Recurring disputes within the Spanish community in the Philippines among the so-called peninsulares (Spaniards born in Spain) and the insulares (‘insulars’: the creoles and the mestizos of Spanish origin born in the islands) had two distinctive features during the last two decades of the nineteenth century. On the one hand, the increasing number of Spanish immigrants to the Philippines intensified rivalries. On the other, the immigrants’ extensive use of malleable racialist theories to vindicate their role in the Philippines extended beyond the Spanish community. Although this racial theorising was initially addressed to a Spanish audience, it led to impassioned local disputes with the ilustrados, the proto-nationalist group of urban and cosmopolitan Filipinos.Footnote 1
This article thus considers late nineteenth century racial theories in relation to rivalries within the Spanish community, which were to play a role in the ending of Spain's colonisation of the Philippines. As such this study seeks to contribute to the literature on the Philippines by emphasising the importance of racialism in these historical processes. The role of these disputes as part of the history of the Spanish community of the Philippines has received little historiographical attention. Studies of this community have focused mostly on missionaries, their internal rivalries, and their struggles against the hacenderos. Recently, attention has expanded to the whole of the community, covering also the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.Footnote 2 The leadership, internal diversity and connections of this settler community with the rest of Philippine society via creoles, mestizos and the many Filipinos who considered themselves to be Spanish, however, and the processes of inclusion and exclusion, need more attention, particularly in the wake of Jean Taylor's and Ann Stoler's studies on the Dutch East Indies and French Indochina.Footnote 3
The impact of racial ideas on the end of Spanish colonisation in the Philippines also demands further research. There is a broader discussion about the role of the reforms set forth by the Madrid administration to renovate colonisation in the Philippines. While some scholars dismiss these changes as mere ‘neo-mercantile forces’, others argue for their significance.Footnote 4 Christopher Schmidt-Nowara, for instance, with reference to the combined governance of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines, argues that these changes represented ‘a new colonial project without historical precedence in the history of Spanish colonialism’.Footnote 5 Yet the legitimacy granted to these colonial reforms by racial theories has not received much attention, especially in Spanish language scholarship. This neglect has had various consequences and has prompted the criticism of under-theorisation.Footnote 6 With regard to the Philippines, however, accusations of the ‘racism’ of the administration and of a range of individuals from the conservative pro-friar Wenceslao Retana to the progressive liberal Pablo Feced (also known as Quioquiap), are simplistic.Footnote 7 Research questions have been limited to the reasons behind the emergence of extreme racism in certain texts, and the debate generally has been acrimonious and lacking in theoretical innovation.Footnote 8
Nor has the impact of racial thought on the Philippine Revolution of 1896–98 received much attention. Exceptions include the work of Filomeno V. Aguilar, who emphasises the influence of new racist ideas on the growing Philippine national consciousness. Aguilar argues that the ilustrados ‘had assimilated the European concept of civilization, modernity, and its racial hierarchy’.Footnote 9 John D. Blanco merges racialism with other social developments, noting the originality of the ‘interface’ that the Filipino national leader, José Rizal, ‘establishes between scientific and religious understandings of enlightenment, which allowed folk Christianity to absorb and reinterpret the colonial legacy’.Footnote 10
This article analyses the role of racial ideas in intra-Spanish disputes in the late nineteenth century Philippines by comparing the accounts produced by the well-known contemporary authors, Francisco Cañamaque y Jiménez (Gaucín, Málaga, 1851–91) and Pablo Feced y Temprano (Aliaga, Teruel, 1834–1900), and to a lesser extent, Vicente Barrantes Moreno (Badajoz, 1829–98). Cañamaque and Feced were opinion-makers among the Spanish emigrants. Their writings appear to have provoked strong allegiances and disputes, both in Spain and within the Spanish community in the Philippines. Barrantes worked at the Ministerio de Ultramar (Overseas Ministry) and at the Civil Government in Manila (1866–69), and was elected as a deputy in the Cortes (1851–63). Rizal referred to him as the worst example of a Spanish official. These authors were regularly attacked in the main publication of Filipinos in Spain at this time, La Solidaridad.Footnote 11
My argument is that the malleable and contingent use of racial ideas in these writings can be read from two perspectives. First, they can be approached as indicators of profound changes in the internal balances of the Spanish settler community and its discourses of difference. Second, they can be understood as aspects that played in favour of the anticolonial movement, contributing both to reinvigorate the ilustrados’ rejection of Spanish rule and to stimulate adherence to the anticolonial cause of other members of the wider Spanish community (mestizos, creoles and of course, peninsulares) who, horrified at their leaders’ drifting radicalisation, came to accept the idea that Spanish rule in the Archipelago was coming to an end. This article uses the term ‘peninsulares’, as well as emigrants and settlers, depending on the context, and ‘insulares’ to refer both to the small creole population and to the wider group of Spanish mestizos. The text first analyses the changing views on ‘race’ in the Philippines during the Spanish period. It then turns to the Spanish migrants’ expectations, and to the evolution of supremacist discourses in the works of Cañamaque, Feced and Barrantes. Finally, the article describes the appropriation, circulation, and impact of their texts in the Philippines, in an attempt to evaluate parallels with the Cuban independence process.
