Rhetorical Indios: Propagandists and Their Publics in the Spanish Philippines

Rhetorical Indios: Propagandists andTheir Publics in the SpanishPhilippinesSMITA LAHIRI

Harvard University

Censorship notwithstanding, the final half-century of Spanish rule in thePhilippines was a time of efflorescence in colonial print culture. Between theadvent of typo-lithography in 1858 and the successive occurrence, in 1896and 1898, of the Filipino revolution and the Spanish-American War, printingpresses operating in Manila and beyond issued thousands of books and period-icals, the first public library, the Museo-Biblioteca de Filipinas, opened itsdoors in 1887, and the importation of books from Europe and America couldscarcely keep pace with demand.While the history of books and printing in the Philippines has long been of

interest to scholars and bibliophiles, there has been relatively little investigationof the colonial public sphere as a nexus of discursive and institutional practice. Tobe sure, copious attention has been paid to specific authors and their writings,particularly the Propagandists—a group of Filipino nationalists that includedsuch prolific luminaries (ilustrados) as Jose Rizal and Marcelo H. Del Pilar.Their annals, consisting of journalism and correspondence between the farcorners of Europe and the Philippines, constitute the first canonical writings ofFilipino nationalism as well as a remarkable record of the first in a series of

Acknowledgments: This essay and its previous incarnations were greatly improved by the com-ments and suggestions of Vincent Brown, Joshua Baker, Michael Herzfeld, Paul D. Kramer, AnnMarie Leshkowich, Janet McIntosh, Michael Puett, Vicente L. Rafael, Benilda Santos, KarenStrassler, Ajantha Subramanian, Megan Thomas, Christine Walley, Fernando Zialcita, and fouranonymous CSSH reviewers. Early versions were presented at the Association for Asian Studies,the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University, the Ateneo de Manila Uni-versity, and the University of Toronto. A Short-Term Fellowship from the Newberry Library inChicago supported part of the research on which this essay is based. Unless otherwise specified,all translations appearing here are my own. Although I have noted my debts to Benedict Anderson’swritings in various places, I would also like to acknowledge the extent of his influence upon thisessay’s overall effort to combine an internalist reading of certain Philippine colonial writingswith the work of historical contextualization. Naturally, I take responsibility for any errors or short-comings that this essay might contain.

Comparative Studies in Society and History 2007;49(2):243–275.0010-4175/07 $15.00 # 2007 Society for Comparative Study of Society and HistoryDOI: 10.1017/S0010417507000485

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highly significant Filipino diasporas. On the whole, however, the domination ofthe national frame with respect to late nineteenth-century writings has preventedan appreciation of the Filipino colonial public sphere for what it was: a dense,rhizomatic network of peninsular and archipelagic authors and readers spanningmetropole and colony and animated by all manner of texts, including bureau-cratic reports, political polemics, satirical sketches, poetry, costumbristanovels, propaganda tracts, devotional works, and sundry forms of ephemera.

To reconstruct something so dispersed and notional as a bygone publicsphere, one needs not only an aerial view of its web-like architecture butalso as many situated glimpses as possible of its constituent nodes.1 Thisessay is a venture of the latter kind, and it undertakes two tasks. First, itseeks to resituate the writings of the Filipino nationalists within a matrix ofintertextual and dialogical relations with the regular clergy,2 who occupiedroles as text regulators as well as authors in their own right. To do so, I set afew fragments of Propagandist prose beside two works of propaganda3 com-posed by Spanish friars. These latter writings, ostensibly directed to indios,or natives, were meant to warn against the dangers of modernity, understoodin terms of the influence of liberal ideas, the questioning of ecclesiasticalauthority, the learning of Castilian, and with it, the destabilization of thesocial and linguistic hierarchies of the colony.

My second objective is to explore friar apprehensions regarding the conso-lidation of subaltern “publics” amongst the colonized.4 As the abovementioned

1 Here, the interdisciplinary field known as the “history of the book” offers many fruitfulavenues of approach, concerned as it is with the materiality of texts as physical objects, as wellas with issues of distribution, reception, and relationships amongst publishers, editors, authors,booksellers, and readers. Jurilla (2003) offers an overview of the field and an assessment of itsscope within Philippine studies.

2 “Regular clergy,” the members of religious or monastic orders, are so called because they arebound by the rules and regulations of their associations; unlike secular clergy, they tend to live livesof monastic seclusion. In the Philippines, regular clergy from the Augustinian, Dominican, Francis-can, Jesuit, and Recollect orders were the principal architects of evangelization and subsequentlyserved in parish administration all over the archipelago. When assigned to parishes, regularclergy (also known as friars) were also subject to the Episcopal jurisdiction of diocesan authorities.For details on the role of the clergy within civil administration in the nineteenth-century Philippines,see Schumacher 1981, Cushner 1971, Robles 1969, and Bankoff 1992.

3 Here, my use of the word “propaganda” is intended to invoke its pejorative connotations in theEnglish language. Not so in the case of the Propagandists, the self-designated group of ilustradonationalists encompassing Jose Rizal, M. H. Del Pilar, and their colleagues. In calling themselvespropagandistas, these writers were simply identifying themselves as journalists or propagators ofinformation, drawing, naturally enough, upon the Castilian sense of that word (Schumacher 1972).

4 The locus classicus for the historical sociology of the public sphere is Jurgen Habermas’ Struc-tural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1991). The notion of “publics,” associated with the workof Michael Warner (2002), among others, has emerged as a useful descriptive and analytical tool forcapturing the qualities specific to discursively constituted communities. My use of “publics” doesnot take a stance on the thicket of debates surrounding Habermas’ account of the emergence of thepublic sphere as a category of bourgeois society (see Calhoun 1992; Crossley and Roberts 2004);rather, I use it to disaggregate the “public sphere” into constituent discursive communities, whose

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works—one in Castilian, the other in Tagalog—reveal, such fears emergedfrom the circulation of rumors about revolts and revolution as well as fromfriar defensiveness and pessimism regarding the colonial project itself.Serving simultaneously as ideologically laden representations of indio ornative publics and as efforts to domesticate and contain the threats posed bythem, friar propaganda works can hardly be taken as reliable or substantiveportrayals of the colonial public sphere. Rather, I argue, their power to illumi-nate comes from their usefulness as diagnostic tools for probing a shifting fieldof colonial power relations that the national “imagined community” has largelyovershadowed (Anderson 1991, 1998a).

I L U S T R A D O AND F R A I L E : A N TA G ON I S T S I N T H E P U B L I C A R E N A

Let us take as our point of departure a passage from Noli me Tangere (1886), thesatirical novel that earned for its author, Jose Protacio Rizal y Alonso, a martyr’sdeath by firing squad and immediate consecration as the first Filipino hero. Aliterary depiction of the “social cancer” afflicting the colony, Noli me Tangereis replete with caricatures of virtually all aspects of late nineteenth-centuryPhilippine life. However, its central plot chronicles the fate of CrisostomoIbarra, a Europe-returned mestizo youth whose idealistic efforts to bringsocial uplift to the needier sections of his home town of San Diego land himafoul of the venal and vindictive local representatives of the “frailocracy”.Its chapter 59 (“Patria e Intereses,” Rizal 1886: 318–25) is set in the colonial

capital of Manila and links up several hitherto distinct publics featured in thesocial world of the novel—townspeople of San Diego, residents of Manila’sTondo district, readers of the Diario de Manila, and denizens of the conventsin the walled city of Intramuros—by depicting the arrival of news from SanDiego concerning the ostensible discovery and preemption by the town’s resi-dent friars of an indio conspiracy to attack local institutions of church and state.As information implicating Ibarra as one of the ringleaders of the foiled plottraverses the social world of the novel along multiple axes of dissemination,forces of modernity and enlightenment collide with stratagems hatched bycolonizers as well as colonized in an atmosphere of fear, paranoia, andignorance. Telegraphic transmissions pass instantaneously from San Diego toManila and soon engender press reports whose ominous effects are, if anything,exaggerated by the “corrections” and mutilations inscribed upon them byofficial censors. Before long, the tandem activities of reading and rumor-mongering have produced an acute feeling of perturbation in thosecity-dwellers unfortunate enough to be acquainted with Ibarra, latterly thetoast of Manila’s hybrid bourgeoisie.

relations with each other are a matter for empirical investigation along the lines demonstrated inworks such as Gal and Woolard (2001).

R H E T O R I C A L I N D I O S 245

A Chinese mestizo household becomes the scene of tearful recriminations asCapitan Tinong and his wife Tinchang each pins blame on the other for injudi-ciously cultivating the well to do and eligible young Ibarra’s acquaintance. Theyapply for advice to their cousin Primitivo, a Latin-spouting dandy, whose effortsto retrieve the situation result, quite literally, in conflagration. Taking a seriousview of the matter, Primitivo proceeds to rummage through the house in searchof articles that might conceivably incriminate the couple. (Among the Europeanperiodicals that he deems particularly dangerous is a stack of back issues of theTimes of London retained by Capitana Tinchang because of their superior qual-ities for wrapping household valuables.) Matters proceed as follows:

He began to give order upon order: to upturn bookcases, rifle through papers, books,letters, etcetera. Promptly, a bonfire began to rage in the kitchen; old shotguns werehacked apart with an axe; rusty revolvers were flung upon the blaze; the servant whowished to preserve the barrel of one as a soupspoon received a sharp reproof.

—Conservare etiam sperasti, perfida? Burn it!And he continued his auto-da-fe.He saw an old parchment tome and read the title:—“Revolutions of the Celestial Bodies by Copernicus,” pfui! ite, malediti, in ignem

kalanis! he exclaimed, flinging it from him. Revolutions and Copernicus! Crime of allcrimes! If I hadn’t arrived in time. . . “Liberty in the Philippines!” Tsk, tsk! To the fire!

