Reynaldo C . Ileto
Born in 1946, Reynaldo Clemeña Ileto obtained his academic degrees from the Ateneo de Manila and Cornell universities. He taught at the University of the Philippines, De la Salle University, and James Cook University, before joining the Australian National University as Reader in Asian Studies from 1995 to 2007. He has also been on fellowship grants at the University of California (Santa Cruz), University of Hawaii at Manoa, Kyoto University, Institute of Southeast Asian Studies (Singapore) and Tokyo University of Foreign Studies. In 2020 he was Distinguished Visiting Professor of History at the De la Salle University, Manila.
From 2001 to 2012 Ileto was Professor of Southeast Asian Studies at the National University of Singapore; and from 2015 to 2022, Adjunct Senior Fellow at the Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Nanyang Technological Univ.
Ileto's major works include Magindanao 1860-1888: The Career of Datu Utto of Buayan; Pasyon and Revolution: Popular Movements in the Philippines, 1840-1910; Filipinos and their Revolution: Event, Discourse, Historiography; and Knowledge and Pacification: On the U.S. Conquest and the Writing of Philippine History. He authored “Religion and Anticolonial Movements” in The Cambridge History of Southeast Asia. His writings have earned him a number of distinctions, including the Benda Prize in Southeast Asian Studies, the Ohira book prize, and the Academic Laureate of the 14th Fukuoka Asian Culture prizes. In 2012, he was conferred the "Gawad Tanglaw ng Lahi" by the Ateneo de Manila University and in 2018, the "Gawad Balagtas" by the Writers Union of the Philippines (UMPIL).
Ileto is currently Honorary Professor at the College of Asia and the Pacific, The Australian National University.
From 2001 to 2012 Ileto was Professor of Southeast Asian Studies at the National University of Singapore; and from 2015 to 2022, Adjunct Senior Fellow at the Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Nanyang Technological Univ.
Ileto's major works include Magindanao 1860-1888: The Career of Datu Utto of Buayan; Pasyon and Revolution: Popular Movements in the Philippines, 1840-1910; Filipinos and their Revolution: Event, Discourse, Historiography; and Knowledge and Pacification: On the U.S. Conquest and the Writing of Philippine History. He authored “Religion and Anticolonial Movements” in The Cambridge History of Southeast Asia. His writings have earned him a number of distinctions, including the Benda Prize in Southeast Asian Studies, the Ohira book prize, and the Academic Laureate of the 14th Fukuoka Asian Culture prizes. In 2012, he was conferred the "Gawad Tanglaw ng Lahi" by the Ateneo de Manila University and in 2018, the "Gawad Balagtas" by the Writers Union of the Philippines (UMPIL).
Ileto is currently Honorary Professor at the College of Asia and the Pacific, The Australian National University.
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Books by Reynaldo C . Ileto
The book places the Philippine revolution in the context of native traditions, and explains the persistence of radical peasant brotherhoods in this century. Seen as continuous attempts by the masses to transform the world in their terms are the various movements that the book analyzes—Apolinario de la Cruz’s Cofradía de San Jose, Andres Bonifacio’s Katipunan, Macario Sakay’s Katipunan, Felipe Salvador’s Santa Iglesia, the Colorum Society, and other popular movements during the Spanish, revolutionary, and American colonial periods.
The book is based on the author's doctoral dissertation titled "Pasion and the Interpretation of Change in Tagalog Society," successfully defended in December 1973. The expanded thesis was retitled "Pasyon and Revolution: Popular Movements in the Philippines, 1840-1910," and published by the Ateneo de Manila University Press in 1979. As of 2020, the book was on its tenth printing.
Southeast Asia Program and as a book by the Mindanao State
University’s Research Center, Magindanao 1860-1888 remains the best
biography of a Magindanao orang besar who once ruled an area that
today encompasses the provinces of Maguindanao, North Cotabato,
South Cotabato and Sultan Kudarat. No other work has matched
the research and analytical rigor that Rey put into this small book.