Context of Spanish racialism
Racialism as a social construction around the human body had long met with obstacles in the Hispanic world. Catholicism, the main global vision for understanding this world, had little interest in classifying populations using biological information, and within each society, the importance of ‘race’, ‘lineage’, and ‘caste’ changed throughout time and space, as had considerations of ‘blood’. The Philippines is an example of a site in which the term ‘race’ was used in divergent ways. In Spain, biological information was used to stigmatise specific groups and entire populations. The term ‘raça’, which appears in the first Spanish language dictionaries, had a twofold meaning as ‘sunbeam’ as well as ‘defective textile’ — something with irregularities which permit sunlight to pass through. From tailoring jargon, raça came to mean a stain, or fault (mácula), that could be transmitted to descendants and provided a general framework for punishing biological heterodoxy. Many institutions restricted access to high positions according to this framework, demanding certificates under the so-called limpieza de sangre, the blood purity laws.Footnote 12 Over time, the Spanish notion of the transmission of ‘impurities’ through lineage lost credibility, and racial theories imported from outside of Spain gained prominence. Environmental or territorial explanations of variations in human behaviour rose and declined, the blood purity laws disappeared, and different theories around the human body gained popularity.Footnote 13
In the Spanish Empire, the context for racialism was different. The human body barely featured among justifications for conquest. The Spanish monarchy, like the Portuguese, had historically legitimised its conquests through dynastic iterations of a political theology. Furthermore, there was a lower likelihood of inheriting impurities through undesirable strains of blood in the colonies than on the Iberian Peninsula, partly because the restrictions on the emigration of Jews and conversos (those whose ancestors had converted to Christianity) offered little space for genealogical references. In fact, the first systematic classification of world populations to emerge in Spain, written by the Jesuit José de Acosta in 1590, was organised according to social and cultural information, such as the existence of calendars or writing systems, and did not engage in comparisons of physical characteristics.
The human body, however, fulfilled a role in establishing hierarchies inside the colonial societies of Latin America and the Philippines, although the rankings changed not only between territories but over time, and administrative procedures allowed changes in classification for those able to afford it.Footnote 14 Social hierarchy was legitimised by economic status and the level of ‘Hispanisation’, but lineage, blood, and phenotype became increasingly prominent, and legal and social constructs overlapped with biological constructs to create what Max Hering has defined as a ‘pigmentocracy’.Footnote 15 The Christian worldview left its mark on ‘race’, which tended to be amalgamated with other typically religious notions relating mainly to blood, although the blend was different in each territory.
Nineteenth-century liberalism encouraged the subordination of the colonies to the population of the metropolis, and biological determinism appeared in Spanish discourses on human difference, as in other countries. The constitutions drafted in this period demonstrate this. The initial drafts of the first constitution of Spain promised to unite every Spaniard in the Americas and in Europe under the same government, but this egalitarian promise was never fulfilled and the final text of the 1812 Cádiz Consitution did not include it. The Spanish Constitution of 1837 followed the example of other European metropolises in regard to their colonies by representing them as Spain's ‘possessions’, and excluding them from political rights. Alongside this disappearance of early-modern conceptions, the first references to the human body appeared.Footnote 16 During the 1876 Restoration Constitution, again under the Bourbon dynasty, only the Caribbean colonies gained representation in the Spanish Cortes.
The Philippine Islands also maintained a peculiar relationship with ‘race’, especially because of the role played by Chinese settlers. Peninsular Spaniards were theoretically at the top of the hierarchy, followed by the criollos (creoles) and mestizos, with a middle rank occupied by the Christianised native population, and the lowest positions occupied by the frontier ‘savages’ and non-European settlers such as Africans and Chinese.Footnote 17 However, the difficulties associated with using native labour in the Hacienda system and missionary protests limited the arrival of lay migrants. The resulting scarcity of peninsular Spaniards allowed the social rise of the creoles — who were also scarce — and of the Spanish mestizos. Footnote 18 The status of the Chinese minority rose and fell, partly with the level of ‘Hispanisation’ of its own mestizo population, which was more numerous than that of the Spanish mestizos, and according to the intensity of migratory flows.Footnote 19 Political events occasionally allowed mestizos to gain pre-eminence, as Ruth de Llobet has pointed out. The oscillations and unfulfilled promises during the drafting of the 1812 Cádiz Constitution did not provoke moves toward independence as they did in Latin America, but political awareness grew amongst Chinese mestizos and the native elite, who gradually assumed the political agency once enjoyed by the creoles. This was partly thanks to the Mexican War of Independence (1810–21), which held more interest for the Chinese mestizos and native elite than it did for the Spanish creoles.Footnote 20 Finally, the fate of the Philippines diverged from that of Cuba and Puerto Rico. While the Constitution of 1837 treated all colonies equally, the 1876 Constitution left the Philippines without representation. The never-proclaimed Federal Constitution of the First Spanish Republic, written three years earlier, gives a clue to understanding this: the Philippines together with the island of Fernando Poo (Bioko, part of present-day Equatorial Guinea), were described as territories which ‘as they progress may be elevated to States by public authorities’.Footnote 21 In some respects, the Spanish Constitution of 1873 was more progressive than the Constitution of 1876. However, both considered the Philippines as a colony, similar to the African territories; both the Spanish left and the right subscribed to this common colonialist framework.