Thus were burned innocent books, written by simple authors. Not even “CapitanJuan,” that guileless work, managed to survive. Cousin Primitivo was right: the right-eous do indeed pay for the sins of the wicked (p. 324).

Invoking the inquisitorial institution of auto-da-fe in the same breath as thelightening-like quality of the telegraph, the scene of Primitivo’s bonfire con-denses one of the dominant chronotopes of Rizal’s novel (and of Propagandistwritings more generally): the colonial Philippines as a site of conflict betweenthe Middle Ages and modernity. Entirely characteristic of Rizal’s style, thispassage simultaneously offers readers a slice of buffoonery, a quick sketch ofcolonial print culture, and a thinly veiled expression of ilustrado outrage atthe regime of censorship prevailing in the colony. Although the image of analarmed Primitivo hastily discarding the Copernican treatise because of its“revolutionary” subject matter is played for laughs, the comedy is black:thanks to the scholasticism and backward-looking reign of the friars in thecolony, Latin-laced posturing passes for true learning, and the crowningachievements of human reason—scientific knowledge and political liberty—are indiscriminately dealt the fate of ephemera. As the underside of censorship,however, the passage also suggests that the climate of repression fostered by theregular clergy had made books and periodicals into a kind of contraband, asincriminating and sought-after as the light arms that were proliferating acrossthe colony. In the liberal critique of censorship that is advanced in thispassage, the Copernican treatise and the political pamphlet are used to representScience and Liberty as twin offspring of the Enlightenment whose eventualtriumph over medievalism in the colony is only a matter of time. This brings


us to a question: what is the significance of the third named title to perish inPrimitivo’s bonfire, the “guileless” Capitan Juan?Here we must return briefly to the event that precipitated the conflagration in

Tinong’s library: the putative foiling by San Diego’s Franciscan parish priest ofan anti-colonial conspiracy spearheaded by Ibarra and his educated indio associ-ates. Within the novel, these trumped-up accusations are patently revealed as theregular clergy’s means of neutralizing reform-minded members of the local intel-ligentsia. As every Rizal scholar and aficionado knows, this plot element was athinly veiled reference to the Cavite Mutiny of 1872, a turning point in colonialaffairs and an eventual touchstone for the eventual consolidation of a Filipinonational consciousness subsuming divisions amongst creoles, mestizos, andindios (Artigas y Cueva 1996; Schumacher 1972; Corpuz 1989). On 20January, artillery troops in the important Philippine arsenal of Cavite mutiniedand killed their Spanish offers, leading to a two-day siege of the garrison. Inthe reprisals that followed, an entire generation of Filipino priests, lawyers, andmerchants came under suspicion of sedition, were charged in hastily conductedmilitary tribunals, and executed or exiled to the Mariana Islands. Family tieswith one of the chief alleged conspirators, Fr. Jose Burgos, caused Rizal to behit especially hard by the execution of the object of his youthful veneration(Craig 1927). A generation later, when he came to write the Noli, Rizal’s fictionalsketch of the framing of Ibarra by the Franciscans of San Diego served as a publicdeclaration of his conviction that the accused of Cavite, now widely regarded asmartyrs to the national cause, had been smeared by a conspiracy amongst Spanishfriars to thwart liberal-minded reforms inimical to their vested interests.5

Returning now to the scene of Primitivo’s bonfire, we can better appreciatethe sly significance of the narrative in casting Capitan Juan upon the flames.For the Spanish friar who authored that work, Fr. Casimiro Herrero, OSA,nursed a well-known antagonism towards the Filipino intelligentsia ingeneral and Fr. Burgos in particular (Sanchez Fuertes 1988a: 70–72). Priorto the mutiny, Herrero was part of a close-knit group of conservative clericsthat included the Franciscan Fr. Joaquin de Coria, whose bitter exchangeswith Burgos in the Madrid press on colonial policy led to Coria’s humiliationand downfall (Herrero 1871). Herrero himself published several polemicalworks that attacked proposals to expand the colonial educational system, deni-grated the intellectual, racial, and moral qualities of Filipino indios, mestizos,and creoles, and warned of dangers posed by liberal reforms to the securityof the colony (Herrero 1871). Following the mutiny, Herrero conductedpastoral work in the Tondo district of Manila (the alleged hatching-ground ofthe conspiracy), where his assistance to the investigating military authorities

5 Rizal was not the originator of this thesis, which was first published in El Eco Filipino, a news-paper published in Spain by Philippine-born creoles to uphold the interests of the colony (SanchezFuertes 1988b: 138).


led to several prosecutions and won him the bishopric of Nueva Caceres, one offour dioceses of the archipelago (Aparıcio 1968: 257). Soon thereafter, heauthored a report charging creole malcontents with fomenting the CaviteMutiny by spreading exogenous political ideas and stirring up resentmentamongst indios against the colonial motherland, as well as against the regularclergy responsible for conveying them her gifts of benevolence, uplift, and salva-tion (1872). Capitan Juan (1874), the work coupled in the Noli with the Coper-nican treatise and a liberal pamphlet, differed little in content from these works,save for one fact, that I will discuss at some length presently: it omitted theauthor’s name, purporting instead to be the first-person composition of anindio and sometime gobernadorcillo or town mayor. Within its pages, the epon-ymous narrator Juan presents his compatriots with a series of lectures aimed atdiverting them from the path of subversion and winning back their fealty towardthe friars and the Spanish motherland or patria. In effect, Capitan Juan was apseudo-narrative tract that employed the conceit of native authorship in orderto demonstrate to indios the fitting nature of their colonial subordination.

Clearly, the Noli’s satiric reference to Capitan Juan serves to unmask its truenature as regime propaganda. On one hand, the book’s hapless demise in Pri-mitivo’s bonfire spells out a rather general liberal critique of censorship as notonly oppressive but counterproductive; in the climate of paranoia it generates,even ideas favorable to ruling interests may become its casualties. But the useof Capitan Juan as a motif also carries an indictment of friar power that is morespecifically directed at the regular clergy’s unassailable role as gatekeepers tothe public realm of print. This power of “text regulation” rested upon twobases.6 First, friars were guaranteed a plurality of votes on the official Commit-tee on Censorship for the colony as a whole, which allowed them to scrutinizeand sanitize all local periodical literature and to block the importation of anywork they regarded as objectionable (Filipinas 1857; Retana 1908a). Second,the regular clergy exercised tight control over the apparatus for translating,printing, and disseminating exogenous works into vernacular languages(Rafael 2005; Retana 1906, 1911; Medina 1896; Nuchero Hidalgo 1998). Awork like Capitan Juan was thus a double incitement to Rizal and otherPropagandists. Not only was it tendentious and gallingly offensive to Filipinosin itself, but its publication and dissemination stood for the power of the regularclergy to monopolize dissemination, as well as to foreclose the emergence ofalternative publics that might offer new bases for mutual identification andmobilization amongst disconnected individuals.

In this light, ilustrado references to friar compositions for Filipino readersmay be seen as exploiting an avenue for veiled metadiscursive commentary

6 I borrow the concept of “text regulators” from Haeri (1997), whose discussion concerns thefunctioning of an Egyptian bureaucratic apparatus whose purpose is to ensure the appropriateand correct use of Classical Arabic.


upon the regular clergy’s privileged positions as regulators of the publicsphere—a sinecure that at this juncture may have appeared, given the Propa-gandists’ liberal ideological stripe and their self-conception as heirs of theEnlightenment, as more deeply illegitimate than the very exercise of colonialsovereignty by Spain. For another example of such metadiscursive commen-tary, let us set aside Capitan Juan for the moment and turn to Si TandangBasio Macunat (1885), another work that didactically employed the figure ofa native narrator. Composed in Tagalog byMiguel Luis Bustamante, a Franciscanfriar whose career included tours of duty in several areas of the archipelago,Basio Macunat concerned itself with the influence of modernity andurbanization on native society and issued its readers a cautionary warningagainst indiscriminately aspiring to Spanish mores. On the whole far betterknown today than Capitan Juan, Basio Macunat made its rather haplessauthor a lightening-rod for anti-friar sentiment. One particular speech in thebook, uttered by the wise but crotchety title character Basio, was to becomeenduringly notorious. In it, the loyal Basio likens Castilian-speaking indiosto dressed-up monkeys and declares, “Separate the indio from his waterbuffalo and he will only commit offences against God and King” (16).The Propagandists received Bustamante’s novel as an affront to Filipinos,

and insured that it became the eye of a well-orchestrated storm of ridicule.Nearly every issue of La Solidaridad (the radical paper edited and publishedfrom Barcelona by overseas ilustrados between 1889 and 1890) came tofeature a polemical essay or short story that sideswiped Basio Macunat(Fores-Ganzon et al. 1967). As one might expect, most of these jabs wereattacks or burlesques that highlighted the novel’s obnoxious message.7

However, at least two prominent Propagandists went beyond the book’scontent in order to speculate upon or expose certain peculiarities within friarpractices of dissemination. In the sequel to Noli me Tangere, entitled El Filibus-terismo, the repulsive parish priest of Tiani (perhaps a play on Tanay, the settingof Bustamante’s novel) indulges in frequent tirades against the folly of teachingCastilian to natives, virtually “double voicing” the words placed in BasioMacunat’s mouth by Bustamente (Rizal 1891).8 Moreover, this Fray Camorra(whom some scholars have tentatively identified as a caricature of Bustamante

7 These polemical readings propagated a tendentious reading of the novel based on selective anddecontextualized quotation. Many treated Basio’s notorious opinion regarding the place of indios asa statement of the author’s own view, ignoring that Basio’s speech causes him to be chided by thenarrator, who reminds him that some of the ablest lawyers and doctors of the day were indios.More-over, these critics ignored Bustamante’s achievement of a level of verbal art in Tagalog that wasunequalled by most ilustrados.

