Dia de la Hispanidad: A time for remembering

It is a little over a hundred years since 1898 and it has come to this. Filipinos have to be reminded that Spain is not only a memory but very much part of the nation’s present.

I have spent the most fruitful years of my life, 25 years in fact, in this country as journalist, husband to a Filipina and father of two children whom I have raised as Filipinos. I have, in many respects, become Filipino. And yes, I consider the Philippines my other homeland.

It is from this engagement with Filipinos, across the nation and from all walks of life, that I have seen the estrangement widen, the dimming of the collective memory of what once was. I have sensed the presence of a psychological barrier that continues to hamper efforts at rediscovery and renewal.

Most Filipinos hardly know about today’s Spain. Whatever little they know of Spain are taken from, I submit, textual material that date to the days of the Propaganda.

While I do not wish to be drawn into a debate about how history should be taught in schools which my children themselves attended, it is clear that for generations of Filipinos, the stereotypes are the ones remembered, the caricatures used by the propagandists to demonize the enemy and further the revolutionary cause.

And because of this, most Filipinos carry with them portraits of the "black Spain." Noli’s Padre Dámaso, Sisa, and the brutal Guardia Civil. And to think that imperial Spain only had a handful of Spaniards who governed most of Luzon, the Visayas and parts of Mindanao.

How they did so, of course, is another story.

In the post-colonial period, it did not help that the required teaching of Spanish was taken out of the school curriculum. The proposition then, if I recall right, was learning Spanish no longer had any value. That, for me, was the final break with the colonial past and the victory of the parochial mind. Today, Spanish is, as everyone knows, the spoken language of more than 400 million people and is considered as the second language in the United States.

By the time I arrived in the country in 1977, the estrangement had grown two oceans wide, and today most Filipinos really do not know, or care to know, about Spain. Except, of course, for some 50,000 Filipino migrants, their families and relatives, working in dear Spain.

Of course, there are pockets of Hispanistas alive and well in the country, undertaking valiant efforts at staving off forgetting and sparking a revival. And I have been privileged to be part of these rearguard actions.

The most noteworthy, of course, is the continued existence of the Academia Filipina de la Lengua Española, the Philippine branch of the Royal Academy of the Spanish Language founded in 1924. Its founding members included Don Epifanio de los Santos, yes EDSA, and Don Enrique Zobel de Ayala. Its present members include the President herself, Her Excellency Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo and His Eminence, Manila Archbishop Jaime Cardinal Sin. Also we still have the much coveted Premio Zóbel yearly awarded to a distinguished Hispanista.

There was, of course, the short-lived Spanish section, Crónica de Manila, in the Manila Chronicle, which a group of Hispanistas and I, with the late Foreign Affairs Secretary Raul Manglapus co-founded and edited.

Still and all, these and other efforts have, in the main, not lit the fire. There continues to be disinterest among the many. Again, this may be because of the obstacle I pointed out earlier, which has prevented most Filipinos from moving on, welcoming an encounter with today’s Spain.

This is the inanimate but real obstacle which, I think, must be hurdled before our two countries can wholeheartedly "embrace the past," as the 1998 Centennial Commission aptly put it, and move on, in full stride, as equal partners in the present.

Spain has acknowledged the mistakes committed during the days of Empire. It has even paid tribute to the great Filipino hero, José Rizal, by allowing the erection of his statue at very heart of Madrid, at the Avenida Islas Filipinas.

No less than the Socialist Prime Minister Felipe González himself expressed this during his visit to the country in 1988. In a speech at a dinner in his honor hosted by then President Corazón Aquino, González said: La relación histórica entre Filipinas y España ha sido larga y no siempre fácil. Se deben reconocer, y asi lo hacen ahora la mayoria do los españoles de hoy, los errores cometidos en los años de la liquidación de la situacion colonial hispano-filipina, en las últimas decadas del siglo XIX (…)".

(The historic relationship between the Philippines and Spain was long and not always easy. We must acknowledge, as it is now realized by the majority of the Spaniards, the mistakes committed in the years of the liquidation of the colonial Spanish-Philippine situation, in the last decades of the XIX century (…)".

The unprecedented visit of the King Juan Carlos I and Queen Sofía of Spain in 1995, which was the first ever by a Spanish monarch since Magellan came, was clearly aimed at closure.

Allow me to quote a portion of his speech at the State Dinner given by then President Fidel V. Ramos:

"Mr. President. The past persists into the present, and offers all the possibilities now open to us – both peoples and individuals – for acting (…) This visit is the clearest proof of Spain’s renewed interest in strengthening our relations and provides confirmation of the affection and friendship that the Spanish people feel for the Philippines."

There is no doubt that a "common future" can be forged using our "common past" as a foundation for working together in our "common present."

The ongoing cultural cooperation project and between our two countries, whose slogans I lifted these from, shows that current efforts at rediscovery and renewal are moving towards the direction which we all aspire for.

For apart from the paella, the chorizo de Bilbao, the pasodoble, the mantón de Manila, the abanicos, the bullfights, the flamenco, the walls of Intramuros, the old Spanish-built churches, and the Sto. Niño, there is so much to be gained from a renewing of ties on the basis of friendship and respect.

Spain can very well be the Philippine’s door to Europe, to Latin America. And vice-versa, the Philippines should be Spain’s bridge to Asia. This is nothing new. For our shared history began in this manner. Spain’s search for the fabled Spice Islands led it to the Philippines.

The opportunity for rediscovering each other is there for the taking. We only have to be bold enough to cross the line and embrace each other.

Indeed, as we celebrate the National Day of Spain, it´s time Filipinos began to learn more about the ties that continue to bind rather than divide us. It is time to act, as the King of Spain has said, on the "possibilities now open to us."

Perhaps, when President Arroyo, whose father also visited Spain as President, is able to travel to Spain in the near future, she shall inaugurate a new beginning in our journey toward a common and prosperous future and relive with more intensity our long-lasting "historia de un amor"

Mabuhay ang Pilipinas! Viva España!

(José "Pepe" Rodríguez is a veteran Manila-based journalist and writer. He is president of the Philippine branch of the Royal Academy of the Spanish Language. He was former president of the Foreign Correspondents Association of the Philippines and the Manila Overseas Press Club)