Racialism evolved dramatically during the last decades of the nineteenth century, when biological determinism became dominant. Beginning with the study of skulls, the human body was increasingly understood and laboratories and researchers produced more and more quantifiable data that led many to view the superiority of the ‘white race’ as scientific truth. These conclusions were applied to the understanding of the whole. Social Darwinism anticipated natural selection amongst nations, especially through the mechanism of war. Its theorists divided the world into ‘vital nations’ — those most likely to survive — and those that were not, concluding that the superiority of ‘white’ societies would be everlasting.
Spaniards and their government were captivated by these new epistemologies. These ‘scientific’ advances were used by anti-clericals to undermine Church teachings, but, in fact, many Catholics accepted these ideas, as shown by the writings of the main conservative leader during the post-1868 Restoration, Antonio Cánovas del Castillo. Cánovas accepted Social Darwinism to a large extent, including the idea that national vitality was to be demonstrated through war.Footnote 22
Supremacist narratives of the new Eldorado
Amid this national identity crisis, poverty and expectations of personal betterment led many Spaniards to migrate, including to the Philippine Islands, where so few had travelled before. The demographic revolution, brought about by the lowering of the mortality rate through sanitary improvements, and the revolution in sea transportation, led to a ‘mass migration’ from the Iberian Peninsula.Footnote 23 Between 1882 and 1890, the number of emigrants doubled, and then increased a further 25 per cent in the following decade.Footnote 24 Many settled in Spanish colonies, mainly in Cuba, where nearly 100,000 people are said to have arrived between 1882 and 1892.Footnote 25 There is no comprehensive study on the growth of the Spanish population in the Philippines and a concrete figure is hard to establish, however. Comparison of the censuses of 1876 and 1894 shows similar patterns. Religious personnel doubled in this period, and the military (comprising army, navy, customs officials, civil guards, and veteran guards) increased by some 25 per cent, while there is no clear data on the increase in the number of other peninsulares.Footnote 26
Social life within the Spanish communities in the Philippines changed as a consequence of this wave of migration. From the start of the nineteenth century, a number of disputes and alliances had revealed the discontent prevailing among the creoles and their readiness to ally with non-white elites against the government. These included elections during the constitutional periods of 1813–14 and 1820–23, the Palmero conspiracy in 1828 studied by Ruth de Llobet,Footnote 27 and the infamous executions of three priests in 1872. At the end of the century, the growing number of lower-class Spaniards in the Philippines began to erode the ascendancy of the Spanish groups. Migration to the Philippines enabled those considered by many in Spain as ‘basket-cases’ to inhabit the top of the colonial hierarchy; these newcomers adjusted their self-perceptions accordingly.
The Spanish community in the Philippines developed along with its own peculiarities. In the Caribbean, centuries of emigration left little space for new settlers, and in Cuba peasants from impoverished origins became salaried employees but did not rise to the apex of society.Footnote 28 Emigration to the Philippines required significant funds, however, which meant that the settlers were primarily from the northern regions of the Iberian Peninsula, such as Asturias-Santander, the Basque Country and Catalonia, with their better education rates, as indicated by the American census of 1903.Footnote 29 These migrants perceived the Philippines as a site with exceptional economic potential, like Africa; and unlike Cuba, its government had no debt. No serious threats to Spanish colonisation loomed on the horizon. Most importantly, however, the very small community of creole insulares were unlikely to offer strong resistance to the peninsulares achieving their ambitions in the islands. Their dreams were boundless.