8 Double-voiced discourse characteristically “make[s] use of someone else’s discourse for [its]own purposes, by inserting a new semantic intention into a discourse which already has, and whichretains, an intention of its own” (Bakhtin 1984: 189).


himself) tirelessly threatens and coerces his parishioners into purchasing SiTandang Basio Macunat so that he can pocket the proceeds.

A couple of glancing blows at Bustamante’s novel can also be found in twoof the most famous polemics composed by the doyen of the Filipino colony inBarcelona, Marcelo H. Del Pilar, who, like many of his compatriots, was driveninto self-imposed exile in Europe by the absence of press freedoms in the archi-pelago. In La Frailocracia Filipina (1979 [1889]), Del Pilar noted acerbicallythat that Basio Macunat’s stance against the teaching of Spanish to nativesdirectly contravened recent directives from the colonial office in Madrid(1889). Even more pointedly, in La Soberanıa Monacal en Filipinas (Monasticsovereignty in the Philippines, 1888) he mocked the book’s Franciscan publish-ing house for their opaque system of distributing it: “the present writer couldnever buy even a single copy of it when he attempted to do so in person.Through the offices of his servant, however, he has managed to acquire asmany as needed for himself and his friends. Meanwhile, it is given awaygratis in the rural parishes of the countryside” (p. 187).

With this revelation of Franciscan tactics of restricting the circulation ofBasio Macunat to a relatively powerless section of the colonial society, DelPilar exposed the book to the full rigor of public evaluation and puncturedthe illusion of friar loftiness. Both Capitan Juan and Basio Macunat hadmade it a point to posit their respective audiences as being comprised solelyof indios, as if to deliberately withhold recognition from the hybrid Filipinointelligentsia that contained their strongest critics. With these ripostes,however, Del Pilar succeeded in inverting the valence of this tactic and trans-formed it from an expression of power into a sign of cowardice. Once again, awork of friar-authored propaganda aimed at a native audience had provided theilustrados with an opportunity to expose and condemn the petty but potentpractices of text regulation through which friars acted as gatekeepers to thecolonial public sphere.

To those scholars of Philippine nationalism steeped in the works of thePropagandists, the almost promiscuous intertextuality of ilustrado writingswill undoubtedly bring no surprises (Schumacher 1972; Arcilla 1988; Rafael1999). Yet while the liberal and intimate use made by the Propagandists ofEuropean literature, Spanish journalism, ecclesiastical sources, and bureau-cratic reports (to name but a few of the many exogeneous interlocutorsfound within their writings) may be well known, these have generally beentreated as sources of background information rather than as a political strategyto expose the metapragmatics of authorization, recognition, and participation—the very politics of speaking out and being heard—through which power waswielded within the colonial public sphere itself. As a corollary, the almost com-plete neglect meted out to friar works of propaganda, among other writings, hasleft unexplored a promising avenue of inquiry into the nineteenth-centurycolonial public sphere.


Given their half-hearted narrative conceits, seemingly transparent agendas,patent racism, and general air of mediocrity, it is understandable that friarworks of propaganda have drawn little scrutiny. Here we must also take intoconsideration the very success of Filipino nationalist and U.S. imperialisthistoriography in sedimenting an overdrawn stereotype of the regular clergyas anachronistic oppressors who were swept out of their depth by moderncurrents. A revisionist reading of works like Capitan Juan and BasioMacunat can begin to restore nuance to our understanding of late Spanish colo-nialism by illuminating strategies the regular clergy used to defend their vestedinterests within the changing political environment encompassing both metro-pole and colony.

L I B E R A L I S M ON TWO CO N T I N E N T S : P R I N T C U LT U R E A N D T H E

V I C I S S I T U D E S O F F R I A R P OW E R

Books and printed materials, one of the most prized of cargoes on theAcapulco-Manila galleon route, were monitored by colonial authorities fortheir ideological content as far back as the latter decades of the sixteenthcentury (Leonard 1992: 226–40). The institutionalization of censorship,however, did not begin in earnest until the nineteenth century. Shaped by pol-itical vicissitudes elsewhere in the Spanish empire as well as in the metropole,its implementation in the Philippines both built on and complicated patterns ofcooperation between civil governors and friars that had long served as thebedrock of colonial governance.Napoleon’s invasion of Spain in 1808 inaugurated nearly a century of

conflict between republican Liberals and conservative monarchists. Soonthereafter, the proclamation of the Constitution of Cadiz, a victory for Liberals,was overtaken by insurrection in the Latin American colonies, leading to theirindependence between 1810 and 1820. In the Philippines, creole nationalismamongst locally born Spaniards (known as hijos del pais) took the form ofresentment at their exclusion from economic opportunities and official posts,and was openly expressed during the brief interregnum between 1813 and1824, when the liberties extended by the 1812 Cadiz Constitution allowedmaterials of all ideological stripes circulate freely (Retana 1908a: 1–5).Starting in 1825, detailed regulations concerning the importation of booksand periodicals were put into effect by civilian governors. And while Liberalswere successful in securing freedom of speech and correspondence in Spain,after 1837—when the governance of the Philippines was separated from themetropole and its representation in the Cortes abolished—these privileges ofcitizenship no longer extended to colonial soil (Dıaz-Trechuelo 1998; Robles1969).Although their appointments followed the prevailing winds in Madrid, even

Liberal governors found it expedient to rely upon the regular clergy as theireyes and ears in monitoring the politically dangerous creole class, as well as


the increasingly assertive Spanish and Chinese mestizos (Mas 1963; Schumacher1972). Official anxieties regarding these groups were heightened by the prolifer-ation of commercial printing presses operating in the environs of Manila by mid-century (Hernandez 1996: 58–62). When, in 1856, a permanent Commission onCensorship was set up to check the circulation of materials posing a threat to themonarchy, religion, public tranquility, andmorals, four votes on the nine-memberCommission were reserved for the regular clergy, giving them a near-veto overall rulings. The Commission had substantial interpretive license; materials of asatiric or allegorical nature were specifically banned, and publishers of period-icals had to obtain approval for each issue prior to duplication and dissemination(Filipinas 1857). While supposedly reflecting their status as stewards of thenative population, the decisive authority given to friars actually served to buttressthe informal services they rendered to civil administrators by spying on creolesand mestizos, the real targets of the statute. (Censorship guidelines tellinglyinvoked indios not as potential authors—or even readers—but rather as innocentswhose morals required protection from corrupting influences). In return, gover-nors showed themselves willing to regard the indio population as wards of theclergy and as off limits.

The extent of this accommodation can be seen in the linguistic arena, wherefor centuries civil governors turned a blind eye as the regular clergy ignoredtheir mandate to spread Castilian amongst the indio population. Instead,friars preferred to withhold the language from natives in order to maintainthe symbolic capital of Castilian and their own unique status as its mediators(Rafael 1993; 2005). Despite these efforts, a Castilian-speaking ladino classemerged in Manila; however, in rural areas, where friars served as gatekeepersto the language, only a tiny percentage of indios learned to understand, speak,or read Castilian, even though statutes issued over the centuries had repeatedlycalled for natives to be taught it.9 In linguistic as well as other arenas,republican governors and monarchist friars, sworn enemies on the peninsula,coexisted as colonial bedfellows even as waves of Liberal anticlericalismconvulsed Spain, demoralizing the clergy and stripping the Church and themonastic orders of their lands and other assets.

This colonial modus vivendi was shattered in September of 1868 when arevolt of naval forces commanded by Liberal sympathizers forced Isabel IIfrom the throne, leading to the promulgation of a new constitution. Althoughthe monarchy would be restored in 1873 under Isabel’s son, Alfonso XII, thereverberations of the short-lived “Glorious Revolution” in the archipelagoduring the intervening years were profound. In Madrid, Liberal ascendancebrought to the fore anti-colonial thinkers linked to the Radical Party, and

9 According to Retana, the printing of works in languages other than Castilian was forbidden bystatute. Notwithstanding this, he notes, “it is certain that practically every year saw the printing ofthousands of copies of chapbooks of a religious nature in vernacular languages” (1908b: 2).


generated a number of publications attacking colonial policy. Scathing indict-ments of the regular clergy appeared in two journals representing the interestsof Spain’s overseas possessions: El Eco Filipino and El Correo de Espana.10

Among the regular clergy, who regarded colonial service in the Philippinesas a haven from the depredations transpiring on the peninsula, these develop-ments led to profound uneasiness regarding their own future and exacerbatedmounting strain from local quarters (Cushner 1971).From mid-century onward, the constituency seeking liberal reforms had

steadily expanded to encompass a new monied class comprising not onlyhijos del pais, but also mestizos and indios (Wickberg 1965; Fast andRichardson 1979; McCoy and de Jesus 1982; Anderson 1988). By investingtheir wealth (built up through commerce and cash-cropping for export) in over-seas education, professional training, and cultural self-Hispanization, these newelites quickly gained access to the upper echelons of colonial society, favorablyimpressing some peninsular governors with their dynamism and passionatedesire to be embraced as full citizens by the mother country.11 These actionsof cultivating favor and cultural citizenship would alone have been sufficientto earn this heterogeneous bourgeoisie the ire of the regular clergy. As itwas, an influential section of this group comprised of “secular” (i.e., diocesan)clergy added insult to injury by calling for the religious orders to turn overparish administration to diocesan authorities and refocus their efforts in newmission fields (Schumacher 1972; 1997). At a time when the religious orderswere under sustained attack in Spain and “under considerable pressure toprove themselves indispensable as the upholders of Spain’s mission and sover-eignty in the Philippines” (Schumacher 1972: 213) the appearance of a plaus-ible class of home-grown leaders in the archipelago could not but fill friars likeCasimiro Herrero, the Bishop of Nueva Caceres, with dread. Before long, theseforebodings were realized in the form of the aforementioned mutiny at Cavite,furnishing signs of the arrival of metropolitan political tensions in the colony.The publication of Capitan Juan in 1874, two years after the mutiny,

suggested the regular clergy’s cognizance of an oppositional public, impre-cisely understood but presumed to be Liberal in its sympathies. Set inManila in 1871 (the year before the Cavite Mutiny), the work features thevoice of Juan, the wise title character, and an indio town mayor from an

10 Sanchez Fuertes (1988a) identifies the major peninsular proponents of colonial reform asbeing Rafael Marıa de Labra y Cadrada, the Regidor brothers Antonio Marıa and Manuel, theex-Franciscan Francisco Arriaga, and Federico Lerena and Jose Marıa Basa, the publishers of ElEco Filipino.

