconsciously,
literally and metaphorically, in-between and across national, linguistic,
ethnic and cultural boundaries in order to inspire new imaginaries of
nationalism.
To sum up, the aim of this study is to explore the intersection between
the literature and nationalism in the complex context of the twentieth-
century Philippines. Through close readings of the selected texts, I have
the double aim of shedding light on a largely neglected literary tradition
and tracing the struggle of Spanish-Filipino writers to formulate a notion
of Filipino identity able to serve as the basis for their imagined nation,
adequate to its status as a transcultured and transcultural realm.

The Question of Filipino Identity

The impact of a double colonisation and the existence of various pre-
Hispanic cultures in the archipelago23 have made Filipino society one
in which many cultures intermingle and in which past influences, such
as those of the Malay, the Hispanic, the American and also the Chinese
and the Japanese, retain a certain presence until today. This is notice-
able in many aspects of Filipino culture: in language and religion—but
also in food, folklore and ethnicity. These influences, it can be argued,
are simultaneously present and absent, haunting Filipino cultural and
national identity, and causing it to be perceived negatively as non-
authentic. Whereas it can be said that notions of cultural and national
identity are always rather unsettled and unsettling, formulating an answer
to what it meant to be Filipino in the early twentieth century was
particularly complicated, necessitating a continuous negotiation of various
attachments to and detachments from native, colonial and other cultures.
Filipino anthropologist Fernando Zialcita explains this anxiety about
Filipino identity as an ongoing crisis of recognition. He argues that even
twenty-first-century Filipinos tend to negatively describe their cultural
28 I. VILLAESCUSA ILLÁN

mix with the word “bastard” (“lo que tenemos es una cultura ‘bastarda’
o ‘imitativa’” 2012: 513) instead of using, for instance, the word “mes-
tiza/o”, broadly and positively employed in Latin America to denote a
hybrid identity.24 In his book, Authentic, Although not Exotic (2005),
Zialcita claims that the negative view of Filipino identity among Filipinos
is due to several reasons:

Filipinos love their way of life. However, problems appear when they reflect
on their identity and try to explain this to themselves, to fellow Filipinos, or
to outsiders. This is not helped by the readiness of biased Anglo-Americans
and fellow Asians who scorn the Filipino for not being truly Asian. These
problems and biases stem from (1) a demonization of Spanish influence,
(2) a limited menu of binaries for interpreting culture, and (3) reductionist
interpretations. (2005: 11)

According to Zialcita, then, the crisis of recognition emerges from the

need to explain oneself to the self and to other(s) while lacking a language
to grasp a reality that escapes existing classifications. The notion of being
Asian, for example, is not adequate for all those who live in Asia or even
Southeast Asia, and is particularly restrictive when it comes to describing
the Philippines, which, because of its specific history of double coloni-
sation, tends to be regarded as an anomaly within Asia. The baroque
churches that are part of Filipino heritage, for example, are seen as an
“aberration in Asia” when compared with Buddhist stupas, Hindi temples
or mosques (Zialcita 2012: 11). For Zialcita, these architectural examples
demonstrate that there is no cultural unity in Asia25 and, furthermore,
that the Philippines does not conform to the idea of the authentically
Asian that other countries have attached their national identity to, which
also implies being exotic, presumably to the orientalising eyes of the West.
This study aims to show that the tension Zialcita perceives in relation
to contemporary Filipino identity is also present in the Hispano-Filipino
literature of the early twentieth century, expressing itself in the way the
texts I analyse attach and detach themselves from the various cultures that
could be considered part of Filipino identity while never reaching full
identification. For example, Paz Mendoza’s initial admiration of the overt
nationalism prompted by Italian fascism is due to the fact that she wants
to envision a similarly inspiring sense of national unity for the Philip-
pines. Yet, she is also aware of what dictatorial policies mean and how
propaganda coerces national identification in undesirable, exclusive ways.
 1 INTRODUCTION 29

Similarly, Jesús Balmori’s fascination with the strong Japanese national

identity and the devotion to Japanese culture demonstrated by the heroic
acts of the samurais shows a similar type of attachment to the idea of a
united, homogeneous, national community. In both cases, these imag-
inations are torn apart by the realities of Italian fascism and Japanese
imperialism. Because of the presence of this tension between identifi-
cation and disidentification, I suggest that notions of attachment and
detachment are more useful to understanding the struggle, yet the neces-
sity, or conceiving of Filipino national identity in early twentieth-century
Hispano-Filipino literature.

