Malolos behind the letter

On November 1st of the last two years, Nicanor Tiongson stood guard over several tombs in two Malolos cemeteries. He was waiting for the thinning All Saints’ Day crowd to yield visitors whose recollections, family gossip, albums, and heirlooms might help him reconstruct the life stories of the town’s most famous 19th century women.

Dr. Tiongson, an eminent scholar and dean of the U.P. College of Mass Communication, first thought of writing their biographies three decades ago, when the children of the women were still alive and residing a stone’s throw away from his childhood home in Malolos. But numerous books on the theater, film and the literature–not to mention a memorable stint as Artistic Director of the Cultural Center of the Philippines–kept him away from the project.

The thought makes him a bit regretful. "Although the research yielded a lot of data," he carefully points out, "I really wish I had done the book earlier."

Most of us have heard of these women. Graciano Lopez-Jaena made them the subject of his column for the first issue of La Solidaridad. A sonnet was also composed in their honor by a lesser known propagandista, Fernando Canon. But what secured their place in history was a letter written to them in Tagalog by the most famous Filipino of all: Jose Rizal.

Rizal’s epistle, which continues to circulate long after their addressees’ passing, has proven to be something of a blessing and a curse. He exalted the women for their courage in claiming their right to education, specifically, to study Spanish, the language of the rulers and the learned. But Rizal, in keeping with the propaganda movement’s strategic anti-clerical thrust, also narrowly framed the significance of the Malolos women’s gesture as an intelligent way of breaking the mold of docile womanhood imposed by the hopelessly chauvinist frailocracy. By doing so, Rizal unwittingly fixed the historical role of these women to this one shining act of self-assertion.

What Dr. Tiongson shows us in his recently published book, simply titled The Women of Malolos (Ateneo de Manila University Press, Manila, 2004), is that the twenty did not simply exit to the sidelines of history after they presented their controversial petition to the Spanish Governor General. Some of them generously supported the 1896 revolution and the war against the Americans. Others occupied top positions in the Red Cross and the Asociacion Femenista de Filipinas. Still others concerned themselves with decidedly domestic or personal affairs, like rearing eleven children or working as a ticket collector at the local cinema. The author points out there’s nothing easy or selfish about the path chosen by those who stayed at home. After all, in a patriarchal society that circumscribes the roles and aspirations of women, the likes of women warriors like Gregoria de Jesus and Teresa Magbanua are very few and far between.

Dr. Tiongson argues that the significance of the women’s gesture and indeed, their lives played out in a much larger theater. He demonstrates, for instance, that the ethnicity of the women as indio-sangley mestizas mattered and still matters a lot. For one, the "in-betweeness" of this ethic group might explain their unusual zeal in civic affairs, in aspiring to the cultural and political capital of the Spanish elite, and in clamoring for rights that were denied them (or their fathers) because of their ethnic or national origin. It is interesting to note that many of the most passionate 19th century patriots, including Rizal and Emilio Aguinaldo, shared a similar ethnic profile.

The economic prosperity and political ferment of Malolos–its denizens amassed a great fortune on export crops and were active in the propaganda movement–had also set the stage for the women’s action, empowering them financially and inspiring them politically. During a recent interview, Dr. Tiongson concedes that he initially underestimated its importance: "As I began to appreciate the economic and political background of the mestizos of the 1880s and 1890s in Malolos, I began to understand how even the economic elite would be capable of making what under the colonial circumstances would be called radical decisions."

Thanks to Dr. Tiongson’s account, those who see the petition as a small political gesture on a national scale may at the very least appreciate its towering significance to micro-history–to the very local politics of the storied Bulacan town. The book explains, for instance, that the approval of the women’s request was very much a Malolos-wide effort, having been bolstered by much lobbying at Malacañang courtesy of the town’s influential businessmen and politicos.

To be sure, there’s an awful lot at stake in naming the Malolos women’s petition as an act of national significance, right up there in importance with Andres Bonifacio’s cedula-tearing or the "transvestite"-led guerilla attacks in Balangiga. The same is true of the event’s place in women’s history, for the image of young women peacefully advancing their right to education and self-expression is one of the very few emblems of Filipina nationalism in the popular mind.

Because of such high stakes, we might be able to see beyond the less-than-idyllic minutiae of the women’s petition. Dr. Tiongson’s account does not hesitate in providing such details. He explains, without apologies, that the petition was not written by the women and that even the idea of presenting it to the Spanish Governor General was not theirs. It was the brainchild of Teodoro Sandico, who had already been teaching the women Spanish on the sly.

To be sure, the women deserve credit for showing up, defying the friars, securing an audience with the Spanish honcho, and lobbying for the petition afterwards; but it was, indeed, a man who had put them up to it and a group of other men–Del Pilar, Rizal, etc.–who had brought attention and assigned value to their gesture.

In Dr. Tiongson’s account, the male "sponsorship" of these women and their petition does not take anything away from the women. In the same way that the women cannot be blamed for being affluent–some historians, Tiongson notes, dismiss them as half-hearted burgis–one must recognize that male-dominated society’s control of the means of expression and the political apparatus pre-empted the women from composing the petition or, for that matter, thinking of performing a political gesture.

"The women of Malolos are perfect examples of women who have been double-colonized (by the imperialists and the native patriarchy)," Dr. Tiongson explains during our interview. "This is one of the points I make in the last chapter. Their expression of the desire to enlighten themselves was a blow, first, against the colonial order that sought to brutalize the colonized to facilitate and perpetuate subjugation; and second, against the local patriarchy which had defined bed, board and brood as the ‘natural’ domain of women."

Not everything is about politics, of course. The book tells more than just the larger story of the decisive historical moment. It strains to show us who these women were or might have been. Because history has not left us with diaries or memoirs by these women, Tiongson tells their stories through data gleaned from private and public documents, like tax records, land titles, and engravings on the back of pictures. Memories–often second and third hand grandma stories–also supply a lot of intimate but volatile suggestions about the women.

Some of the women, we learn, did not hate the friars, contrary to Rizal or Del Pilar’s characterization of their gesture. As church manangs, they religiously attended mass and participated in church activities all their lives. One of the more colorful women kept a secret devotion to Ginebra San Miguel even in the twilight of her life. Another seemed to have suffered more under her wayward husband (who impregnated her older widowed sister) than the strictures of colonial life.

These individual stories are precious not in spite–but precisely because–of their departure from a grand historical narrative that lumps them together into a virtually anonymous collective. Though fans of History with a capital "H" may find the sources of these stories less than ideal, Dr. Tiongson’s decision to present them is clearly strategic. For as we read about these women coming of age, faring differently in marriage, venturing into business or philantrophy, we affirm a desire to truly know them beyond the petition, and past the limits of what official accounts allow.

The portraits of these women created especially for the book by Rafael del Casal function as emblems of the collective act of committed re-imagination that is required to pull these twenty important women out of the void of history, into the light of a modest but heartfelt remembrance.