11 Benedict Anderson writes that by the 1880s the second generation of this hybrid bourgeoisiebecame the progenitors of a proto-national consciousness that was quite distinct from that of earliercreole patriots in subsuming colonial social categories based on blood and limpieza de sangre. Thisshift in consciousness, Anderson argues, first took place among those youth whose parents sentthem overseas to study (2003).


unidentified rural province. Arriving in Manila on business, Juan hears from afriend the worrying news of the prevalence of foreign revolutionary pamphletsand periodicals in circulation amongst indios. These publications, he learns, arefilled with “phantasms”: concepts such as “liberty” and “individual rights,”which serve as a “pretext” by which persons harboring political ambitionsseek to fool those more simple and ignorant than themselves (p. 12). Seizedby inquietude, Juan is haunted by visions of potential disasters stemmingfrom these menacing publications. Still, he is somewhat calmed by an ideathat comes to him upon remembering an old teacher: “If I can harness thegood reasons that my wise master expounded about the gratitude . . . whichwe owe the Nation that has encircled us in her mantle and shared with us herreligion, culture, and liberties. I can illuminate the minds of those bedeviledby revolutionary doctrines threatening anarchy in the islands” (p. 14).

The following night, Juan’s friend takes him to attend a surreptitious gather-ing (public assembly, it is worth noting, being forbidden in the colony)convened in the home of a well-to-do indio. There he learns that prior to themeeting a pamphlet had been pre-circulated giving news of the dethroning ofIsabel II three years previously, and of the promulgation of a liberal Consti-tution. At first, the gathering appears to be a dispassionate affair; it is chairedby a presidente who opines, in temperate and reasoned tones, that the newConstitution’s expansions of individual rights ought to apply to overseas sub-jects (p. 20). However, the meeting takes an unfortunate turn when a learnedspeaker undertakes to explain the terms “liberty” and “equality” to listenerswho do not understand Castilian. Intentionally or not, his translation goesseriously awry. Ignoring the rest of his words, uneducated members of theaudience fixate on “equality,” their thoughts immediately turning to the lucra-tive posts they might occupy if the castilas (Spaniards) were to be sent home orkilled (p. 21). The mood of the gathering turns chaotic and ugly. Thankfully, thetimely and calming intervention of the visitor from the countryside prevents itfrom being swept in the direction of outright subversion and violence.

As a work of propaganda, Capitan Juan takes on the ideological work ofenvisioning the kinds of secret mobilizations that were involved in bringingabout the Cavite Mutiny, as well as that of constructing a species of nativeloyalist whose presence might yet have forestalled it. While we clearlycannot take Capitan Juan’s depiction of a native public as a faithful reflectionof social reality, we can certainly interrogate that image to reveal the contextualhorizon of its construction. Awarning against the dangers posed by the circula-tion of unsanctioned printed matter, Juan’s narrative, which extends over twochapters, is as integral to the ideological purposes of the text as are thetwenty-two non-narrative “lectures” that follow it. Yet the conceit of nativeauthorship seems to endorse the very phenomenon that has been posed as athreat, namely the constitution of subaltern publics around the use of print.Indeed, Herrero’s very depiction of the indio political gathering as a


concatenation of anonymous individuals, a subset of a potentially indefinitesocial formation generated by the surreptitious circulation of discourse, owesmuch to the liberal political imagination that was such an anathema to theregular clergy. As we shall see, such a portrayal suggests a distinct reorientationof ideologies and practices of writing, translation, and dissemination that hadfor centuries proved crucial to the friars’ assertion of social and spiritualauthority over indio subjects.

C O D E S , C I R C U L AT I O N , A N D T H E C O N C E I T O F C A P I TA N J U A N

Unlike the constituents of a face-to-face community, members of a public maynever meet in person or learn of each other’s individual existences. Yet theydevelop an indefinite awareness of each other via the mediation of texts thatare addressed to them as members of a public, mobilizing their attentionthrough the use of particular genres and specific media forms. For MichaelWarner, this linkage between mobilization and mediation is intrinsic to thevery nature of publics as discursive entities that are constituted by the reflexivecirculation of written or spoken discourse (2002: 15).Acknowledging the impossibility of constructing a singular history for “the

public,” Warner observes that to belong to a public is “to be a certain kind ofperson, to inhabit a certain kind of social world, to have at one’s disposal certainmedia and genres, to be motivated by a certain normative horizon, and to speakwithin a certain language ideology” (2002: 10). One can go a step further:making a serious effort to address a public requires one to discursivelysituate oneself within a contextually-specific horizon of personhood, socialrelations, formats, norms, and linguistic ideologies.The very formation of colonial print culture reflected a language ideology

(Schieffelin, Woolard, and Kroskrity 1998; Errington 2001) peculiar to themissionary project, one that has been compellingly elaborated by Rafael(1993). Medieval scholars posited an intrinsic connection between the Chris-tian message and Latin. But if Latin was the means by which the Wordmoved from heaven to earth, then Castilian was the instrument by which itwas in turn conveyed to the indios of Mexico and the Philippines. Re-codifiedby Nebrija in correspondence with Latin, the Castilian language embodied thedream of perfect mediation. Standing as it did for the power of translation itself,control over Castilian became central to the authority of the regular clergy asmediators between God and man, Espana and Filipinas, kastila (Spaniard)and indio (op. cit.: 23–54).Printing was conscripted early in the seventeenth century to serve the

evangelical regime of translation, and a stream of friar-authored dictionariesand linguistic manuals or artes issued from the presses of the Augustinians,Dominicans, Franciscans, and Jesuits (Tormo Sanz 1979; Retana 1906;1911). Due to the expense of printing, when vernacular works—mainly doctri-nas and devocionarios—emerged roughly a century later they generally did not


pass into the private possession of indios; instead they were used as auxiliaryaids in standardizing and facilitating face-to-face relations between clergyand laity (Rafael 1993: 84–109). In contrast to the indefinite membershipand horizontality of Warner’s archetypical public—the eighteenth-centuryAmerican “republic of letters”—vernacular texts in the colonial Philippinesissued a hierarchical summons to convene face to face in the name of theFather (Rafael, personal communication). Within Castilian print culture,which was explicitly geared to the leisured classes’ demand for stimulationand entertainment reflecting contemporary life, one could find numerousmagazines and newspapers, costumbrista novels penned by peninsularwriters (Hernandez Chung 1998), and even (when the censors were inattentive)the occasional polemical essay. However, the domination of vernacular printingby clerical presses and the tendency of privately owned presses to publishsecular works in Castilian created a disjuncture between the print cultures ofFilipino languages and Castilian. Well into the middle of the nineteenthcentury, the range of genres available to vernacular readers were substantiallyunchanged from those introduced two centuries earlier, even though a signifi-cant proportion of the reading public was able to read material in the linguafranca as well in a Filipino language.

To what extent were friar-authored vernacular texts circumscribed bymissionary ideology of translation described above? And how (if at all) didthey foster consciousness of belonging to a “community of discourse” (Chartier1994)—if not a public—among their readers? Some hints are provided by themost common printed genre of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, thedevocionario.12 These were cheaply produced pamphlets that taught laypeoplehow to expiate sins by earning indulgences or pleading for intercession fromthe saints or the souls in purgatory. In these works, explicit directives (“makefour Signs of the Cross,” “offer three Hail Mary’s,” etc.) parentheticallyframe the prayers and hagiographic narratives, as if to make the sacramentalfigure of the priest into an absent presence at the scene of inward devotion.The first textual convention to note here is the relationship of hierarchicalpersonalism posited between author and reader. Devocionarios and novenasserved as a technology for transforming print on the page into efficaciousspeech acts or prayer, and constructed the nature of reading by indios not asa private practice but as a supervised and embodied performance.13 Second,in keeping with an ideology of writing in which all authoritative discourse orig-inates elsewhere, reaching Filipino indios only by the fortunate accident of friarmediation, devotional works offered readers few localized topoi or references

12 For facsimiles of the title pages and text selections of several devocionarios, see Retana 1906.13 Boyarin (1993) offers a number of studies that demonstrate the variety of ideologies and insti-

tutions and practices associated with reading in various world contexts, historical andcontemporary.


to their own social universe. Many, indeed, were translated from the originalCastilian or another European language and were anchored in the spatiotem-poral world of scripture or sacred history. Third, since anything worthknowing, writing, or printing had to pass into the vernacular from Castilian,authorship was constructed by default as the province of Spaniards. By alogic in which written discourse was supposed to flow in authorized channelsfrom top to bottom—never upward or horizontally—indio authorship was allbut rendered a contradiction in terms.14 In short, even as vernacular works cul-tivated readers’ consciousness of their membership in the unbounded commu-nity of Christendom, the hierarchical ideology of clerical print culture departedstrikingly from the qualities of impersonality and horizontality that Warnerattributes to publics.Still, the ubiquity of paratexts—versified forewords, prologues, and other

supplementary materials—that accompanied devotional works suggests thatsome kind of mediating work was nonetheless regarded as necessary in orderto localize them for indio readers. As instances of metadiscourse that reflex-ively constituted the relationship between the authors and readers, theseadjuncts to devotional literature may be seen as furnishing conventions for ima-gining a public, albeit one within the bounds of hierarchy and personalism. Forexample, Fenella Cannell unpacks an exemplary paratext, a correspondencebetween a bishop and translator that supplements a Bicol-language pasyon,but she finds the ideology of downward dissemination displaced by a differentculturally particular logic, one of reciprocity and exchange. Building uponRafael’s work on conversion as an interaction between Spanish and Tagalogcultural logics of literacy, Cannell argues that such dedications framed verna-cular texts as a gift from priestly authors to indio readers, the form of whosereciprocal counter-gift was sometimes explicitly specified in advance as acertain kind of pious and grateful reading practice (2006). This logic of recipro-city incited the emergence of alternative practices of reading, writing, andcirculation at the fringes of clerical control. And if friar authors themselveson occasion deviated from missionary ideologies of writing, Cannell shows