Chapter Outline
In Chapter 2, I focus on the poetry of Jesús Balmori (1886–1946),
which expresses Filipino transcultural heritage as a meeting place of
Malay and Spanish culture and looks at Japan in an orientalist mode.
Balmori’s poetry is considered an example of Filipino modernism that
follows Hispanic modernist aesthetics in terms of its oriental themes and
style (in the fashion of Juan José Tablada, Enrique Gómez Carrillo and
Rubén Darío). Consequently, it provides a fertile ground to look at the
role orientalism played in the attempt by Hispano-Filipino authors of the
early twentieth century to situate the Philippines within the oriental imag-
inary. This attempt is mediated through Latin American representations
of the orient, which at its turn appropriated and reacted to European
orientalism. Given the geopolitical circumstances of the Philippines as a
Hispanised culture located in Asia, it is not surprising that the modernist
orientalism found in its literature is shaped in two ways: as a form of self-
representation that affirms its own Asianness and as a form of orientalism
from the orient, directed towards other parts of Asia, specifically Japan.
In the chapter, I identify and analyse the various types of orientalism
articulated in Balmori’s poetry, focusing on three poems contained in the
poetry collections Rimas Malayas (1904) and Mi casa de Nipa (1941).
My argument is that Balmori’s poems engage with the two models of
orientalism conceptualised respectively by Edward W. Said (1978) and
Araceli Tinajero (2004): as a discourse of cultural hegemony promoting
assimilation to Spanish colonisation and Western modernity, and as an
expression of literary modernismo that re-inscribes the poet’s incorpo-
ration of Hispanic and French aesthetics popularised in Latin American
writing. Crucially, in some of his poems, Balmori also moves beyond these
30 I. VILLAESCUSA ILLÁN

models by giving voice to what I call Filipino transcultural orientalism.

This form of orientalist writing articulates Filipino identity as both subject
and object of orientalism, with texts variously attaching to and detaching
from the Western and Eastern cultures that have historically constituted
it, as well as the forms of representing the orient specific to these cultures
and their literary expressions (Darian-style verses that tell the story of a
Geisha that dies while waiting for her never-returning lover, for example).
In Chapter 3, I expand on the concept of transcultural orientalism by
arguing that Adelina Gurrea Monasterio’s work emphasises its transcul-
tural dimension over its orientalist one. I look at three of her texts: a
satirical play entitled Filipinas: Auto histórico-satírico which was staged
in Valladolid, Spain, in 1951, and has not received any in-depth crit-
ical analysis in English or Spanish up until now; a selection of poems
from the collections En agraz (1968) and Más senderos (1967); and a
short story called “El Talisay”, part of the collection of short stories
Cuentos de Juana: narraciones malayas de las islas filipinas (1943). I
show how, like Balmori’s poems, these texts draw on various cultural
influences in order to orientalise the Philippines. However, rather than
establishing a hierarchy of cultures or following modernist aesthetics,
Gurrea orientalises the Philippines in three different ways that represent a
move towards a more transcultural position. First, the satirical play revisits
Filipino colonial history by having allegorical characters—the Philippines,
Mother Spain, Uncle Sam and Mrs. History—explicitly discuss their role
in the transculturation of the Philippines. The historical perspective of
the play shows transculturation as a colonial heritage in which various
cultural traits are visible (e.g. young Philippines has inherited, on the one
hand, the industrious and pragmatic mentality of American culture and,
on the other, a spiritualist view on the world derived from a Catholic
education). Second, Gurrea’s poems approach the Philippines through
what Svetlana Boym (2001) calls reflective nostalgia, the reflection of
individual memories of the past, which, in Gurrea’s poetry and short
stories, revive a nostalgia for images of the rural Philippines where she
grew up. Last, the memories of her childhood in the island of Negros
are revived through the tales of Malayan mythology she learnt from
the family’s employee, a Malayan nanny called Juana. In the short story
“El Talisay”, Gurrea uses a narrative structure that blurs the discourse
of the oriental and the Western perspective through the two narrators,
 1 INTRODUCTION 31