The texts that probably best define the mix of national frustration, personal ambitions, and intra-Spanish disputes at the turn of the century are those of Francisco Cañamaque and Pablo Feced. The impact of Cañamaque's Recuerdos de Filipinas (Memories of the Philippines) is reflected both by its banning by the Spanish Governor of Manila and by his subsequent writings on the Philippines: a second volume that had not been announced in the first, a miscellany, and two articles translated into French.Footnote 30 The fame of Feced's Esbozos y pinceladas (Sketches and paintings) has been often cited among Filipino nationalists.Footnote 31 Feced published in two of the main newspapers in Madrid and the Philippines, El Liberal and Diario de Manila. Among the texts that reference his book is a chapter by the famous writer Emilia Pardo Bazán.Footnote 32 Both authors were certainly opinion-makers, but it is difficult to ascertain to what extent their texts represented the ideas of the Spaniards, either in Spain or in the Philippines. Rizal's close friend, Ferdinand Blumentritt, stated that Spanish emigrants tended to follow ‘the comfortable [racist] theories of Quioquiap [Feced] and company’.Footnote 33 It seems Blumentritt is correct, though he did not live in the Philippines, since Feced — as had Cañamaque earlier — expressed the ambitions of many migrants to the Islands, both temporary functionaries and settlers. Feced's publications were widely distributed among foreigners. Barrantes’ El Teatro Tagalo (Tagalog Theatre), on the contrary, was written as a scholarly book.Footnote 34 It may be presumed that Barrantes’ former position as an official in the Philippines garnered some attention among Spanish readers, but most of its impact came from the strong Ilustrado criticism of this book, partly in reaction to its criticisms of José Rizal.Footnote 35
Cañamaque's and Feced's relations with the archipelago and ways of transmitting their narratives to their fellow Spaniards share many characteristics. The texts are of similar structure and length, around 300 pages each, and narrated in brief chapters suitable for publication in periodicals. Both manuscripts were serialised before and after they were published as books. Each narrative is based on personal experience: Cañamaque arrived in the archipelago on the invitation of some friends and returned after performing various roles in the administration (as he writes, without saying anything more about these friends),Footnote 36 while Feced took over one of his elder brother's haciendas in Camarines Sur.Footnote 37 Both maintained intense relations with the Islands upon their return to Spain. Cañamaque discussed Mindanao with the prime minister while serving as a deputy in the Cortes (for Puerto Rico 1881–84 and for Malaga 1886–90), and Feced returned to fight against the Philippine Revolution; Barrantes, too, was a senator (1891–93 and 1896–98).Footnote 38
Cañamaque and Feced made similar observations about lowland Christian Filipinos.Footnote 39 Their styles, however, differed. Cañamaque was prone to using terms related to mystery and irrationality,Footnote 40 whereas Feced, who focused on social defects such as ‘vanity’, ‘alcoholism’, or ‘primitivism’, tended to indulge in physical descriptions.Footnote 41 Such assessments also give us clues to understanding their differences. Cañamaque tended to balance his criticisms by providing comparisons in which Filipinos and Spaniards are presented as having similar faults.Footnote 42 He compares the Filipinos’ tendency toward dealing in contraband, for instance, with similar patterns among the Aragonese and the Andalusians (he was Andalusian himself),Footnote 43 and the religiosity of some Filipinos with that of ‘the pious and ultramontane Spanish’.Footnote 44 Feced, however, does not write of the positive attributes of the FilipinosFootnote 45 and dilutes any positive references — noting, for instance, that sympathy and capacity for enjoyment are traits of the Spanish as well as the Filipino.Footnote 46 Their representations of minorities are scarce, but again show different foci. Cañamaque's descriptions resemble many written earlier, while Feced's tend to introduce new aspects. Cañamaque's descriptions of the highland inhabitants recall the trope of the ‘noble savage’,Footnote 47 but both writers focused on various highlanders’ position towards Spain: Feced opts to focus on their opposition to the ‘civilising’ work of Spain,Footnote 48 while Cañamaque takes the opportunity to lay claim to the Bangsamoros’ Spanish-ness.Footnote 49
The mestizos receive the harshest criticisms from both authors. Their disgust is evident not only in characterisations of their presumptuousness and exaggerated desire to imitate Spaniards, but also on delimitating differences.Footnote 50 Cañamaque accuses the ‘Indian-Spanish mestizos’ (or ‘mesticillos’, a derogatory term) of possessing the worst parts of every group to which they belonged;Footnote 51 uses old tropes of deterioration due to climate;Footnote 52 and describes at length their physical differences compared with both the ‘Indians’ and the peninsulares.Footnote 53 Feced focuses on their supposed idolatry and strives to categorise them by their mixed bloodlines, according to their Chinese or Spanish ancestry.Footnote 54 On immigrants, both authors’ flattering remarks about European settlersFootnote 55 are balanced by their stereotypical denigrations of the Chinese.Footnote 56 Still, Cañamaque boasts of his balanced views and points out some positive aspects of the Chinese.Footnote 57 Feced's criticism of the Chinese follows biological lines and also constructs notions of racial menace, which would be echoed in later ‘yellow peril’ anxieties.Footnote 58