14 It bears note that some indios could and did become authors, especially after the mid-seventeenth century, when indios began to be trained in seminaries in Castilian and Latin. Theseventeenth-century manual of Tomas Pinpin, a native typesetter for the Dominicans, was a cele-brated case of native authorship. Catering to indio desires to appropriate the code of power and pri-vilege, Pinpin’s book instructed indios in the art of expressing oneself in Castilian to personalbetterment and advantage. Mojares (1983) suggests that some paratexts accompanying devotionalworks published under the name of friar authors were actually composed by their indio assistants. Inaddition, there are many indio-authored examples of corrido (a verse-epic form inspired by the chi-valric themes of Spanish Golden Age romances), which was the only genre of secular literaturewhose consumption was not discouraged. While they are undoubtedly significant for understandingthe growth of literary culture, these exceptions hardly displaced the ideological marking of author-ship as Castilian, a relation which was secured by that code’s association with translation and thedissemination of God’s word downward along a hierarchy of languages (see Rafael 1993).


that occult practices of reading were even more widespread amongst indiosfrom subaltern classes. Through copying and bricolage, indios authored theirown magical texts out of Latin or Castilian fragments appropriated from devo-tional materials, thus stealing the gift of reading in a tactical act of negative reci-procity.15 Moreover, the well-documented efficacy of these incantationaltalismans or anting (talismans) in recruiting indios to join local uprisingsagainst civil and religious authorities demonstrates how the potency conferredupon textuality by the colonial project was utilized to mobilize publics inaltogether subversive terms (Ileto 1979).

In the second half of the nineteenth century, the devocionarios and metricalromances that made up vernacular literature were joined by the didactic prosegenres of dialogo, tratado, ejemplo, and manual de urbanidad, also authoredby clerics (Mojares 1983; Diokno and Villegas 1998). These works featurednatives as characters and even as narrators, and their purposes included incul-cating proper piety, instilling ideals of virtue, and imparting instruction onmorals and conduct. The new genres constructed the public distinctively bymitigating the distance between the (often pseudonymous) kastila author andindio reader, and encouraging the latter to identify with the narrative’s inspira-tional or cautionary travails. Notwithstanding a certain artfully producednaivete (recall the Noli’s ironic reference to “Capitan Juan, that guilelesswork”), movements of concealment and revelation often played across theirsurfaces, particularly in the (usually fake) paratexts to which authors tookrecourse in framing their compositions.

The preface of Capitan Juan (1874), which laid out the work’s rhetoricalconceit, instructively utilized some of these conventions. Although its writerwas nowhere identified as the bishop of Nueva Caceres, “P. Caro,” the authorialpersona whose name appeared on the title page, could easily be deciphered as acontraction of “Casimiro Herrero.” Addressing the reader in the preface,P. Caro explained that Juan, the book’s true author, had entrusted the manu-script to himself to disseminate as he judged fit. Moved by the “noblenative’s” honorable efforts to “preserve in these islands the unity of religion,order, civilization, and progress which it owes to Spain and its missionaries”(p. 8), P. Caro undertook the publication of the manuscript. Since, however,the native author had implored him to withhold his true “name, town, biogra-phy, and customs” from public knowledge, P. Caro felt bound to protect hisidentity with a pseudonym (pp. 6–7). By incorporating these details, theauthor-editor not only called attention to his own authorizing function as atext regulator, but also endorsed the generically named Juan as the epitomeof acceptable indio political subjectivity, proper modesty, and Christian

15 See Fenella Cannell’s discussion (2006) of the well-known talismanic text that was acquired,edited, and published by W. E. Retana as Un libro de aniterıas (1894). On the transmission of talis-mans through printed works, see Covar 1980.


humility. Notwithstanding the complexity and elaboration of the conceit, it ispatently obvious that the separation of author, editor, and narrator in CaptainJuan is entirely perfunctory: the extrafictional and narrative voices of P. Caroand Juan respectively serve as mere proxies for the overbearing authorialpresence of Casimiro Herrero himself.In positing the task of the translator as central to the work’s dissemination

and potential impact, moreover, Capitan Juan amply bears out VicenteRafael’s claim that friar authority in the colonial Philippines was predicatedupon translation. Given that Capitan Juan was supposedly intended for indioreaders, its publication in Castilian initially seems puzzling—all the more so,surely, given Herrero’s mastery of two Filipino languages, and his belief thatthe circulation of foreign language works in the colony had been partly respon-sible for the Cavite Mutiny. In his preface, however, the extrafictional P. Carooffers a telling explanation for the publication of Capitan Juan in Castilianrather than in a vernacular language. “Knowing the desires of the author andpossessing his idiom,” declared P. Caro, “I have preferred to publish thework in Castilian so that it can be known throughout the islands and translatedinto its diverse languages as befits its importance” (p. 7, my emphasis). As wewill see, this reverie regarding the dissemination of Capitan Juan throughoutthe archipelago in a veritable Babel of vernacular languages would, ironicallyenough, be thwarted by none other than the Commission on Censorship. Fornow, however, it is sufficient to note that P. Caro’s remarks arrogate the truepower of authorship to himself. It is, after all, the Spanish editor who willlift Juan’s manuscript out of the vernacular stream and place it in a widercircuit of circulation. Far from signaling the democratization of access to thepublic sphere, it turns out, the recognition apparently awarded to Juan as anative author only secures the yoke between language and colonial power.The fact that Capitan Juan’s pivotal narrative scene identifies coalition-

formation among colonized subjects with mistranslation soon emerges asvital to the work’s ideological purpose. If the presidente’s attempted vernacu-larization of the terms “liberty” and “equality” for the benefit of his ruder indioconfederates identifies Castilian as the language of the contraband print matter,then the near-disastrous result of his efforts gives a peculiarly linguisticexpression to the threat of political destabilization. Figured in this scene ofcross-linguistic circulation and cross-class solidarity is a fear, widespreadamongst the colonial authorities at this juncture, of elite mestizos and hijosdel pais making common cause with subaltern speakers of Tagalog and othervernaculars in order to challenge peninsular and especially friar dominance.16

16 Substantiation for these fears was to come just a few years later, when the Propagandistsfocused their hopes and dreams for a common national language not upon Tagalog but Castilian(Rafael 1999; Barron 1998).


But if the ideological stance inscribed in Capitan Juan was clear andunambiguous, this could not be said of the identity of the public at which itwas directed. As a didactic work that held up its titular native character as anideal for emulation, it appeared at first blush to belong to the ranks of theejemplo, or perhaps the more polemical form of tratado. Its publication in Cas-tilian (and in Madrid to boot), however, makes such an identification with genreproblematic to say the least. Even more importantly, Capitan Juan’s directbroaching of the inflammatory fact of the Glorious Revolution (not tomention that of the Cavite Mutiny) at a time when these events could scarcelyeven be referenced in the Castilian-language press, signals that its goals weremore complicated than the typical one of promoting virtuous conduct and vili-fying drinking or gambling. Identifying these goals, however, is no straightfor-ward matter. To recognize the chaotic ambiguity of Capitan Juan, one needonly consider the disjointed quality of Juan’s “lectures,” any given one ofwhich betrays a tendency to careen between wildly different topics, now elabor-ating theological glosses on Augustinian or Aquinean theology, now denoun-cing liberal ideals such as “liberty,” “equality,” and “fraternity” as sophisticaldistortions of Biblical values, and now indexing local realities such as cara-baos, monteses (inhabitants of outlaw settlements in the hills), bagyos(typhoons), negritos (aborigines), Chinese mestizos, rattan switches, andcoconut palms. Genre and convention by themselves cannot account forthese peculiarities. Rather, the imperatives that made Capitan Juan a grabbag for such disparate rhetorical efforts must be sought in the unstable positionof the friar in the late nineteenth-century Philippines—embattled and perse-cuted on the peninsula but privileged on the archipelago; heir to an absoluteevangelical mandate and an anachronism in secular statecraft; embodimentof local knowledge but newly accountable to cosmopolitan modernity.

N A R R AT I V E , P R O PA G ANDA , A N D T H E Q U E S T I O N O F T H E A U D I E N C E

All forms involving a narrator or a posited author . . . open up the possibility oftranslating one’s own intentions from one linguistic system to another . . . of saying“‘I am me’” in someone else’s language, and in my own language, “I am other”

(Bakhtin 1981: 314–15).