Gurrea as herself at sixteen and Juana. The story presents binary opposi-
tions such as native/foreign, orient/occident and religion/superstition as
deeply intertwined in everyday cultural practices in the rural Philippines.
In Chapter 4, I elaborate the concept of active transculturation on
the basis of the imagination of a future, modern, independent Philip-
pines. These images are motivated by comparison with countries around
the world that Paz Mendoza visits and writes about in her Notas de viaje
(1929). This travelogue has not been re-edited since its second edition in
1949, and to date, only a biography on Mendoza written by Encarnación
Alzona in 1967 includes comments on Mendoza’s travels. Mendoza’s rich
and provocative travel notes are the departing point for my analysis of her
construction of a peripheral vision of modernity grounded on an active
process of cultural and economic transformation by which the Philip-
pines would become part of a global modernity existing somewhere else.
Mendoza is selective on noticing signs of modernity mostly stimulated by
advances in urbanism, hygiene, industrialisation and education which she
observes in European countries (Germany, Norway, England, France), in
the US and also in Cuba. The transpacific anti-colonial alliance that unites
Cuba and the Philippines appears in Mendoza’s referral to Cuba as the
sister republic, one which, in Mendoza’s eyes, is developing on its own
terms given its status as an independent nation. Like in Balmori’s poems,
Mendoza’s writing manifests Hispano-Filipino’s identification with a pan-
Hispanic culture via the language and history of colonial resistance with
Latin America. In this chapter, I argue that, in Mendoza’s travel notes,
transculturation does not only appear as an outcome of past colonial
contact, as in Balmori’s poem and Gurrea’s play, but prompted by the
experience of travelling. Mendoza turns her experience of travel into
her own individual contribution to nation building by forging a future
vision of a modern independent Philippines. However, her hypothesis
of transculturation shows the tension between the imagined modern
future of the Philippines (modelled on other nations industrialised and
economically competitive) and the Philippines’ cultural and political
realities.
In Chapter 5, I return to one of Balmori’s work, one of the few novels
written about and contemporary to Second World War, Los pájaros de
fuego. Una novela filipina de la guerra (1945). It is a family melodrama
set in Manila, which, instead of imagining a hypothetical future for the
Philippines on the basis of the positively conceived models of other coun-
tries, uses the historical developments of the early 1940s, leading up to
32 I. VILLAESCUSA ILLÁN

