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ABSTRACT
In 1964, Mexico and the Philippines commemorated the fourth centenary of Miguel López de Legazpi and Andrés de Urdaneta’s 1564 expedition from New Spain to the Philippines. Celebrations, which were held in Mexico and the Philippines, included gift exchanges, the inauguration of monuments and lectures by politicians, diplomats and scholars from both nations. This transpacific encounter resonates with Enrique Dussel’s call for more “transversal” dialogues between intellectuals from the so-called peripheries of the world. However, participants in this collaboration were not forming a new transperipheral network. Instead, they were returning to a transpacific intercolonial link that had operated from 1565 to 1815: the Manila-Acapulco galleon trade. This article focuses on the work of Mexican philosopher and diplomat Leopoldo Zea, one of the main organizers of the 1964 celebrations. While my argument is that reading José Rizal and planning the 1964 events contributed to Zea’s formulation of a vision of solidarity between nations of the so-called Third World, my ultimate objective is to rethink the “global” character of Philippine literature in Spanish through an examination of the cultural residues of the transpacific galleon trade.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Benita Sampedro Vizcaya, Adolfo Campoy-Cubillo, Sean Manning, Ulrich E. Bach and the two anonymous reviewers for all their helpful comments on earlier drafts.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Paula C. Park is Assistant Professor of Spanish and Latin American studies at Wesleyan University. Her research areas are Spanish American literary/cultural production and Philippine literature in Spanish from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Her articles have been published in Hispanic Review, Hispanófila, Transmodernity, Iberoromania and Symploke, among other journals. Her current book project, Across the Hispanic Pacific: Intercolonial Intimacies between the Philippines and Latin America, 1898–1964, reexamines the geographically bound and politically charged definitions of hispanidad and latinidad by analyzing the work of Filipino and Latin American writers, cultural critics and diplomats. Email: [email protected]
Notes
1 The course, titled Postcoloniality, was taught by professor Ward Keeler at the University of Texas at Austin in spring 2010.
2 Major initiatives to disseminate Philippine literature in Spanish globally include the electronic journal Revista Filipina, which was founded by Filipino writer Edmundo Farolán in 1997, the book series Clásicos Hispanofilipinos, created by the Instituto Cervantes in Manila and the digitization of various works housed in the Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes, a project directed by Rocío Ortuño Casanova with funding from the Universidad de Alicante.
3 While in The Magellan Fallacy (Citation2012) Lifshey successfully interrogated the state of Hispanic studies in the US and rendered Spanish-language literary production from the Philippines and Equatorial Guinea visible to a wider audience, in Subversions of the American Century (Citation2016) he seems to lose sight of the implications of relying so much on the technicalities of his use of terms, arguing that, in fact, all literature produced in the Philippines during the US colonial rule should be considered “American”. For instance, regarding Balmori’s Los pájaros de fuego, he adds: “It is also inherently a landmark of America, written by an American national in an American property about the conflict most central to the American century” (2016, 136). To be fair, Lifshey’s objective seems to be to question and amplify the category of “American” literature, by alerting us to the fact that this category is not confined to writings in English.
4 On the Spanish Empire’s claim to and imaginations of the Pacific, see Padrón (Citation2008); Buschmann, Slack, and Tueller (Citation2014); Beauchesne (Citation2015). For approaches to the transpacific that are inclusive of Latin America, most of all Mexico, see Fojas and Guevarra (Citation2012); Calvo and Machuca (Citation2016).
5 Records of decrees from 1718, 1719, 1720, 1722 and 1724 are located, according to Ardash Bonialian, in the Archivo General de Indias, Filipinas, 208, number 1 (Citation2012, 76).
6 Bernal wrote México en Filipinas during his diplomatic appointment in the Philippines in the first half of the 1960s. El Gran Océano remained unfinished due to Bernal’s death in 1972, but was published by Banco de México in 1992 and by the Fondo de Cultura Económica in 2012.
7 One of the first documented uses of the term can be found in an anonymous letter sent from New Spain to Valencia in 1566, which announces Urdaneta’s successful return from Manila to Acapulco. The anonymous letter reads, “Los continuos fracasos y desastres no iban a arredrar a los españoles de la Nueva España, a los novohispanos, es decir, a los mexicanos” (Viaje, n.p.). The letter ends with the following statement: “Ello es cosa grande, y de mucha importancia: y los de México están muy ufanos con su descubrimiento, que tienen entendido que serán ellos el corazón del mundo” (Viaje, n.p.). Bernal quotes this line multiple times (Citation1965, 45, Citation1967, 59, Citation2012, 182).