Capitan Juan’s true purposes announce themselves obliquely within the ambi-guity that surrounds the intended audience of Juan’s lectures. In his prologue,Juan describes the men gathered at the secret meeting as belonging to themiddle and upper strata of indio society. Upon composing his manuscript,however, he decides to expand his audience to all who “share our narrowintelligence,” and “whose ancestors were converted by the heroic Spanishmissionaries,” immediately generating ambiguity. Does this broader audienceinclude Spanish and Chinese mestizos, groups that colonial racial theoryjudged to be more advanced than the autochthonous pre-Christian Malays


from whom they were, in part, descended? By rights it should, and yet inseveral lectures Juan’s use of “we” explicitly excludes those groups. Atthese moments, Juan seems to invoke a society of pureblooded indios, avirtual impossibility given three centuries of intermixing and hybridization.This is far from trivial—Juan’s impossibly imagined audience offers a clueto Herrero’s rhetorical purposes precisely insofar as it effaces from view emer-ging proto-national solidarities amongst indios, mestizos, and creoles. Notcoincidentally, it also relegates the hybrid populations that posed the greatestthreat to friar dominance to a non-integral (and illegitimate) role in Philippinesociety.Readers will recall that the regular clergy was under serious attack from

several quarters at the time of Capitan Juan’s writing. On one side, someLiberals had cast aspersions on the capacity of the friars to bring aboutnative uplift; on another, an ambitious and rising bourgeoisie chafed at a mor-ibund clerical establishment seemingly committed to placing its own vestedinterests above all other considerations. After the Cavite Mutiny, even peninsu-lar modernizers seeking to preserve Spain’s overseas possessions began torevisit the role of the regular clergy in view of the challenges of securing thecolony and the increasing complexity of colonial governance. In light ofthese predicaments, we might view Herrero’s tract as a response to tworelated challenges: the urgent need to defend regular clergy’s indispensabilityand moral unimpeachability to peninsular observers of the colony, and theimperative of discrediting the emerging proto-national bourgeoisie. But howdid the ruse of the native narrator and the fiction of addressing an indiopublic fit into these objectives? In brief, these devices allowed Herrero toimpugn creoles and mestizos without extending them recognition as coevalinterlocutors within the public realm.Such a strategy explains why the perfidy of the elite is so frequently insinu-

ated in Capitan Juan. In the narrative portion of the work, the presidente andhis allies appear discomfited and exchange “significant” glances as the enthu-siastic crowd begs Juan to return (p. 25). Immediately afterward, the presidenteuses allegorical language to signal that a disruption of plans has taken place anddismisses the meeting (p. 26); along with other men “of importance,” hevacates the seminar table and fails to reappear at subsequent lectures. In theirabsence, the returning majority begs Juan to expound further upon doctrinesof “peace and security.” Immediately, Juan is led to compare the absentleaders with those held responsible for the Cavite Mutiny:

It could be argued that what took place was a conspiracy, involving persons from eventhe most respectable and advanced classes in our midst. This only proves that the falsedoctrines disseminated in pamphlets and periodicals are a venom that penetrates eventhe sanest and straightest of hearts, especially if the passions are not subordinated toreason. Equally, it furnishes evidence that all societies, no matter how holy, containtheir Cains and Judases (pp. 27–28).


After exonerating the friars of any blame for failing to prevent the CaviteMutiny, the book progresses through a series of topics: initial lectures onabstract philosophical topics give way to discourses on the recent scourgesof Protestantism and liberalism in Europe, culminating in a series of polemicson the archipelago’s history and colonial affairs. Threaded through this world-historical tour is a more localized account of the ethnological, intellectual, andmoral deficiencies of Filipino indios, one that insistently reiterates the necessityof firm peninsular leadership for native welfare and leaves no doubt as to theidentity of the Cains and Judases of colonial society. In one of the book’sfinal lectures, “What Would Become of the Native and the Islands withoutthe Union with Spain?” (pp. 237–51), Juan invites his audience to considerthe likely consequences of a successful revolution through the tale of afamily in which the children are persuaded to turn against their self-sacrificingparents by two treacherous sons-in-law (pp. 237–38). This “family romance”(Hunt 1992) is, of course, an allegory of the colony: friars and the civil auth-orities are father and mother (indexing God the Father and la patria or themotherland, respectively), and the scheming sons-in-law are Chinese andSpanish mestizos. The message is driven home: just as the act of repudiatingone’s parents inexorably destroys all other family bonds in its wake, a revolu-tion against peninsular authorities will erode unity, order, and civilization itself(p. 241). Juan rehearses the steps of this process: First, hijos del pais will per-suade the rest to become pawns of elite disloyalty against the patria. Once theygain control of the archipelago, however, hijos del pais will find themselvestargets of the same strategy, this time by wielded by the Chinese mestizos.They in turn will suffer the resentment and betrayal of the natives. A state ofanarchy will ultimately ensue, returning the indio masses to the same despoticand tribal insecurity in which they were encountered by the sixteenth-centuryconquistadores.

On a related point, the ethnological vein of exposition that runs throughCapitan Juan strengthens the identification of urbane peninsulars (rather thanpowerless indios) as the book’s primary audience, and may be seen as anattempt to counter images of friar moribundity. In the lecture entitled “OurRacial Origins and Characteristics” (pp. 104–11), Juan discusses the arrivalof successive waves of increasingly civilized seafarers from the Indonesianislands in an archipelago aboriginally peopled by negritos or aetas, leadingto the emergence of tribal communities politically organized under leadersknown as datus. He concludes that the supposed shortcomings of the indiorace—lassitude, political disunity, and superstition—are the culmination oftheir “lymphatic” constitution coupled with “atavistic” racial degenerationand exacerbated by tribal despotism (pp. 104–11). This hodgepodge of evol-utionary, climatological, theological, and ethnological discourses makes littlesense as a strategy for addressing an unlettered native audience. On the otherhand, as a display of familiarity with the professional-scientific idioms of the


day, it rebuts peninsular liberals’ charge that modern currents had left the friarsfar behind. A similar argument (precluded here for reasons of space) could bemade regarding the repeated references found in Capitan Juan to native policyin the British and Dutch East Indies.Our discussion of the rhetorical strategy of Capitan Juan would be incom-

plete if it did not take into account the almost breathtaking flatness of thetitle character, a virtual caricature of loyalty and subservience. Despite Juan’sstatus as the narrator and putative author of Captain Juan, the sole authorialpresence the text is, of course, Casimiro Herrero himself. Indeed, CapitanJuan’s very title is a clue that he is not the source of his own discourse, forthe typical nineteenth-century indio gobernadorcillo was typically a proxyfor the will of his parish priest, even if he was technically elected by hispeers in the local principalia (May 1989). Moreover, Juan’s undermining ofhis own authority is incorporated into the very conceit of Capitan Juan. Inthe prologue itself, Juan modestly disavows any claim to originality, creditingas sources his Dominican teachers17 as well as a couple of pamphlets composedby an unnamed Augustinian priest (a device that allows Herrero to liberallyself-plagiarize from previous works). In a convoluted instance of self-referentiality, “Juan” and “P. Caro” once more serve as refracting prisms forthe authorial presence of Casimiro Herrero himself.As a device permitting the friar author to deploy his own discourse from an

alternative footing, the native narrator is used to attest to the moral rectitude ofthe clergy. Consider the following passage, in which Juan praises the regularclergy’s self-sacrificial devotion to the indio population: “Perhaps some ofyou . . . look solely upon the fact that he [the friar] has a house grander thanyour own . . . Rid yourselves of this envy . . . Don’t forget how often youhave seen him in a bamboo litter being carried over mountains and forests, suf-fering the abrasive rays of the sun or the stinging drops of the monsoon just togive grace to some wretch on the point of expiry” (p. 147). But the pragmaticuses of the indio as a rhetorical trope extended beyond the ventriloquizing ofthe paeans that Herrero so unblushingly composed on behalf of his brethren.Equally important, it enabled the author to invoke the local knowledge thatfriars had amassed over centuries of discharging their evangelical and civilizingdispensation. Moreover, Herrero used Juan’s narrative presence to portray thesimultaneously volatile and pliable nature of indios as a racial “type,” and tosuggest the full scope their susceptibility to the political stratagems of the emer-ging hybrid elite. The solution to this problem, which Herrero proffered uponhis slender narrative frame, lay in the relations of subordination and benevolenttutelage that he had established between Juan and P. Caro (the editorial figure

17 This may be read as indicating that Juan studied at the University of Santo Tomas, aDominican-founded institution that still carries the distinction of being the Philippines’ oldestuniversity.


who stands in for the authority of friars as text regulators), a relationship thatunderscored the indispensability of friars in domesticating threats of opposi-tional indio mobilization.

If indio authorship and readership were merely conceits within a rhetoricaltriangle involving the regular clergy, peninsulars, and the emergent colonialbourgeoisie, it does not necessarily follow that Herrero’s anxiety-filledportrayal of the colonial public sphere as a site of diabolical disseminationwas only for effect. True, it would have suited Herrero’s purposes as I havedescribed them to exaggerate the potential for anonymous modes of dissemina-tion to facilitate horizontal solidarities and popular dreams of a world withoutkastilas. But there was nothing simulated about the unease felt by peninsularconservatives regarding the public as a peculiar and unpredictable kind ofcommunity constituted through mediated social interaction. The interlinkedspecters of the Glorious Revolution and the Cavite Mutiny, as well asshadowy intimations of cosmopolitan networks of anarchists, syndicalists,and Masons traversing metropole and colony, insured that even a work likeCapitan Juan—one that posited indio readers without actually taking themseriously—was infused with dark forebodings regarding secrecy andpublicity.18

While Miguel Luis Bustamante’s novel Si Tandang Basio Macunat (1885)brought a rather different kind of scrutiny to the matter of the public, it wasno more sanguine in its implications. Composed in Tagalog, its didacticmoralism closely exemplified the ejemplo genre, but its highly naturalisticdepiction of the vernacular milieu was also akin in spirit to peninsularcostumbrista works in Castilian. At the time of its writing, the crisis of friarpower appeared to be over: in Madrid, the Bourbon restoration of 1874 hadinaugurated a stable set of power-sharing arrangements amongst Liberals andconservatives that effectively vitiated the impetus for radical colonialreforms. Reflecting this relative moment of calm, Bustamante’s noveladdressed itself not to the volatile political effects of textual disseminationbut rather to modernity’s impact on indios as manifested in the temptationsof urban mores and their deleterious effects upon family relations and morality.As such, the unassuming and righteous narrator/title character of BasioMacunat is made to stand in sharp contrast to the protagonist of his tale, ayoung dandy named Prospero whose doting parents send him to Manila foran education against the advice of his sister and the counsel of the parishpriest. Sure enough, Proper sinks into debt and dissipation, plunging hisfamily members into a nightmare of privation and heartbreak from whicheach, in turn, perishes.

