The other Spain

In a recent posting in Facebook, I wrote “something strange was happening”. It was provoked by the surge of interest in football as the national sport for the Philippines and the victories of the Filipino team, Ashkals in the Suzuki Cup Tournament. Football is the traditional sport of Europeans and was passed on to us through Spain. One of the greatest football players was Spanish-Filipino, an Ashkal, a mongrel named Paulino Alcantara. I was soon to learn the revival was not only about sports.

Recently, I was also led to a group of young Filipinos in Facebook who have banded themselves together into a group called The CORRECT Movement. By chance I read an essay written by one of them, Orion Perez Dumdum: Shift in sport, shift in government. I found their discussions stimulating especially their ideas on constitutional reform.

One idea that came to the fore was that (contrary to received “wisdom”), we were more influenced by Spain than we have ever acknowledged. And that goes also for our desire to shift to parliamentary federalist government. It is not a new idea.

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Indeed it was not just the Philippines that gained from Spain’s radical politics (radical then) but many other countries and peoples at the time.

Leon Ma. Guerrero said that the Philippine Revolution was made in Spain. Spain herself was an older battlefield for the same ideas. David Guerrero recently published his writings in an anthology entitled LMG.

“It was in Spain” that my perdition came,” Rizal said. Not enough has been done to bring this idea to the public mind in the Philippines. We think only of one Spain — the Spain in the Philippines captured in his books Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo.

The anniversary of Rizal’s execution last December 30 was a good occasion for this column to find out more about the other Spain. If it was Spain in the Philippines that executed our national hero, it was Spain in Spain that became a home for our heroes to imbibe ideas of good government. It was a parliamentary system of government. 

The National Historical Institute published a book in 1995, Manuel Sarkisyanz’s Rizal and Republican Spain that tells us why. 

“Through his vigorous objectivity and dispassionate attitude toward his sources, Professor Sarkasyanz is able to present a new conceptual approach in his study based on the interplay between two opposing historical forces at work — liberalism vs. traditionalism — in the 19th century and the interaction between the two Spains — Rizal’s Spain and Rizal’s Spanish Philippines,” writes Serafin D. Quiason who was chairman and executive director of the NHI at the time when the book was published.

It would be unfortunate if the book were to be left unread and its ideas unknown to Filipino reformers. Most of us know only about the writings of our national hero against “Spanish Philippines”.  

“The great merit of Professor Sarkisyanz’ study is that it calls not only for a re-thinking of Jose Rizal and his political ideas, but also for a re-interpretation of Philippine history in the light of the continuity of the “democratic Republican” tradition in Spain since (1812),” adds Quiason.

It was a watershed year in Spain’s history because of the Cadiz Constitution of 1812. I never heard of it during my entire time at school and I suppose it would also be true of Filipino students today. That is a pity.

The Cadiz Constitution of 1812 was not just for the enlightenment of Spaniards. It was relevant, indeed important to us because the Spanish government at the time issued a decree “granting all its colonies” representation as provinces in the Spanish Cortes through deputies chosen by the various capital cities.”

Governor General Manuel Gonzales Aguilar called for an election in Manila for a representative for the Philippines. It was Don Ventura de los Reyes who won that election. A son of poor Ilocano parents, he took part in the Ilocos revolt led by Diego Silang in 1762. Later he prospered in the vegetable and indigo business and became a wealthy merchant by the time he was voted as Philippine representative to the Spanish Parliament (Cortes).

De los Reyes did not make it for the opening sessions of the Spanish Parliament in September 24, 1810.  Instead, two deputies, Pedro Perez de Tagle and Dr. Jose Manuel Couto represented him. The 70-year-old De los Reyes did get to Spain in time to be one of the signatories to the Cadiz Constitution of 1812 but the news on the new constitution to govern Spain and her colonies reached Manila only after a year when it was enforced.

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So it is not so strange after all if we revert back to a time that shaped the ideas on governance of our heroes and reformists. The task is to resurrect the good that we can from history’s debris that Spain was a country of executioners and corrupt friars. It was and it wasn’t. As everything in this world, Spain’s colonization of the Philippines may have had its darkness but it also had its silver lining. We must seize this silver lining. It was because of this other Spain that we eventually became Asia’s first constitutional republic.

It will not be an easy task because we have been used to the idea of the Spanish in the Philippines and too little about “Rizal’s Spain”. I bought the Sarkisyanz book on Rizal and Republican Spain in 1995, the year it was published but I never did get around to read it until today because of my advocacy for constitutional reform.

The book’s cover looks forbidding. It can do with a more modernized version. It has the picture of the Philippine flag and Jose Rizal’ on one side joined by the Spanish flag and the picture of Francisco Pi y Margall on the other.

For those like me who had not had the education of Rizal’s Spain I was astonished to know that Pi y Margall was in fact a true to life friend of Rizal. It shows how close our national hero had been to the great reformist movement in Spain. Pi Y Margall was president of the short-lived Spanish Republic of 1873. He was a strong advocate of autonomy for Spain’s remaining colonies and was working for a federalist structure when the republic was put down.

As intellectuals in politics Rizal was to the Philippines what Pi y Margall was to Spain writes Sarkisyanz. We have to know what that Spain was all about that Rizal wanted so much for the Philippines.