8 A list of editions in Spanish, Tagalog and English, as well as translations into seven Philippine vernacular languages, French, Chinese, Indonesian, French, Japanese, German and Thai, can be found in the 2011 bilingual edition of Noli me tangere (Rizal Citation2011, xix–xxii). According to this list, there is a Cuban edition, published in 1983. Unfortunately, I have not been able to find or consult it.
9 Zea Citation1964b, 6.
10 In 1963, Luis G. Miranda also alludes to a similar metaphor: “Los filipinos y los americanos somos hermanos por muchas poderosas razones: y el mexicano, más que ningún otro americano, deberá sentirse en Filipinas en su propia casa” (as quoted in Núñez Melo Citation1963, 10).
11 According to literary critic Eugenia Revueltas, who was part of the group of Mexican scholars convoked by Zea, they also traveled to Japan, India and Egypt. In regard to how Zea, President López Mateos and José Gorotiza, then deputy secretary of Mexico’s Foreign Affairs, would have thought about organizing this event, she mentions “la necesidad de estrechar vínculos culturales con aquella otra parte de la cultura hispánica – tan olvidada – que eran las islas Filipinas, cultura en la que tanto tuvieron que ver los novohispanos, y, por ello mismo, cercana a nosotros” (Citation2006, 129).
12 Years later, Quirino (Citation1974) would repeat the claim that the Philippines was a former colony of Mexico, but in order to elaborate on the cultural exchanges between the Philippines and Mexico via the Manila-Acapulco galleons.
13 While various nations in Asia achieved their independence shortly after World War II, in Africa the movements towards independence spanned the 1960s and 1970s: the Congo achieved its independence from Belgium in 1960, Madagascar and Algeria from France in 1960 and 1962 respectively, Kenya from the British crown in 1963, Equatorial Guinea from Spain in 1968, while the Portuguese colonies Angola, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau and Mozambique became independent in 1974 and 1975.
14 For an analysis of Zea’s dialogue with Fanon, see Fiddian (Citation2003).
15 Zea Citation1962, 197.
16 The fact that Zea and José María Frances, a Spanish journalist who resided in Mexico, were the only “Latin American” delegates at Rizal’s birth centenary in 1961 may be an indication of the limited circulation and reception of Rizal’s work in Latin America at the time. Some exceptions include Breve antología de la poesía filipina (Citation1966), published in Mexico City, which included a wide selection of poems by Rizal and poems by other Spanish-speaking Filipinos dedicated to Rizal, and Zea’s essay “José Rizal y el pensamiento latinoamericano”, which was published in the widely distributed Mexican journal Cuadernos Americanos in 1962, and which I discuss later in this article. I originally found this essay in the conference proceedings for Rizal’s birth centenary, published in Manila, and then located it in the Mexican journal. This essay also serves as a chapter in Zea’s La esencia de lo americano (Citation1971a).
17 This decisive battle saw the emergence of the Republic of Peru and it ensured the previously declared independences of the United Provinces of Río de la Plata in 1810, Chile in 1818 and the United Provinces of Gran Colombia in 1819.
18 Margara Russotto, who was in charge of editing the critical annotations and the chronology in Ayacucho’s Noli me tangere, informed me in an email (4 March 2017) that Rama, her mentor and supervisor, had the idea of including Rizal in the series. Since I was unable to confirm this through Rama’s published writings, I maintain that Zea was probably equally if not more committed than Rama to this decision as a way of consolidating a transnational collective identity. It this respect, it is relevant to note that in a journal entry from 1974, Rama calls Zea a constant supporter of the Ayacucho project and contrasts his “fervor latinoamericanista” to the overall disinterest of other Latin American intellectuals who had an “estrechez nacionalista de miras” (Citation2001, 39).
19 Sánchez Prado reminds us that Zea never claimed to be a historian. Rather, he was a philosopher of history and thus his methodology consisted in moving from specific historical events to universal questions of self-definition; that is, Zea saw history “as an instrument of liberation” (Citation2009, 282).
20 In 1947 Spanish instruction was reintroduced as an optional course in schools and universities. In 1952, Republic Act No. 709 made it compulsory for two consecutive years in universities and private schools, and in 1957, with the passing of Republic Act No. 1881, twenty-four college units were to be required in pedagogy, law and liberal arts (Rodao Citation1997, 105).
21 Panizo’s distancing of Hispanism from Spain also reminds us of the fact that “in international Hispanism, particularly in the United States, Spain does not enjoy the position of dominance that many once considered its due” (Epps Citation2005, 234). It is worth noting here that the imposition of English during the US colonial period contributed hugely to the diminishing interest in Spanish and Hispanic studies in the Philippines.