18 See Anderson (2005) on the significance of anarchism in the political formation of those ilus-trados who studied in Europe, and for an evocative reconstruction of how the revolutionary mobil-izations transpiring across the Continent affected colonial authorities in the Philippines.


Given Basio Macunat’s thematic content, Charles Taylor’s (2002) notion ofthe public as a “modern social imaginary” linked to greater individualism,anonymity, and amorality might appear to be more analytically germane toits ideological purposes than is Warner’s notion of publics as discursive andrhetorical entities. It should also be noted that previous accounts have nottreated issues of publicity as central to Basio Macunat, and have regarded itfor the most part as a colonialist fable that invokes the stereotype of mimicryin order to portray cultural assimilation gone awry (Reyes 1999; Tolentino1994; Mojares 1983). Therefore, let me indicate briefly how I intend to bringthe concerns of this essay to bear upon the novel. In the limited space remain-ing, I first interrogate the purposes that this fable of modernity in the wronghands might have been expected to serve in relation to the distinct but overlap-ping publics that were anticipated for it. Second, I suggest that Basio Macunat’sutilization of codes and circulation as semiotic resources for representing colo-nial modernity bears several instructive points of comparison with CapitanJuan, and sheds a more detailed light on the challenges posed by a vernacularmodernity to friar social and linguistic authority.Basio Macunat abandoned the chronotopes conventional within friar-

authored vernacular writings, whose spatiotemporal settings, as previously dis-cussed, had mainly comprised the biblical, the hagiographic, and the chivalric.Set by Bustamante within the colony itself and anchored in the moment of hiswriting, the events read aloud by the narrator are said to have taken place ahalf-century previously, that is, precisely at the juncture when the relaxationof foreign trade embargoes had opened up the archipelago to exogenousforces of modernity. In an equally significant innovation, the author pennedtwo separate prefaces, one for Tagalog readers and the other (in Castilian)for “non-Tagalog readers,” each of which was envisioned as potentially“reading this book or listening to it being read aloud.” In this way, he explicitlysignaled that his anticipated public straddled the usually discrete readerships(and listenerships) of vernacular and Castilian printed matter. Addressingindio readers in the Tagalog language preface, he adopted a colloquial registerand struck a tone of deferential intimacy. Averring that the book in their handshad been composed with no motive other than to provide a source of simpleentertainment, the author begged his readers to forgive him any gaffes orerrors, and to make allowances for the fact that “I am no tagalog but rather akastila to whom the tagalog people are truly beloved.” In the Castilianpreface, however, Bustamante adopted a formal tone and acknowledged a com-pletely different motivation for writing the book: the ongoing “crisis” in theTagalog language. Instead of delineating this “crisis,” however, Bustamanteonly noted its widespread nature as one through which “nearly all languageshave passed.” No less evasively, he added: “Into [the crisis] I now toss, withthe utmost goodwill, my own little paragraph. Given current conditions, Idare say that what has been said is sufficient and will not go misunderstood


by those, who, having studied with some duration or attention the Tagaloglanguage, will be abreast of what is transpiring” (4).

During the late nineteenth century, after a significant gap of time, the artesand diccionarios of early colonial linguistics were supplanted by newapproaches to vernacular language teaching and study (Coria 1872; Minguella1878; Tormo Sanz 1979; Thomas n.d.). Presumably, then, the passage abovewas addressed to the small, friar-dominated circle of colonial-era linguists inwhich the Tagalog language had been taken up as an object of scholarlyinquiry and standardizing reform. Hesitant to advance a claim to authoritywithin this domain of expertise, Bustamante may nevertheless have felt thathis command of colloquial Tagalog, built up over a lengthy career serving inrural localities, gave him a linguistic vantage point upon a broader canvas ofsocial transformation that was worthy of attention. A Bakhtinian imagecomes to mind here, namely the linguistic “moment of chaos” (1981) inwhich the stagnant milieu of the Russian peasantry was dialogically rupturedby the proliferation of ideologies linked to the church, the market, and the bour-geoisie. Recall that Basio Macunat dealt thematically with a new set of socialaspirations and dislocations generated by the commercial reorientation of agrar-ian relations in the Philippine countryside; it is Prospero’s passion to speakCastilian that sets in train the ruin of his family’s status and fortune. WereBustamante’s elliptical remarks on the “crisis” of Tagalog intended to denotea peculiarly linguistic cast for the social upheavals of his time?

Before we turn to the novel itself, let us complete our examination ofBustamante’s Castilian preface, which manifested an evasiveness not whollyexplicable as the scruples of a non-expert entering a specialist domain. This,I suggest, arose from the author’s ambivalent acknowledgement that theoverlap between his two designated readerships—vernacular and Castilian—was, in fact, significantly larger than the small coterie of linguists that he hadexplicitly recognized. As Bustamante undoubtedly realized, a significant pro-portion of elite indios and mestizos were quite accustomed to collecting andperusing printed matter in more than one language.19 In one sense, surely, Bus-tamante was not ill-disposed toward these unacknowledged bilingual readers,for in a distinct tweak to the ideology of translation discussed by Rafael, heappeared eager to enlist them as linguistic mediators. For the very titling ofthe dual prefaces suggests that Bustamante relied upon his Tagalog readersnot only to read the book aloud to non-literates but also to explain or translateit for the benefit of non-Tagalogs, namely monolingual speakers of othervernaculars. Indeed, Basio Macunat had created a deliciously ironic situation

19 Glancing back to the scene of Primitivo’s bonfire in Noli me Tangere, it is strange that Rizal’sportrayal of the contents of Capitan Tinong’s library mentions only works in Castilian. For verisi-militude, Tinong’s bookshelves should also have contained quantities of vernacular-languagenovenas, devocionarios, doctrinas, and so forth.


in which monoglot Castilian speakers would for once require the linguisticmediation of Filipinos. In another sense, however, Bustamante’s circumspec-tion in addressing his linguist readership bespeaks an awareness of unwelcomepotential ‘overhearers’ within the domain of printed Castilian. Apparently, Bus-tamante, like Herrero before him, had no wish to authorize the hybrid bourgeoi-sie by extending to them an explicit recognition of their readership, in part, onemay assume, because the book itself offered a pejorative depiction of the socialinvestment in self-Hispanization made by this class. Once again then, weencounter the power politics of speaking and recognition that was wielded soirksomely against ilustrados in the public sphere.Unlike in the case of Capitan Juan, however, the indio reader constructed by

Bustamante was no mere conceit or afterthought. This much was evidenced bythe fact that the book was composed in the idiomatic and colloquial dialect ofSouthern Luzon, one of the Tagalog heartlands. Moreover, in contrast to thesermonic form of Capitan Juan, in which narrative gives way to homily andultimately to catechism, the didacticism of Basio Macunat lies in establishinga dramatic interplay between surface and core, guile and authenticity, asthrough schooling novice readers who were new to the novelistic form itself.In the Tagalog preface, for instance, Bustamante declined to summarize themessage of the novel, and instead deploys a humble metaphor in an effort toinculcate metadiscursive alertness in his readers: “this story may be likenedto a lime. No matter what the size, fragrance, or smoothness of the fruit, youcan’t use its juice until you squeeze it out. So if the reader or listener wantsto get at the juice here in the story, it’s really up to them. . . My heartfeltadvice . . . to my beloved tagalogs is not to skip around in this story, as istheir habit when reading books; because if so, they will go astray. For just asin a speech, where it is necessary to listen to each part in order to weigh itssignificance and to arrive at the truth, so it is with this story” (p. 2). Far fromplacing faith in the seamless transmission of authorial intention to nativereaders, Bustamante thus displayed his familiarity with indio reading practices,as well as his awareness of the potential for words addressed to a native publicto be subverted.Turning now to the novel itself, two examples must suffice to illustrate the

significance it places upon language and dissemination, two themes whosecentral importance to the elaboration of publicity in this context has alreadybeen shown. Tellingly, Si Tandang Basio Macunat is a fable about themisuse of linguistic capital, through which all other kinds of capital—monetary,social, and moral—are lost. The critical theme of Castilian’s linguistic capitalamongst Filipinos is first raised in the book’s initial and pivotal scene. Ident-ified only as a priest, the unnamed narrator visits the locality of Tanay(where Bustamante had served as parish priest), and strikes up a friendshipwith the elderly indio Basio Macunat. As a compliment to Basio, a hardwork-ing peasant, the narrator guilelessly observes that it is a pity the indio never


learned to speak Castilian, otherwise he might have earned a salary andachieved a higher status for his family instead of eking out a humble existenceon the land (p. 6). Basio likens Castilian-speaking indios to dressed-upmonkeys, and vehemently utters the notorious words, “Separate the indiofrom his carabau and he will only commit offence against God and theKing” (p. 16). In a request that marks the transmission of narrative authorityfrom priest to indio, the surprised narrator asks Basio to explain himself. Bring-ing forth from an old trunk a manuscript penned nearly fifty years previously byhis father Antonio, Basio proceeds to read it aloud. As we have seen, the manu-script chronicles the ruin of the local Baticot family as a result of misplacedambitions. The amiable but weak Proper (Prospero) goes to Manila notwith-standing the sound instincts of his sister Pili; Proper becomes dandified,sinks into a dissolute life of gambling and womanizing; and dies violently inprison. Among his wretched family members, it is Pili, the virtuous sister,who foresaw the coming tragedy but was powerless to prevent it, who dieslast and suffers most.

