Independence and a colonial legacy

Wildcat File Photo Arizona Daily Wildcat Glenda Buya-Ao Claborne

The Spaniards rediscovered the Philippines in 1565; almost half a century after Magellan set foot and was killed on the islands and Cortez conquered Mexico in 1520. Mexico became the base of operations for the Spanish Empire's colonization of the Philippines.

The Philippines proved to be economically profitless for the empire but the Spanish colonists stayed, sustained primarily by the galleon trade in Chinese silks and Mexican silver between Acapulco and Manila, and by the clergy's zeal to convert the heathen islanders to Catholicism.

In the end, Catholicism may be the most deep-rooted Spanish legacy that both Mexico and the Philippines share. Both the Mexican Indians and the Philippine natives embraced and adapted it creatively to their Culture to come up with their own version of folk Catholicism.

Ironically, in the Philippines, it was the excesses of the Spanish friars that fueled an initial sense of Filipino nationalism, which led to any real sense of a pan-Filipino revolution against the Spanish regime. But it was Catholicism that united the historically fragmented nature of Philippine society.

It is probably the gaiety, the colors, the intensity and the mysticism surrounding most Catholic-related festivals and processions that characterize Filipinos as more Latino than Asian, a characterization that even my dour and drab Protestant upbringing did not subdue in me.

There is a Latino beat, if there is any such thing, in how Filipinos move and talk even though few Filipinos speak Spanish.

Strange thing, you would think, that the Spanish language never took root in the Philippines after 300 years of Spanish rule. Most Mexicans speak Spanish, only a few Filipinos do. Why?

Spanish colonial policy originally favored the teaching of Catholicism in the colonies' native languages and the separation of the Spanish population from the natives but later changed to more assimilation of the native populations into Hispanic culture.

But unlike Mexico, which was nearer to Madrid and had a prosperous mining industry, the Philippines was a negligible outpost way out in the Pacific.

Also, the Filipinos did not see much economic and political incentive to learn Spanish in the tightly Spanish-controlled bureaucracy and clergy. After ousting the Spanish out of the Philippines in 1898 and pacifying the Filipino revolutionaries against American occupation, the Americans quickly opened public schools with English as the medium of instruction and also opened civil service positions to the Filipinos.

In less than a decade, English was established in the Philippines and since then has become a dominant language in Philippine schools and mass media.

Mexico has had a very bumpy ride to self-sufficiency since independence from Spain in 1810, as did the Philippines since 1898. Each country had their entanglements with the United States broken only by brief interludes with some other foreign intervention; the French in Mexico in the 1860s and the Japanese in the Philippines during World War II.

In this age of globalization where the rule is interdependence between nations, if not overdependence of poor countries on the foreign capital of rich nations, the concept of national sovereignty seems only a colonial relic to remember on certain days. But a remembrance of our colonial past and the interconnections that we have because of it may help countries like Mexico and the Philippines to identify their internal weaknesses on which modern-day, multi-national, corporate conquistadors prey and to find avenues for equitable interdependence.

Anyway, Viva Mexico!

Glenda Buya-ao Claborne is a communications graduate student and can be reached at Glenda.Buya-ao.Claborne@wildcat.arizona.edu. Her column, Sitting on the Fulcrum, appears every Monday.