the Japanese invasion, to address the potential negative effects of uncriti-

cally seeking to emulate other countries. This chapter, then, is about the
limits of active transculturation. The bleak ending of Balmori’s novel,
which sees the main protagonist, a former nipponophile, and most of
his family killed, suggests that there is no future for the country, at
least not unless the Philippines stops aspiring to be like Japan, fighting
for/with the US and refusing to let go of the Hispanic colonial legacy.
To analyse how past and present events (the rise of fascism in Europe,
the emergence of Japan as a pan-Asian power, the American rule of
the Philippines and the Hispanic colonial legacy) are woven together
in the novel, I use the concept of translation, which I understand as a
technique of transculturation capable of creating new meaning from a
pre-existing one. This approach to translation, inspired by the work of
Rey Chow (1995, 2008) and Vicente L. Rafael (1999, 2000), entails a
rejection of translation as merely a linguistic process that renders words
in one language intelligible in another; instead, it conceives of transla-
tion as a complex process of reinterpretation, appropriation, expansion
and exchange between cultures, across national borders or within them.
I use Chow’s conceptualisation of translation as an exercise of simulta-
neous betrayal and mourning towards the “original” to investigate how
Balmori’s novel translates various cultural influences into a conception of
the Filipino nation. In addition, I discuss Rafael’s suggestion that Filipino
nationalism was a translation into Spanish of an ideology that circulated
among the Hispanic elite and how it appears in the novel.
In Chapter 6, finally, I analyse Antonio Abad’s El Campeón (1940),
an animal fable about a cockfighting rooster that presents an allegory of
the Filipino nation as it tries to define itself in the wake of a double colo-
nialisation. I have not found any scholarly work that discusses this novel
in detail and this chapter constitutes the first reading of it as an allegory
of Filipino nationalism. El Campeón tells the life story of Banogón, a
champion fighting cock who, after a successful career in the urban arenas,
returns to a chicken coop in the village where he was born. Upon his
return, he struggles to fit into the local community. The struggles of
Banogón and the other poultry characters with the transformations that
are taken place on the farm (most notably the arrival of a species called
American leghorns) metaphorically illuminate Abad’s vision of Filipino
society—as affected by political, cultural and identity-related crises—
and his concerns with reconfiguring Filipino national identity. Where
Mendoza’s Notas de viaje (1929) and Balmori’s Los Pájaros de fuego
 1 INTRODUCTION 33

(1945) sought to develop Philippine nationalism primarily by comparing

their country to other European nations, Japan and the US, Abad’s
novel, in contrast, locates a basis for nationalism in Filipino rural culture,
using the long-standing Filipino tradition of cockfighting—which is at the
same time presented as a transcultural practice—to propose an alternative
view on Filipino national identity. Ultimately, the novel argues for the
impossibility of smoothly translating the prevailing European ideologies
of the nation-state, based on cultural homogeneity, racial supremacy and
masculinity, to the doubly colonised, deeply transcultural context of the
Philippines. This emphasis on the heterogeneity of the Philippines can be
read as signalling El Campeón’s move from cultural nationalism to tran-
scultural nationalism. By presenting cockfighting, from the perspective of
the human characters in the novel, as a traditional Filipino practice that
survived the various colonial attempts, on the part of both the Spanish
and the Americans, to eradicate it, Abad transforms the practice of cock-
fighting into an anti-colonial metaphor. In my analysis of the novel, I
also reflect on the relationship between masculinity and cockfighting by
reading the classic article by anthropologist Clifford Geertz (1972) on
Balinese cockfighting in dialogue with Jerry García’s (2004) interpreta-
tion of the importance of the cockfight for Chicano (masculine) identity
in the US. I argue that the novel, despite its complacent ending, presents
a different type of masculine hero that also allows for a different mode of
national identity.

Notes
1. I refer here to the work of Gallo and Donoso (2011); De la Peña (2011);
Donoso (2012); Álvarez-Tardío (2009a, 2009b, 2014); Lifshey (2011,
2012, 2013, 2016, 2017); Ortuño (2013, 2017, 2019); Mojarro (2018a,
2018b, 2019) on Philippine literature in Spanish; to Ricci (2014); Rueda
(2010); Dahiri (2016) on Moroccan literature and Thenesoya Vidina
Martín De la Nuez (2007, 2022) on Equatorial Guinea. I will discuss the
some of these references in detail throughout the book. For a shortcut to
these authors, please consult the index.
2. I am referring here to Reyes Encanto (2004); Camagay (2010); Guerrero
Napkil (1999); Quidonza-Santiado (2010); Zapanta-Manlapaz (2003);
Santiago (2003). With regard to the Spanish period, Luciano Santiago
(2003) has studied the work of female writers (most of whom were reli-
gious) and publishers from the sixteenth century until the nineteenth
century. He affirms that the first woman to publish an original book
34 I. VILLAESCUSA ILLÁN

