Charting the ‘History of the Burgis’

This Week’s Winner

Jun Rabeje teaches sociology and Philippine history at San Sebastian College-Recoletos in Manila. He is a husband and a father to two girls. Aside from reading paperbacks and a few special-interest magazines, his hobbies include playing the guitar and pick-up basketball with friends.

If I remember correctly, it was in a ‘70s bubblegum song where I first heard the word burgis. I dismissed it then as one of those meaningless expressions that every generation comes up with and later fades into obscurity. I was more than mildly surprised therefore when I discovered the real meaning of the term while casually browsing through a world history textbook on the subject of feudal Europe in high school. Upon coming across the term "bourgeois," I assumed that it is where our burgis came from. Today, when discussing social stratification in my sociology class, I use the easier-to-pronounce burgis after telling my students about the word’s French origins

Poverty prevented me from going to college right after high school graduation. It was the year after EDSA and Lean Alejandro was about to get killed. Suddenly free from education, I seriously began devouring every half-decent book I could get hold of. That’s how I got introduced to Karl Marx – by sheer chance and through a second-hand history textbook that was falling apart. Painfully aware that my family belonged to the marginalized sector, I found myself agreeing with Marx’s interpretation of history as the continuing drama of class struggles. Inevitably, I began identifying the bourgeois as the antagonists of history. It was also about this time that I began seriously reading history, figuring that maybe I could build a career out of this interest. It seemed perfectly natural for me then that my decision to study history coincided with my teenage flirtation with Marx and utopian theories. And while all of this was happening, John Lennon’s Mind Games was blaring from the cassette player

Fortuitously, though I tried to ignore it at first, I discovered in myself a trace of conservatism some years later. I really haven’t changed that much, I said to myself. Or have I? It can’t be, I reasoned, for wasn’t it just a few years ago when I started quoting from Marx and Conrado de Quiros? Wasn’t it just 1991 and I was collecting newspaper clippings about the US military bases issue and just about every controversy that fired up my anger? Wasn’t it just 1992 and I was a left-of-center liberal mouthing off against fascists in the military and the national police and elitists in civil government? To this day, the memories are still vivid but I am sure that a transformation has indeed taken place. I still feel righteous indignation over perceived social injustices and still feel that the masses are being screwed by policies perpetuated by the country’s oligarchic leadership. I have resigned myself, however, to the fact that something had been irretrievably wrested from the battlefield of my psyche and from its debris evolved a more benign perspective of history and even life itself.

In retrospect, the move from one part of the political continuum to another was steady and irrevocable. Ironically, I think the transformation also began in 1991, coinciding with this newfound interest with American standards like George and Ira Gershwin’s Someone to Watch Over Me and Billy Strayhorn’s Lush Life. At about this time, I also discovered Western classical literature and thoroughly relished Emily Bronté’s Wuthering Heights as much as Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov. Sleepless in Seattle and Sommersby were the films to see and I got my first taste of the stage in Repertory Philippines’ Don’t Dress For Dinner. Finally in 1994, one of the first things I did after finding a little surplus of funds from my first teaching job was to secure a Time magazine subscription. Without realizing it at that time, I have become a burgis

It was almost serendipitous therefore when I chanced upon Mariel Francisco and Fe Maria Arriola’s History of the Burgis. I was with some classmates in a graduate school class when I began reading a few borrowed photocopied pages when halfway through the prologue, I half-seriously blurted, "Burgis din pala ako!" A few minutes of introspection later led me to the resigned acceptance that, "Oo, burgis na nga talaga ako."

But who is the burgis really? Can we construct a profile of a typical early 21st century Pinoy burgis? Is it even necessary for this inchoate group to assert its presence in a more forceful manner and directly influence contemporary history? Or as A.R. Samson asked in the quotation found at the beginning of that prologue: Should the burgis get involved in politics or should it simply go on with its life and ask not to be bothered?

In History of the Burgis, Francisco and Arriola claimed that a good number of the most influential personalities in our history belonged to this social class. According to the authors, our socio-political history – including the events of 1896 and 1986 – was burgis in motivation if not in direction. Even Andres Bonifacio was Burgis, they say. This statement is a clear departure from traditional textbook instruction. Two of the country’s most widely read historians, Teodoro Agoncillo and Gregorio Zaide, were quite emphatic about the place of Bonifacio in the social strata of his time. Even more insistent were Reynaldo Ileto and Renato Constantino, whose "history from below" proposition argues for the far from insignificant role of the masses in the evolution of the Philippine state.

Francisco and Arriola argued though that the Supremo was a self-made burgis or at the very least, an urbanized indio. For instance, they allege, how else would you call a person from the late 1800s whose collection of books included Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables and a biography of the lives of the American Presidents? The same is true, they say, of the university-educated Emilio Jacinto and Apolinario Mabini. The disturbing implication here is that rising above one’s social class is akin to political advancement and being attuned to the challenges of leadership. Is this saying then that revolutionary leaders like Hermano Pule and Macario Sakay did not have a ghost of a chance at becoming paragons of patriotic virtue because of their inability to go beyond the threshold dividing the parochial and the bourgeois? In more contentious terms, is labeling Bonifacio a burgis tantamount to robbing the masa of its foremost figurehead and source of inspiration? I may have misread some vital points here but I honestly feel that these are valid questions

Still, students of Philippine social history cannot afford to ignore what Francisco and Arriola have to say. An important achievement, I think, is that they were able to trace a linear progression which showed how the present social elite got to where they are through shrewdness and unbelievable gall in manipulating both the colonial masters and the unsuspecting masses. More importantly, it showed how the burgis can rise beyond their petty disagreements to assume the role of leadership, though sometimes with deep reservation.

I acknowledged my burgis preferences halfway through this paper. The admission gave me the distinct feeling of being a part of a whole; a cog in a machine. (Well, a screw perhaps, but functioning nonetheless.) Labeling does have its uses, a social utility, even. But it shouldn’t stop there; citizens after all, are only as good as their contribution to society. In the end, it is not membership in a particular social class, which determines one’s place in the collective story of the nation. The real measure of a person’s worth is whether one has lived up to the potential that every human person has in improving the lives of those he shares existence with, and ultimately, how much of oneself that person is willing to sacrifice in order to actualize his vision of the future