Throughout this maudlin object lesson regarding the exogenous blandish-ments of Manila, the social languages associated with the milieus of countryand city are used to depict the tensions and ruptures caused by inappropriateHispanization. On the one hand, the kastila (Castilian) influence in nativespeech seems to index a successful and benevolent colonial presence. Thus,old Basio’s speech becomes suffused with Spanish loan words when hedescribes the domestic routines of his childhood: “rising when it was stilldark, we would give thanks to God, go to church if there was an early mass,and go off to work, coming back for a brief almuerzo at a las nueve, and inthe evening we would pray the Rosary without falla. . . .” (p. 12).20 Yet the pre-sence of Castilian in Tagalog—this time in narrative speech rather than in thevoices of characters—can also take on a jarring yet arresting power.

In the scene where a dandified Proper returns to Tanay on his first visit homefrom Manila, Proper’s appearance—described with a clutch of Castiliannouns—stirs the excitement of onlookers, and even provokes an interjectionfrom the indio author, as though Antonio found himself overcome by thescene while reading it aloud (p. 64). The device of the indio narrator offersseveral comic possibilities, some of which are exploited in his deadpan recount-ing of Proper’s attempts to “speak kastila” to the horses in Tanay. The urbanereader, at a social remove from the rustic Antonio, might appreciate the vainfoolishness being ascribed to Proper, while also recognizing his equestriancommands as part of the everyday local argot of Manila. In another passage,

20 Indeed, in the original edition of Basio Macunat, Castilian words appear in italics, as thoughdenoting the shaping of native rhythms by a benevolent but distinctively external influence. Thisconvention was dropped in the recent edition published by the University of the Philippinesunder the editorship of Virgilio S. Almario (1996).


Basio criticizes those “newly-trained teachers from what they call ‘normal’schools . . .who wear frock coats or whatever they’re called and give them-selves the airs of barrio captains or even priests, be they just as dark-skinnedas me” (p. 15). He wistfully recalls the strict but conscientious schoolteacherof his youth, who was widely respected and loved even though he did notspeak a word of Castilian. In scenes such as this, Castilian is depicted as a par-tially domesticated language of social power and distinction—quite unlikeCapitan Juan, where Castilian, symbolizing language in its purest form,stands for the power of translation.If Capitan Juan conjured publicity as the clandestine circulation of anon-

ymous political incitements, in Basio Macunat, the dangers of disseminationcarry forth into the domestic sphere. Although we do not find in BasioMacunat the motif of public assembly that was so prominent in CapitanJuan, the imaginary21 of the public as a domain of circulating cultural formssuffuses the story-world of the book, permeating the gambling-houses Properfrequents, the airs of courtship he adopts, the fashions he imitates, and theletters he writes home. Significantly, one of the noteworthy themes of thebook concerns how the mediation of personal relations by letter-writing turnsintimates and kin into strangers. In this regard, Pili comes to stand in for theideal reader, for she is the only character in the novel who is not deceived bypomp and surface appearances. Her discernment reveals itself upon thearrival of Proper’s first letter home from Manila. Written in a breezy and elev-ated style, the letter delights his family members and upgrades their status (itaddresses them as Don, Dona, and Senorita). Only Pili—who knows how tosqueeze the juice from the lime, that is, to read between the lines—is left heart-sick, having detected signs of Proper’s transformed inner state from subtle cuesin his choice of words and sentiment (p. 45). Face-to-face relations, it seems,are always preferable to written discourse, and even Antonio’s blamelessmanuscript must lie hidden in a trunk for fifty years before it can be broughtinto circulation at a moment of social rupture to mend the breach betweenBasio and the narrator. Even then, it is not read privately but out loud, asthough foreshadowing the future acts of collective reading in which Busta-mante imagined his own work becoming disseminated.If there is a constitutive irony within friar propaganda texts, it lies in their

nature as publicly oriented texts that seek to warn indios of the dangers of pub-licity. While responding to highly particular political circumstances and bearingvery distinct rhetorical ambitions, Capitan Juan and Basio Macunat display

21 While Michael Warner implies an elective affinity between publicness and modernity, CharlesTaylor appears to go further in designating the public sphere as one of three “modern social ima-ginaries” (2002). An assessment of the precise characteristics of colonial modernity in thePhilippines is behind the scope of this article. Here, I am primarily concerned with how claimsregarding modernity were advanced in the course of efforts to undercut as well as to defend theposition of the friars in the colony’s administration.


several instructive commonalities as reflexive efforts to intervene in the prom-ises and dangers associated with publicity itself. As pragmatic interventionswithin a hostile public milieu in which the friars increasingly found themselvespositioned as anachronisms, both works embody a complex stance comprisingelements of concession and intransigence. Departing from the establishedgenres and conventions of friar writing, these works portrayed for the firsttime on the printed page a world in which Filipinos were claiming the protec-tions of a Liberal Spanish Constitution and crowding into elite professions. Atthe same time, they reiterated and helped to sediment ethnological andsentimental stereotypes of the indio population as puerile and volatile. Inaddition, both works utilized the same ideologically saturated rhetorical struc-ture, each attempting to model the perfect transmission of delegated authoritythrough the voice of a native narrator, as if issuing peninsular critics a pledge onbehalf of the regular clergy to resolve the challenges posed by the agency of thecolonized.

A key aspect of this strategy of persuasion lay in effacing those sections ofthe colonized population characterized by hybrid ancestry and significant socialand symbolic capital, thus ideologically masking the true nature and source ofthe challenge to friar power. Even so, these texts could not help but announcethe presence of the proto-national bourgeoisie, as eavesdroppers whose trouble-some presence could neither be forgotten nor entirely repressed by the act ofwriting. In works like Capitan Juan and Basio Macunat, friar authors reiteratedthe functions of text regulation and linguistic gate keeping that were historicallycentral to the construction of their own hegemony. Yet the very fact that theyfelt the need to do so revealed that by the late nineteenth century the ranksof the colonized included challengers who had already proved themselvesadept at subverting those very forms of regulation. In the very act of enteringthe public arena to do battle, friar authors therefore conceded an importantvictory to their opponents.

C O N C L U S I O N : T H E S P E C T R A L I T Y O F P U B L I C S

Drawing its impetus from calls by Frederick Cooper and Ann Stoler to attend tothe non-monolithic and trans-continental nature of colonial projects, this essayhas sought to situate the Philippine colonial public sphere within the “tensionsof empire” (1997) that, by the late nineteenth century, had gathered within theheterogeneous force field comprising the regular clergy, peninsular Liberals,and a burgeoning group of hybrid local elites. Joining an internalist readingof two friar texts from the nineteenth-century Philippines to an account oftheir layered political and cultural contexts, I have shown that when friarauthors disseminated images of an indio public they advanced both aself-serving construction as well as an unintended foundation for the effortsof Philippine nationalists to summon a differently construed national publicinto existence.


For the most part, this study has bracketed the question of friar propaganda’sbroader impact, choosing instead to concentrate upon its ideological andrhetorical formation. In order to leave readers something with which toponder the elusive nature of publics themselves, let me therefore close with amorsel of intriguing information regarding the reception of Capitan Juan invarious quarters of the colony. Some years following the Spanish-AmericanWar’s fateful culmination and the ceding of the archipelago to the UnitedStates of America, the publication of a slim volume annotated by W. E.Retana, the foremost bibliographer of the Philippines, offered peninsularreaders a rare glimpse into the deliberations of the (now long-defunct) Commit-tee of Censors (1908a). These extracts from the minutes of the Committee’smeetings between 1869 and 1874, together with Retana’s commentary,conjure up a near-farcical milieu of pettifogging paranoia and philistinism,which banned a treatise on Gibraltar’s geography for treating a deluge as anatural event rather than an act of God (pp. 5–6), and even threatened tosubject the beloved Don Quixote to bowdlerization (pp. 12–13).Deliberations over the fate of Capitan Juan stretched over three sessions. At

the first meeting, the committee complimented the book for filling an importantvoid and recommended that it be freely circulated in the colony (p. 37). Yet atits very next meeting the committee suspended its decision, deferring to thecivil government’s concerns that the book might cause offense and unrest(ibid.) Revisiting the matter for the third time a month later, the committeere-approved Capitan Juan, but only for limited circulation among the religiouscorporations (p. 39). Dwelling on the case in his conclusion, Retana excoriatedthe misplaced colonial priorities that left works of genuine merit to molder inwarehouses while allowing the regular clergy to self-publish and distributequantities of “puerile” works (pp. 39–40). For his part, he averred, “sinceGaspar de San Agustin, another Augustinian, wrote his diatribe againstthe indios, nothing quite so depressing has been written until Capitan Juan”(1908a: 37).Intent on his critique of the colonial censorship regime, Retana did not

comment on the specter of public mobilization that kept Capitan Juan out ofthe hands of its target audience. Readers will, however, appreciate a certainpoetic irony in the fact that a book intended to instruct indios of the dangersof political consortium itself seems to have precipitated public mobilization,or, at least, the potent fear of its occurrence. It would appear that rumor hadtransformed Herrero’s book into a veritable specter of itself, endowing itwith an uncanny (if counterproductive) efficacy that did not require it to beactually circulated and read. Also noteworthy here is the migration of themotif of public mobilization from the historical fact of the Cavite Mutinyinto the fictional world of Capitan Juan and back into the suggestive circum-stances of the book’s historical reception. This migration alerts us to a differentbut no less spectral aspect of publicity: the difficulty of completely dissociating


actual instances of public mobilization from fantasized, fictionalized, andfeared ones.22 It is worth pondering whether the ambiguous actuality of thepublic that manifests itself with respect to Capitan Juan amounts to a locally-specific effect of colonial paranoia, or, alternatively, if it exemplifies the uncer-tain ontology of all publics.

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Rhetorical Indios: Propagandists and Their Publics in the Spanish Philippines

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