As for the Spanish community, criticisms of the insulares are balanced by praise of the peninsulares. The authors criticise the rule of insulares over the Philippines, mainly because of their presumed conservative stance against progress on the islands, Cañamaque specifying the lack of culture and political radicalism and Feced pointing to the practice of patronage and neglect of the Spanish poor.Footnote 59 Their main criticisms fell on the creoles of Manila, whereas both tended to praise the residents of the provinces.Footnote 60 Cañamaque and Feced concur in pointing to the peninsulares as the great hope of the archipelago. The former asserted that new settlers would elevate the Filipinos to a position ‘alongside the richest and happiest peoples of the earth’.Footnote 61 They would receive ‘utterly, and forever, the light of civilisation, no less fecund and beautiful than the light of the heavens’.Footnote 62 Feced is still more elated: the peninsulares were ‘the salvational currents of emigration’ and his descriptions are rife with millenarian terms like ‘redemption’ and extravagant phrases such as ‘eternal Christ of those Lazaruses sleeping in the jungle’.Footnote 63 Friars, while also peninsulares, belonged to an institution Cañamaque and Feced opposed, but they both showed sympathies for monks of lowly social provenance. Feced goes further, praising their patriotism and their openness and calling his readers to imitate their achievements.Footnote 64
Cañamaque and Feced offer slightly different proposals for the Philippines’ future, although both advocate reforms.Footnote 65 They defend the imitation of European examples, Feced most radically (‘the Colonies for the Metropole, the Anglo-Saxons say; the Metropole for the Colonies we say!’) and write of the need to overcome the obstacles of restrictive legislation and Chinese competition.Footnote 66 Beyond this, Cañamaque proposes including updating and reforming the so-called Leyes de Indias (Laws of the Indies), the legislation decreed at the start of colonisation in order to regulate both society and economy.Footnote 67 Yet Feced sees nothing useful in these laws, sneering at ‘our soft and paternal Leyes de Indias’ that would allow an easier life in what he called ‘the land of Cockaigne’ (tierra de jauja).Footnote 68 He also, somewhat ironically, attacks those who were concerned with the welfare of the Filipinos as ‘philanthropists’.Footnote 69 On Chinese competition, Cañamaque proposes partial solutions while Feced is especially vociferous on this: ‘the Philippines is a Chinese colony under a Spanish flag’.Footnote 70
Both declared the ‘superiority’ of the Spanish, but they had different ideas regarding the Spanish community. For Cañamaque, mobility was possible in both directions, allowing the social rise of the Filipinos in a ‘civilising relationship’ to a level similar to that of Spaniards, and in turn, the possibility that a Spaniard might ‘degenerate’ to the ‘ignominious state of that of a white ‘indian’.Footnote 71 However, Feced cannot conceive of this last point. He complains that, in the Philippines, ‘a poor castila [a Spaniard] is the last word of the creed; he is not even a castila’.Footnote 72 This is a central part of his discourse, although expressed in a highly obscure way. It appears to him highly abnormal (‘of all the miracles of this Oriental country’)Footnote 73 that in the Philippines ‘social categories […] lose their stature in their relationship with their compatriots that they gain with the indigenous masses’.Footnote 74 That is, Feced complains of the prioritisation of social divisions which would lead to the poor Spanish being further integrated into Philippine society than they were into Spanish society — ‘abysses on one side and a certain democratic levelling on the other’.Footnote 75 Finally, their rejection of independence is based on quite different grounds. Cañamaque appealed to patriotism, while trusting in education.Footnote 76 Feced went further by describing Filipinos as grown children.Footnote 77 Some among them, he wrote to Blumentritt, ‘wish the Philippines to be viewed as an adult; others, myself included, believe this not to be so, that the Philippines is still a child and as such has to be dressed and attended to’.Footnote 78
Cañamaque and Feced had much in common: their rural origins; their personal transformations during their voyages;Footnote 79 their positive attitude towards bureaucrats coming from the Peninsula; their preference for settling in the countryside; their shallow knowledge of the Philippines — despite both having spent a number of years there; and their broad opposition to the Chinese, never distinguishing between the mestizos and non-mestizos.Footnote 80 They both saw that the way to increase their stature in the islands required support from the metropole and the development of this new, exclusionary epistemology, which was proceeding in parallel with efforts in Madrid to overhaul their colonial administration. Both books are dedicated to the strongest proponent of the colonisation of the Philippines, Víctor Balaguer, Overseas Minister in 1871 and 1886–88.Footnote 81 Finally, they both gained a level of acceptance from the Catholic Church, in spite of their anti-clerical origins.Footnote 82 Cañamaque even discusses his strategy of garnering support from the Church by combining criticism with flattery.Footnote 83
There are also revealing differences between the two authors. Cañamaque, as noted, prides himself on his balanced views;Footnote 84 Feced on his progressive ideas. Cañamaque chooses to describe the Philippines through picturesque scenes and comparisons with Spain,Footnote 85 while Feced focuses more on the stagnancy ofFootnote 86 and differences within the archipelago.Footnote 87 In general, Feced reveals the increasingly radical discourse among peninsulares on how to reform and modernise colonisation. Rizal saw Feced as ‘somewhat more blunt’Footnote 88 than Cañamaque, Mas, San Agustin and others, and speculated that it was probably because he was ‘more sincere’.Footnote 89 There was little sincerity, however, in Feced's praise of the Catholic Church. Cañamaque is more radical, finally, in his statements against the Spanish mestizos.