in Spanish in the Philippines was Doha Maria Varela de Brodet, whose

Novena de Santa Muria Magdalena appeared in the 1830s (571).
3. To my knowledge, Álvarez-Tardío (2009a, 2009b), Lifshey (2017) and
Ortuño Casanova (2018) have engaged with selected works of Adelina
Gurrea Monasterio and Maria Paz Zamora Mascuñana; I will return to
them in Chapters 3 and 5 of this book.
4. The Zóbel Prize was founded by Enrique Zobel de Ayala (1977–1923), a
Spanish intellectual born in Madrid in 1842 from a marriage that united
two aristocratic families of Spanish and Danish descent. He moved to
Manila in 1882 and turned his home into a centre of cultural and intel-
lectual life that would later become the Casino español. Nowadays, the
Casino español is located next to the Cervantes Institute in Manila, in the
poor district of Ermita where Spanish is still spoken. In 2001, Lourdes
Brillantes published a book in Spanish that collects the works and biogra-
phies of all the authors who won the Zóbel Prize between 1922 and
2000. In 2006, an English version was published in Manila.
5. María Paz Mendoza Guazón received the award in 1930 for her Notas de
Viaje; Inés Villa in 1932 for her PhD dissertation Filipinas en el camino
de la cultura (Philippines in the Way of Culture); Evangelina Guerrero
Zacarías in 1936 for a collection of poetry Kaleidoscopio espiritual (Spir-
itual Kaleidoscope); Adelina Gurrea Monasterio in 1955 for her short
stories Cuentos de Juana: narraciones malayas de las islas filipinas; Nilda
Guerrero Barranco in 1954 for her poetry collection titled Nostalgias
(Nostalgia). During the Second World War, Paz Zamora Mascuñana wrote
a diary that was published in 1958 as Nuestros cinco últimos días bajo el
yugo nipón (Our Last Five Days under the Japanese Yoke), a collection of
short stories called Mi obolo: colección de cuentos filipinos (My Alm: Collec-
tion of Filipino Stories, 1924) and a cook book with Sofía Reyes de Veyra
titled Every day cookery for the home (1934). For a thorough discussion of
Mascuñana’s work, see Lifshey 2017.
6. See Villanueva Kalaw’s book How the Filipina got the vote written in 1952.
7. Many other writers invoke the example of Princess Urduja of Pangasigan
and Sima of Cobato as (mythic) women as a way of reclaiming past
freedoms. See Camagay (2010: 107).
8. I am referring to two key books: Aparato bibliográfico para la historia
general de Filipinas (1906) and De la evolución de la literatura castellana
en Filipinas y noticias histórico-bibliográficas de el teatro en Filipinas desde
sus orígenes hasta 1898 (1909).
9. In the last section of the book titled “Los años veinte: The Happy
Twenties” y hasta el medio siglo” (248–266), Ortiz Armengol discusses
the references to the Philippines in the work of Emilia Pardo Bazán,
Miguel de Unamuno, Pio Baroja, Azorín, Ramón del Valle-Inclán, George
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POSITIVES, COMPARATIVES, SUPERLATIVES.

239.
Pos., A pronoun; Com., A period of time; Sup., Fermenting froth.
Answer

240.
Pos., A knot of ribbon; Com., An animal; Sup., Self-praise.
Answer

241.
Pos., A reward; Com., Dread; Sup., A festival.
Answer

242.
Pos., To reward; Com., A fruit; Sup., An adhesive mixture.
Answer

243.
Pos., A meadow; Com., An unfortunate king; Sup., The smallest.
Answer
 244.

Pos., In a regular line;

Com., With an appetite fine;
Sup., ’Twill be done when we dine.

Answer

245.

Pos., Busy, noisy, and cheerful.