In Magindanao 1860-1888, one sees the beginnings of a historical
approach that we would later associate with his more famous book
Pasyon and Revolution. Foremost is the meticulous teasing out of
the contradictions within “colonial sources” to reconstruct a picture
of Datu Utto which is a far cry from the Spanish image of a petty
autocrat who ruled solely by the sword. In Rey’s book, Utto became
someone whose power was based on diplomatic cunning, the
discriminating use of force, and an astute business sense. He
appeared literate in Spanish (or at the very least could converse in
the language), and was quite sensitive to the ups and downs of the trade
within the Magindanao region and beyond. At the height of
his power, Utto was treated as an equal by the Spanish, the latter
signing a treaty that acknowledged his authority in the Buayan and
Buluan areas and his de facto influence as far down south as
Sarangani bay. This was a practice long abandoned in the rest of
lowland Philippines, and associated with the more commerceoriented
Dutch and British, Spain’s foremost rivals in the maritime
Southeast Asian region.
The Spanish were never uncomfortable with it because it meant
putting leaders of these “savage” tribes in the same level as them.
The Spanish eventually neutralized Utto after they successfully split
his alliance and took control of his trading posts. Unfortunately
for Spain, the subjugation of Utto came too late in her reign. Andres
Bonifacio shortly led the Katipunan to declare independence at
Balintawak and began the process of dismantling the Spanish
colonial state.
...
Magindanao 1860-1888 is thus a local history text, a narrative
about the contentious relationship between Spain and the
Magindanaos, and an account of the exploits of yet another
Southeast Asian orang besar. This multilayered focus is the main
reason why the book is still unsurpassed despite its seeming
senescence. For the studies that came after the book had already
constricted their intellectual imagination to an area now determined
by the framework of the nation-state. Deeply influenced by the
dominating historiography of Teodoro Agoncillo and Renato
Constantino, these studies have also accepted the idea that
Mindanao was nothing more than a dark frontier and an
insignificant periphery of the Philippine nation-state. In a sense,
because of their limited focus they could not duplicate the multilayered
perspective that Rey’s book possesses. As such, they
remained unable to go beyond its analyses and conclusions.
- from the Foreword by Patricio N. Abinales
Lecture 2: Knowledge and Pacification: The Philippine-American War;
Lecture 3: Orientalism and the Study of Philippine Politics
Papers by Reynaldo C . Ileto
Although the physical setting of Karnow’s book is the Philippines, the Filipino actors in the drama are outnumbered at least two to one by Americans. The Filipinos are crucial to the narrative, as the negative “others” of the Americans whose story the book is really about. The American national imaginary is established and continually reinforced in writings about its cultural “others” –the position that Filipinos have occupied since their trouncing by the US Army in 1900 and bluntly manifested in the "alliance" against the imagined enemy of the day, China.
A careful look at Karnow’s sources reveals an intertextual relationship with predominantly American writings. The building blocks of the book are what these “scholarly” texts tell us about the Filipino-American war, the special (or should I say, exceptional) colonial relationship, collaboration and resistance under Japanese occupation, the U.S.-inspired political party system, the family politics that hijacked it, the rise and fall of Ferdinand Marcos, and the grim reality behind the restoration of democracy at the time of the book’s writing. These texts subscribe to the notion that, somehow, “tradition” has prevailed in the Philippines, which explains its failure to refashion itself in America’s image. The colonialists or “tutors” had no choice but, as benign and liberal overlords since the 1899-1902 war, to allow “tradition” or the “essence” of the Filipino character to survive and eventually reassert itself in the course of the century. History and tradition, certainly not the effects of the U.S. conquest, are to blame for the ills of the present.
This chapter examines the American academic writings that Karnow drew inspiration from. Among them are Norman Owen’s Compadre Colonialism, Carl Lande’s Leaders, Factions, and Parties, Alfred McCoy’s An Anarchy of Families, and Glenn May’s Social Engineering in the Philippines.
438, the so-called “Rizal Bill,” was debated in the halls of Congress. Senior politicians argued passionately about whether or not to pass a law that would require two nineteenth-century novels—Jose Rizal’s Noli me Tangere and El Filibusterismo—which were critical of Spanish Catholic priests as well as the defects of Filipino society at that time, to be read in their unexpurgated form by students in both public and private schools. The debate was echoed by newspaper columnists, Catholic priests, civic leaders, students, and ordinary Filipinos, making this an issue of national proportions. On the eve of the tenth anniversary of independence from the United States on 4 July 1946, there seemed to be an inordinate concern about the history of late Spanish rule. This chapter explores the reasons why.