The nine years between the publication of Cañamaque's book in 1877 and Feced's in 1886 give a clue as to how discourses on human difference were changing. This period saw the growing role of scientific knowledge in colonial governance. Cañamaque simply aimed at a descriptive work (retired military quartermaster Patricio de la Escosura acknowledged in the prologue that Cañamaque had no pretensions about writing a ‘classic work’),Footnote 90 and his frequently repeated depictions of Filipinos as mysterious or superstitious suggest that he was not always aiming for elaborate descriptions. Feced, on the other hand, tried to hide his ignorance by offering quantifiable data on Filipinos and by citing more works, some of them related to the contemporary Philippines.Footnote 91 Feced's ‘scientific’ discourse produced descriptions unlikely to be understood by the majority of Spanish speakers of the time, however.
In fact, Feced's arguments were not as novel as he claimed. Perhaps he sensed that scientific terminology provided a better, updated framework for older ideas. His caution against close contact with Filipinos recalls that of a centuries-earlier ban on Jewish women breastfeeding Christian children.Footnote 92 Sinibaldo de Mas had already advocated making social mobility more difficult in the mid-nineteenth century,Footnote 93 and Cañamaque had also included science in his arguments.Footnote 94 When Feced made reference to the ‘adynamism of the [Filipino] physiology and the soul’,Footnote 95 he was, in reality, merely reiterating the old trope of the ‘indolence of the Indians’.
Cañamaque and Feced were both progressive liberals, but again, time seems crucial to understanding their differences. The former, for instance, appears as a typical anti-cleric, showing himself in favour only of the lower ranks of priesthood, such as frailes de levita, over their superiors, the frailes de cerquillo (so-called because they shaved the upper and lower parts of their heads), whom he accused of not fulfilling their vows of poverty and chastity.Footnote 96 Feced's progressivism, however, is embedded in novel terminology such as ‘metropolis’, colony’, ‘democratic’,Footnote 97 and other terms from the field of science,Footnote 98 even ‘eugenics’ which had been coined only three years prior.Footnote 99 In fact, Feced apparently shared Rizal's admiration for men such as Fedor JagorFootnote 100 and the federalist president of the First Spanish Republic, Francisco Pi y Margall, seen in the way he envisioned the future archipelago as a ‘social state which recalls and signifies the vigour of our national genius, the might of our race, and the splendours of our culture’.Footnote 101 Rizal conceived this ‘social state’ as a decentralised administration close to the interests of citizens, following the ideas of Pi y Margall,Footnote 102 but Feced's progressivism and egalitarianism, in any case, was limited to his fellow settlers, and excludes Filipinos completely.
‘Race’ was crucial to Feced's proposals, and was his rationale for advocating that Philippine society should be divided. The renewed popularity of ‘race’ in Spain and the new meanings it encompassed helped his ambitions and shaped his goals. To enhance his proposals, Feced demonstrated his awareness of the most recent ‘scientific’ theories,Footnote 103 including the highly controversial discussions of ‘race’; in 1886, Rizal himself looked it up in his Spanish dictionary.Footnote 104
‘Race’, certainly, was used to bring discourses of difference in the Philippines up to date. It stressed biologyFootnote 105 and showed a measure of determinism: ‘the laws of history are as unavoidable as those of nature’.Footnote 106 The concept of ‘race’ helped Feced by pointing to intrinsic human differences.Footnote 107 The discourse of race helped reinforce the advantageous position of Spain: it was natural, permanent, and the boundaries between ‘races’ were impossible to transgress. In any case, the ways of understanding the world were changing. Cañamaque's vision is more caste-like, a typically dismissive discourse, similar to many written throughout the centuries of Spanish domination, but Feced's barely-understood ‘scientific racism’ seems to be an instrument aimed at building a new nation in a different territory. It is similar to the examples of utopian societies created in other territories which were opened to European migrants in the twentieth century.
In short, the expectations and experiences of peninsulares in the Philippines linked two worlds. Their ambitions went further than the usual colonial settler desires of social mobility, for several reasons: the archipelago appeared wide open to their visions of a bright future; they had higher self-esteem, and better educational and social backgrounds; they disdained the natives, the Chinese and insulares; and they drew upon the additional advantages furnished by the trend toward biological determinism. While in the 1870s Cañamaque sought to improve the colonies, the context changed in the following decade, so that Feced and many of his followers seem to have aimed to completely reshape the islands. All that was needed to achieve this transformation, for Feced, were the modern scientific ideas he brought to the islands, backing from Spain, and a cooperative church. But the more radical their ambitions, the more difficult it would be to legitimise their discourse.