Com., The thought of it saddening and tearful;
Sup., Its roar and its fierce claws are fearful.

Answer

246.

Pos., The end of all time;

Com., Judge of music and rhyme;
Sup., The Orient clime.

Answer

247.

Pos., Denotes a bond or tie;

Com., In the centre it doth lie;
Sup., The billows break on it and die.
 Answer

248.
Pos., An American genius; Com., To turn out or to flow; Sup., An
office, an express, a place, a piece of timber.
Answer

249.
Pos., To depart; Com., To wound; Sup., A visible spirit.
Answer

250.

Pos., Pleasant, dreary, wet or dry;

Com., If ’tis light or heavy, try,
On your scales, before you buy;
Sup., Don’t spend money foolishly!

Answer

251.
A gentleman who had sent to a certain city for a car-load of fuel,
wrote thus to his nephew residing there:
“Dear Nephew
;
 Uncle John.”
Presently he received the following reply:
“Dear Uncle
:
James.”
Answer

252.
Why is a man up stairs, stealing, like a perfectly honorable man?
Answer

253.
Why is a ship twice as profitable as a hen?
Answer

254.
Why can you preserve fruit better by canning it, than in any other
way?
Answer

255.

Twelve kinds of things in fact, not fiction,

Behind a veil of contradiction.
 * * * * *
All dressed in silk, with stately grace,
We stand with ready ears,
And yet the sounds that greet the place
Not one among us hears.1
We’re keen and quick our holes to find
And run in lively mood,
And yet we’re footless quite and blind,
Although our eyes are good.2
Our perfect heads can’t give us sense,
Though we are naught without them;3
Our useful tongues are mere pretense—
No talk or taste about them.4
Our locks though fine can ne’er be combed;5
Our teeth can never bite;6
Our mouths from out our heads have roamed,
And oft outgrow them quite.7
Our hearts no pity have, or joy,
Yet they’re our richest worth;8
Our hands ne’er waved at girl or boy,
Or anything on earth.9
Alive are we, yet buried quite;
Our trust is in our eyes;
They help us out through darkest night,
Though sight stern fate denies.10
We sally forth when day is done,
And set the owls a-hooting,
And, though we have no bow or gun,
We often go a-shooting.11
Our souls, alas! are dull and low,
Down-trodden, from the start;
Yet who shall say, in weal or wo,
They’re not our better part?12

Answer

256.
 Within this world a creature once did dwell,
As sacred writings unto us do tell,
Who never shall be doomed to Satan’s home,
Nor unto God’s celestial Kingdom come;
Yet in him was a soul that either must
Suffer in Hell, or reign among the just.

Answer

257.
What best describes, and most impedes, a pilgrim’s progress?
Answer

258.
Why is a girl not a noun?
Answer

259.
What part of their infant tuition have old maids and old bachelors
most profited by?
Answer

260.
What is that which never asks any questions, and yet requires
many answers?
 Answer

261.
What quadrupeds are admitted to balls, operas, and dinner-
parties?
Answer

262.
If a bear were to go into a linen-draper’s shop, what would he
want?
Answer

263.
When does truth cease to be truth?
Answer

264.
How many dog-stars are there?
Answer

265.
What is worse than raining cats and dogs?
 Answer

266.
Why is O the only vowel that can be heard?
Answer

267.
Why is a man that has no children invisible?
Answer

268.
What is it which has a mouth, and never speaks; a bed, and
never sleeps?
Answer

269.
Which burns longer, a wax or sperm candle?
Answer

270.
Why is a watch like an extremely modest person?
Answer

271.

LORD MACAULAY’S LAST RIDDLE.

Let us look at it quite closely,

’Tis a very ugly word,
And one that makes me shudder
Whenever it is heard.
It mayn’t be very wicked;
It must be always bad,
And speaks of sin and suffering
Enough to make one mad.
They say it is a compound word,
And that is very true;
And, when they decompose it,
(Which, of course, they’re free to do)—
If, of the letters they take off
And sever the first three,
They leave the nine remaining
As sad as they can be:
For, though it seems to make it less,
In fact it makes it more,
For it takes the brute creation in,
Which it left out before.

