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Home > Journals > PAHA > Vol. 12 (2022) > Numbers 1 & 2

 

Perspectives in the Arts and Humanities Asia

Abstract

The final decade of the nineteenth century saw the emergence of a visible, palpable self-consciousness with the expansion of the formerly denigrating nomenclature ‘Filipino’ (from its original criollo designation) to encompass the mestizo and indio. This resulted from a uniquely potent brew of socio-political and economic factors that boiled over in this period to trigger the first stirrings of nationalism. The newspaper as, in the words of Roland Barthes, “social space” h ad chronicled t he shift in the term’s usage, as explored in the journalism on music—from a mere geographic denotation of the colonized native from las islas Filipinas in the 1860s, to a distinct identity in the process of coalescence in the last decade of the nineteenth century, when the term came to be claimed by a community of people—criollo, mestizo and indio—offspring of the turbulent, complex circumstances of colonization and empowered by a shared realization of a common identity forged and patented through similar experiences of struggle and oppression. Music and theater were important channels for expressing this shift in consciousness, as demonstrated by three examples from Manila’s newspapers. First, in La Lectura Popular, Isabelo de los Reyes launched a passionate defense of the Tagalog komedya (which had been under attack by Spaniards and educated Filipinos) as a truly Filipino form, “la dramática Filipina”; second, in La Ilustración Filipina, the image of zarzuela superstar Práxedes “Yeyeng” Fernandez appeared on the front page, with a write-up inside on her stellar life and career that proudly declared her a true “Artista Filipina”; and third, in El Comercio, a Philippine-made piano by instrument-maker Pio Trinidad in Quiapo, is lauded as a “piano Filipino” for its innovations and use of local wood, one of the first locally made pianos to compete in a piano market saturated by foreign brands. This semantic birthing of the “Filipino” as a people had been observed through shifts in writing perspectives and in the term’s meaning itself. These shifts may be read as positionings and negotiations towards identity, as anti-colonial critiques in themselves, set in motion by socio-political and economic factors that reverberated as well in the press. Journalistic mannerisms, newspaper bilinguality, and the mix of classes and races that wrote and read newspapers all functioned to communicate pride in a newly imagined, nascent identity that found unique and creative pronouncement through music and theater. In these artistic forms and performers, the power of cultural hybridity was at work, transforming the Spanish theater forms comedia and zarzuela, as well as the European piano into genuine Filipino expressions.

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