Discourse and impact
This comparison between the narratives of Cañamaque and Feced demonstrates the increasing tensions caused by the arrival of a new wave of Spanish migrants to the Philippines. While Cañamaque's main goal was to delimit settlers by distancing them from insulares, Feced sought to reinforce Spanish dominion over the islands. This section of the article will analyse criticisms of their texts, and then explore the processes of adaptation and communication.
The Spanish Governor's prohibition of Recuerdos de Filipinas indicates that there were bitter disputes among the Spanish elites in the Philippines, and that the number and standing of the critics was significant. Cañamaque was forced to apologise.Footnote 108 Religion figures as a major reason for the conflict — Cañamaque himself attributed the prohibition of his work to the influence of the Archbishop of Manila, as an instrument of the monastic institutions which ‘unleash their tongues against me’.Footnote 109 Besides this, the various concepts of patriotism were in dispute. Cañamaque provides further clues which point to the creoles’ outrage at his book, referring to a ‘Philippine resident’ who criticised him not only for his scant knowledge of the Philippines, but also for being a ‘bad Spaniard’, and De la Escosura, the author of the prologue, for being ‘hardly patriotic’.Footnote 110 These differing concepts of patriotism seem to be ethnically anchored. Cañamaque identified his critics with assimilation to Philippine culture: those who ‘eat bibinca’ (bibingka, a dessert made of layers of rice and coconut milk from China), and those who ‘chew buyo’ which he despises as a ‘mass of lime, areca nut, and the leaves of a tree called the betel (which the Filipinos regard as if it were a candy)’.Footnote 111 In the face of the growing proportion of peninsulares in the Spanish community and its institutions, and the pressure for tighter control from the metropolis, Cañamaque traced a line dividing those who were maintaining European lifestyles and those who were not. As in Cuba, the consequences of this kind of narrative for colonisation could be seen in the long-term. The pro-Spanish side should have declined as creoles and mestizos, derided for their comic imitation of peninsulares, may have begun to favour proposals for independence, much earlier than in other colonies. After disputing the meaning of Hispanicity and patriotism, many creoles and mestizos separated themselves from a motherland in which the space available to them was narrowing. And contrary to what occurred years later in the Dutch East Indies with the followers of Ernest Douwes Dekker, they had the alternative of assimilation into Philippine society, where they also belonged, swinging their allegiances toward the Philippines, and favouring Filipino proto-nationalists.
Feced goes further. Since the notion of biological difference seemed to be the very key to understanding human difference, Feced reflects the efforts of many individuals to adapt to these new epistemologies, just as nations and empires incorporated them.Footnote 112 In the Spanish colonies, determinism permeated political discourses. In Cuba, for example, the motto of an anti-revolutionary party read Todo por la evolución, nada por la revolución (All for Evolution, no one for Revolution). And in the Philippines Ferdinand Blumentritt was surprised at the recurring Spanish allusions to ‘the innate inferiority of the Malayan race’,Footnote 113 while James LeRoy recalled that in late nineteenth century Manila there was ‘a worsening of the racialist feeling’.Footnote 114 Racist, deterministic discourses were on the rise.
Esbozos y pinceladas reflects the difficulties in adapting and communicating the new discourses. Lack of legitimacy was the initial obstacle in conveying this determinism to colonised peoples. Feced attempted to legitimise a bid for domination over the archipelago, leveraging widespread faith in science and biological determinism to assert that those coming from Europe were best equipped to lead the Philippines toward progress. But Spain lagged behind in science, making Feced's attempts to use scientific racism rather unconvincing. He used various strategies to compensate for this, such as magnifying social differences and staking a direct claim to superiority. First, this radicalisation of the discourse was probably a compensatory psychological mechanism, since Spanish emigrants all appear to have sought some form of compensation for their own failures and those of their nation. Since many in Europe doubted Spaniards belonged to any kind of ‘superior race’ (some were even of the opinion that they did not belong to the ‘white race’) the colonies appear to have provided ideal scenarios in which such accusations could be disproved. Second, Feced's frequent use of new scientific terms appears to have been simply another strategy to enhance his credibility. Barrantes, similarly, had identified climate as the reason for Filipino inferiority, noting ‘the influence of what the metaphysicists call the environment’.Footnote 115 Such obscure phrases steeped in new terminology purporting to be scientific seems to have been an effort to disguise Feced's ignorance of the issues he discusses.Footnote 116 Feced's popularity suggests that many settlers may have proclaimed ideas which they too hardly understood.