Let’s try if we can mend it—

It’s possible we may,
If only we divide it
In some new-fashioned way,
Instead of three and nine, then,
Let’s make it four and eight;
You’ll say it makes no difference,
At least not very great:
But only see the consequence!
That’s all that needs be done
To change this mass of sadness
To unmitigated fun.
It clears off swords and pistols,
 Revolvers, bowie-knives,
And all the horrid weapons
By which men lose their lives;
It wakens holier feelings—
And how joyfully is heard
The native sound of gladness
Compressed into one word!

Yes! four and eight, my friends!

Let that be yours and mine,
Though all the hosts of demons
Rejoice in three and nine.

Answer

272.

A word by grammarians used in our tongue,

Of such a construction is seen,
That if, from five syllables one is removed,
No syllable then will remain.

Answer

273.

Formed long ago, yet made to-day,

I’m most in use when others sleep;
What few would like to give away,
And none would like to keep.

Answer

274.
 A lady was asked “What is Josh Billings’ real name? What do you
think of his writings?” How did she answer both questions by one
word?
Answer

275.
Why is Mr. Jones’ stock-farm, carried on by his boys, like the
focus of a burning-glass?
Answer

276.

A by <. The name of a book, and of its author.

Answer

277.
What word in the English language contains the six vowels in
alphabetical order?
Answer

278.
If the parlor fire needs replenishing, what hero of history could
you name in ordering a servant to attend to it?
 Answer

279.
My FIRST is an insect, my SECOND a quadruped, and my WHOLE
has no real existence.
Answer

280.
If the roof of the Tower of London should blow off, what two
names in English history would the uppermost rooms cry out?
Answer

281.

MY FIRST.

In the glance of the sun, when the wild birds sing,

I start in my beauty to gladden the spring;
I weep at the morning marriage, and smile
On the evening tomb, though I die the while.

MY SECOND.

I wander; I sin; though a breath may make

All my frame an effeminate nature take,
And a manly dignity that, as well,
Can of mastery and lordship tell.

MY WHOLE.
 I have startled the world to jeering and mirth,
Since that, earthly, I dared to withdraw from the earth;
But I stay, though cut off in my prime, far more
Enlivening and life-full than ever before.

Answer

282.

One hundred and one by fifty divide,

Then, if you add naught to the right or left side,
The result will be one out of nine—have you tried?

Answer

283.
I am composed of five letters. As I stand, I am a river in Virginia,
and a fraud. Beheaded, I am one of the sources of light and growth.
Beheaded again, I sustain life; again, and I am a preposition. Omit
my third, and I am a domestic animal in French, and the delight of
social intercourse in English. Transpose my first four, and I become
what may attack your head, if it is a weak one, in your efforts to find
me out.
Answer

284.

Unto a certain numeral one letter join—sad fate!

What first was solitary, you now annihilate.

Answer
 285.

My FIRST was heard to “hurtle in the sky,

When foes in conflict met in olden time”;
My SECOND none can yield without a sigh,
Though it has oft been forfeited by crime;
My WHOLE, its ancient uses gone, is found
On sunny uplands, or in forest ground.

Answer

286.

Can you tell me why

A hypocrite’s eye
Can better descry
Than you can, or I,
Upon how many toes
A pussy-cat goes?

Answer

287.

Walked on earth,
Talked on earth,
Boldly rebuked sin;
Never in Heaven,
Never in Hell,
Never can enter in.

Answer
 288.
There is a certain natural production that is neither animal,
vegetable, nor mineral; it exists from two to six feet from the surface
of the earth; it has neither length, breadth, nor substance; is neither
male nor female, though it is found between both; it is often
mentioned in the Old Testament, and strongly recommended in the
New; and it answers equally the purposes of fidelity and treachery.
Answer

289.

