Spanish revisited

Can you speak Spanish?

It’s spoken in the household of Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. Remember those Spanish words of endearment from Las Vegas, murmured live on TV by the First Gentleman after Manny Pacquiao’s victory? Mike Arroyo was not just suffering from a tequila hangover.

It’s spoken by Foreign Affairs Secretary Alberto Romulo and his wife Lovely, whom he met during student days in Spain, according to Spanish Ambassador Ignacio Sagaz, who also met his Filipino wife in Madrid.

It’s spoken in the household of Joseph Estrada, which is a good indication that while he may be Erap para sa mahirap (Erap for the poor), it doesn’t follow that he himself is poor.

It’s spoken by hundreds of millions of people on the planet, with a substantial number living in the United States. So Sagaz wants to know: how come we scrapped mandatory Spanish subjects in our schools, and are in no hurry to restore the teaching of the language?

Probably because many Spanish-speaking people also speak English, and Filipinos are having enough of a hard time achieving proficiency in English.

But you do feel the ambassador’s pain, when you consider how much of our heritage we are losing by relegating the Spanish language to the archives. Even if works in Spanish are translated, something always gets lost in translation, from Spanish to English, from Spanish to Filipino.

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How much of that heritage is responsible for our observance of Holy Week rituals? This weekend the Holy Week exodus from Metro Manila starts.

The Roman Catholic faith has been the most enduring legacy of Spain’s nearly four centuries of colonial rule in this country, apart from the fact that our islands are named after a Spanish king.

The Catholic faith survived periodic local uprisings against the abuses of Spanish friars, the rise of the Masonic movement among the Filipino elite and the arrival of Protestants. And while there were valid criticisms that Spain used the cross and the sword to subjugate these islands in the 16th century, faith also became a unifying factor among the tribal societies of that era.

To this day the Catholic faith remains one of the few threads that unite this nation. No one can be sure how much of the religious devotion is truly spiritual or merely shallow adherence to rituals and tradition. Even the rituals, however, serve a unifying purpose. In this deeply divided nation, anything that contributes to unity is welcome.

And so we plan our annual vacations and family gatherings based on Catholic tradition. Religious rituals during Holy Week have become tourist attractions.

How much of those rituals were legacies of "Mother Spain"? Did Spaniards start that tradition of self-flagellation and actual crucifixion of penitents in Pampanga? Who started the chanting of Christ’s Passion?

Younger Filipinos whose eardrums have been assaulted by the Pabasa – the reading of Christ’s Pasyon – will probably thank the heavens that it is a dying tradition.

And if you wonder aloud if this tradition was started by Spain, youths will probably say, who cares?

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Among people notorious for short memories, history is better forgotten.

In the case of Spain, it does not help that our history is replete with stories of abuses during the colonial era, of Filipinos being treated as serfs in their own land, and of our founding fathers being tortured and executed for seeking independence from Spain. Even non-violent advocates of mere autonomy from Spain, such as Jose Rizal, were executed.

Our history lessons tell us that the Spaniards believed native Indios did not have enough brains to learn the language of the colonizers. Even the great novels of Rizal, written in Spanish, were not enough to persuade the colonizers that Indios were capable of self-rule.

With all that bitterness between conqueror and conquered, you can understand why most Filipinos – except for the ilustrados like Rizal who were educated abroad – were not enamored with the Spanish language.

The arrival of the Americans sealed the doom of Español in this country. Uncle Sam conquered Philippine hearts and minds with the English language, free education, Hollywood.

Forgotten amid the Pinoy fascination with the American way of life was the rich Spanish heritage – the great literature, music and visual arts of Spain, its impressive culture and history.

By the time I was required to learn the Spanish language in high school, with several more subjects in college, Spanish had become like Latin to most Filipinos – obscure and useless. There was also the perception that it was spoken mostly by a handful of snobs with so much money they won’t ever need to work, or who are pretending to be so.

When the government scrapped Spanish as a mandatory subject, younger generations greeted the move with relief.

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For Filipinos, it is a quaint, pleasant surprise to learn that Czech Ambassador Jaroslav Ludva bothered to memorize Rizal’s Mi Ultimo Adios, then recite it in Spanish and translate it into the Czech language. All to commemorate the friendship between Rizal and Ferdinand Blumentritt, an Austrian professor who later moved to Bohemia, now the Czech Republic.

Sagaz says his Czech counterpart is fluent in Spanish. Does anything get lost in translation from Spanish to English? We wouldn’t know unless we learn Spanish. I certainly didn’t feel Rizal’s anguish while memorizing the poem in Spanish class in college. Being forced to recite it in class was like undergoing a root canal.

These days Filipino youths’ interactions with Spain are limited to watching Spanish movies (mostly rated R) with English subtitles on DVD, dining in Spanish restaurants and buying up clothing in Zara and Mango.

But Sagaz is brimming with optimism. Bilateral relations, he told me, "have never been better."

Chocolate-covered cookies packaged as "Filipinos" are still being sold in Spain. The cookies taste good, which should give us an idea of the image of Filipinos in that country.

Sagaz is pushing Congress to pass a law restoring Spanish as a required subject in Philippine schools. His country is willing to subsidize the teaching, he said. It will be a major foreign aid commitment for Madrid, entailing the training of 70,000 teachers and a four-year program to reintroduce the language. Sagaz said several congressmen have expressed willingness to sponsor the proposal.

Spain is also bankrolling a treatment center for eye problems, in honor of ophthalmologist Rizal, at the Philippine General Hospital. The center awaits formal opening by President Arroyo.

Sagaz said the Philippine chapter of Instituto Cervantes, which promotes Spanish culture, has the fastest growing membership in the world. Why is this so?

Perhaps, he said, Filipinos are finally starting to realize what a shame it is to lose proficiency in a language spoken by a large segment of the global population.

Or perhaps Filipinos have found a potentially practical use for speaking the language of their former colonizers. Sagaz says, tongue-in-cheek, that one question in the application for immigrant status in the United States is: Can you speak Spanish?

US officials in Manila deny this, and it’s not the best reason to learn the language of our past. But for Filipinos, any excuse to learn Spanish can be a good start in remembering our countries’ shared heritage.