Inconsistencies in these arguments proliferated. The claim of Spanish superiority in the Philippines, following determinist theories, simply caused confusion; there was little evidence to support such bold assertions. Fedor Jagor was the only source Feced cited to bolster his arguments. Feced's discussion of the benefits that Spanish prosperity would bring to the Islands was not only riddled with inconsistencies, it contained flagrant contradictions including, most remarkably, in his use of religion. The advantages of scientific progress were proclaimed using millenarian language and emigrants were called ‘emissaries of the divine law of progress’. While conservatism and patronage were despised, the role of the church was defended.
Finally, Catholicism and Hispanisation complicated the penetration of these new ideas. Old frameworks remained strong, making new hierarchies based on biological determinism difficult to accept even by those who had an interest in their operation. Perceptions of ‘race’, for instance, needed to be framed under a different ‘scientific’ framework since for many the term was associated with lineage or social difference. It would take time to promote the new categories, and to discard the old ones. Furthermore, Madrid had already lost its monopoly in the production of knowledge in the Philippines. Growing international trade and the presence of foreign businesses helped the modernisation of the archipelago in many ways, by favouring personal exchanges, both for Europeans to work in the archipelago and for Filipinos to travel to, and reside in, Spain and other foreign countries. As a consequence, and again unlike the course of other empires, by travelling and living in the metropolis Filipinos were able to test previous images of Spain.Footnote 117 This allowed ilustrados to check and to refute Spanish claims of biological superiority, as articles in journals like La Solidaridad show. The ideas transmitted by Feced did not convince many outside the Spanish community, either because of his opaque language or simply because their manipulative intentions were clear.
A contingent discourse
Increasing exports, the improving economic outlook, and the emigration of many peninsulares made Spain increasingly covetous of the Philippines. At the same time, the legitimising discourses around the human body evolved dramatically, from the dismissive arguments expressed by Cañamaque to the new theories of ‘race’ expressed — not entirely successfully — by Feced.
This convergence helps us better understand Spain's limited capacity to mould the thinking of its colonial subjects. Anti-Spanish nationalists in the colonies flatly rejected Spanish discourses of racial difference. In Cuba, leader José Maceo declared that ‘there are no longer blacks or whites, only Cubans’; Juan Gualberto Gómez and Antonio Maceo defined civilisation as the elimination of slavery and racism, and the national hero José Martí also rejected what he called ‘bookshop races’. In the Philippines, Rizal expressed a similar idea, referring to the publishers of La Solidaridad as ‘Young creole men of Spanish descent, Chinese half-breeds, and Malayans; but we call ourselves only Filipinos.’Footnote 118 Rizal was even responsible for what may be the first mockery of modern racism: ‘It is useless to answer certain objections of some fine writers regarding the skins, more or less brown and the faces with noses, more or less flat […] Law has no skin, nor reason a nose.’Footnote 119 After having disputed notions of patriotism and Hispanism, as in Cañamaque's discourse, the rejection of Feced's version of biological determinist discourse paved the way for nationalism among Cubans, Puerto Ricans, and Filipinos.
Anti-racist statements appear to have only been instrumental in the political struggle against Spanish colonialism, however. Old dismissive ideas which had evolved into racist ideas resurfaced after the departure of Spain in Cuba, where Schmidt-Nowara states that ‘the white nationalists considered any debate about race to be a reason for discord and potential treason’.Footnote 120 Rather than defining civilisation as the ‘elimination of slavery and racism’ or the ‘transcendence of race and the perfection of humanity’, as expressed by Ada Ferrer from the ideas of the revolutionary heroes, the most powerful Cuban nationalists under US hegemony opted to define civilisation according to American ideas of ‘refinement, civility, and whiteness’.Footnote 121 In the Philippines, similarities abound. Aguilar refers to the contradictions of the ilustrados as fighting Spain but accepting many imperialist ideas, entering what he defines as ‘pro-imperial-cum-anticolonial politics’.Footnote 122 Later, under the United States, Filipino elites came to represent themselves as appointed to lead over the people of the highlands. These elites exercised a nationalist colonialism that adopted racist theories to establish racial hierarchies within the archipelago.Footnote 123 The radical rejection of racist theses under the Spanish regime, was, then, a rejection of the messenger rather than the message itself. During the fight against Spanish colonialism, notions of hierarchy (old and new) among revolutionaries were dormant, but did not disappear. The peninsulares’ bid for power in the Philippines unleashed many reactions, from sympathy to nationalist fervour among insulares, to anti-racist arguments from brilliant leaders such as José Rizal and José Martí. It certainly contributed to the successful revolutions that ended much of the Spanish Empire. Although racism resurfaced after Spain's exit in 1898, inconsistencies in the Spanish discourse, its radicalism, and the possibility that adversaries could contest information, led to at least a temporary refutation of racist theories.