We are little airy creatures,

All of different voice and features:
One of us in glass is set;
One of us is found in jet;
One of us is set in tin;
One a lump of gold within:
If the last you should pursue,
It can never fly from you.

Answer

290.

My FIRST is a point, my SECOND a span;

In my WHOLE often ends the greatness of man.

Answer
 291.

Wherever English land

Touches the pebbly shore,
My FIRST lies on the sand,
Changing forevermore.
My SECOND oft, I’m told,
State secrets will hold fast,
But, to a key of gold
’Tis known to yield at last.
Fond mother, tender wife,
With agonizing soul,—
The exile, sick of life,—
Have looked and sighed my WHOLE.

Answer

292.

I begin with a thousand, I end with a hundred;

My middle’s a thousand again;
The third of all vowels, the ninth of all letters,
Take their place in the rest of the train:
My WHOLE is a thing you never should do,—
At least, you don’t like it, if tried upon you!

Answer

293.

A word which always speaks of shame

I pray you, reader, now to name:
Eleven parts my whole contains,
To guess them you must take some pains.
 Three groups there be which stand related;
The first with many a word is mated:
The second speaks of favor rare;
The third of plenty everywhere.

Cut off the first; and shameful grows

As fair as any garden rose;
Cut off the last, and lo! ’tis plain,
The word is full of shame again.

Answer

294.
The eldest of four brothers did a sound business; the second, a
smashing business; the third, a light business; and the youngest, the
most wicked business. What were they?
Answer

295.

Cut off my head, and singular I am,

Cut off my tail, and plural I appear;
Cut off both head and tail, O wondrous fact!
My middle part remains, though naught is there.

What is my head cut off? A sounding sea.

What is my tail cut off? A roaring river.
Far in the ocean’s depths I fearless play;
Giver of sweetest sounds, yet mute forever.

Answer

296.
I’m a creature most active, most useful, most known,
Of the thousands who daily perambulate town.
Take from me one letter, and still you will see
I’m the same as I was; just the same, to a T.
Take two letters from me, take three, or take four,
And still I remain just the same as before:
Indeed I may tell you, although you take all
You cannot destroy me, or change me at all.

Answer

297.

My FIRST is up at break of day,

And makes a welcome voice heard,
And goes to bed in twilight gray,
Though neither child nor song-bird.

My SECOND’S known to tongue and pen;

Is fast to all the church walls,
Is always seen in nurseries,
And often when the snow falls.

In green and yellow always dight,

Though melancholy never,
My WHOLE shines bright with golden light,
And emerald, forever.

Answer

298.

To fifty add nothing, then five,

Then add the first part of eighteen;
A desert would life be without it,
 But with it, a garden, I ween.

Answer

299.
What tree bears the most fruit for the Boston market?
Answer

300.
Why is the end of a dog’s tail, like the heart of a tree?
Answer

301.
Why is a fish-monger not likely to be generous?
Answer

302.
Take away my first five, and I am a tree. Take away my last five,
and I am a vegetable. Without my last three, I am an ornament. Cut
off my first and my last three, and I am a titled gentleman. From his
name cut off the last letter, and an organ of sense will remain.
Remove from this the last, and two parts of your head will be left.
Divide me into halves, and you find a fruit and an instrument of
correction. Entire, I can be obtained of any druggist.
 Answer

303.
Why was Elizabeth of England a more marvelous sovereign than
Napoleon?
Answer

304.
A SQUARE-OF-EVERY-WORD PUZZLE.
I.

The desert-king,
Whose presence will
Each living thing
With terror fill.

II.

Of this word ’tis the mission

To be a preposition,
Giving you a notion
Of onward, inward, motion.

III.

This charm to blend,

The myriad roses of Cashmere you ask
Their subtle essences to one small flask
Freely to lend.

IV.

The middy, to his labor trained,

The sun by sextant viewed;