This chapter looks into the circumstances that led Senators Jose Laurel and Claro Rector, who in 1956 were in the final stages of their political careers—to sponsor a Bill that creatively brings the past into the present in order to shape the future of the nation. In particular, it explores the ghostly presence of three distinct periods of Philippine history—Spanish, American, and Japanese imperial rule—in the rhetoric, thinking, and visions of these two politicians and others of their generation.
Given the accepted view that, owing to historical circumstances since 1896, “revolution” was intrinsic to the national self-definition, Agoncillo’s book had the effect of disseminating among the educated public a spirited reading of the Revolution of 1896 that exceeded what the state was heretofore prepared to accept.
...
Ganap versus Hukbalahap, Kabataang Makabayan versus Lapiang Malaya—these are distinctions that may make sense in conventional emplotments of history. But if we frame them in terms of what Laurel called the “forces that make a nation great,” the differences begin to blur and dissolve. Perhaps there is something to Nick Joaquin’s gut feeling that the dramatic events of 1966–1967 were, indeed, a continuation of the “Unfinished Revolution,” not of 1896–1898, but of 1942–1945.
(Introduction and Conclusion)
Part 2 of the book is about the Filipino-American War's entanglement with the politics of memory. It begins with a pictorial essay (Chapter 6) on how my father Rafael, born in 1920, had internalized the U.S. representaton of the war as "a great misunderstanding." His training at the U.S. Military Academy in West Point cemented his loyalty to America, on whose side he was happy to fight in the Pacific War and the Cold War. Rafael Ileto's West Point experience also brought him face to face with the America of his time, when racial tensions were defused by a near-universal desire to defeat America's Oriental "other'--Japan. Incidents wherein Rafael was mistaken for a Japanese only intensified his identification with White America, hence the change of his nickname from "Apeng" to "Rocky."
Rafael's training at West Point in 1940-43 is compared with my student days at Cornell University in 1967-70. It was a different America that I experienced. The Indochina War was at its height and I was drawn to the anti-war movement, identifying with the Vietnamese "enemy." This was also the time when the Filipino-American War was being resurrected and dubbed "the First Vietnam." I discovered records showing that my father's father, Francisco (1850-1945), had served the Republican Army as a spy in 1899. My father had never been told about this. To him the Americans were liberators, to whom, he believed, Filipinos owed a debt of gratitude.
Chapter 6 provides the reader with a better understanding of why current Defense Secretary Gibo Teodoro and Commodore Jay Tarriela are totally subservient to U.S. interests in the current confrontation with China. It has to do with a certain (mis)understanding of history and a deep-seated loyalty to an imperial benefactor that blinds them to the disaster that awaits the ordinary Filipino should war break out. General Rafael Ileto, whose remains lie in the Libingan ng mga Bayani (Cemetery of Heroes) is the prototype of this type of thinking and behavior.
Chapter 4 tells the story of how the mayor of Tiaong creatively managed relationships between his constituents, the U.S. Army garrison, and the guerilla chiefs in the margins. The Americans dubbed the Filipino mode of accommodation and resistance "amigo warfare." The herding of townspeople into "protected zones" or "concentration camps" ended local support for the guerilla forces, and enabled the interrogation and disciplining of a captive populace by the U.S. military.
Chapter 5 details the local experience of the U.S. Army's scorched-earth tactics to extinguish the resistance. Torture, interrogation, the spread of cholera, quarantine, mass starvation, and other calamities and forms of pressure led to the surrender of the remaining guerilla commanders in April-May 1902.
The aim of this section is to tell the story of the resistance to the U.S. invasion from the perspective of the townspeople--the inhabitants of the "pueblo" or "bayan"--instead of the traditional textbook focus on the contending U.S. and Republican standing armies in central Luzon.
Chapter 2 subtitles:
Municipal Rebels
The Banahaw Battalion
Norberto Mayo – Militar Ilustrado
Ladislao Masangcay – Jefe Local
“La Invación Americana”
The Guerrilla Regiments of Tiaong
“The shortcomings of municipal officers” are “chiefly survivals of the old system, known as ‘caciquismo’ . . . the tendency on the part of the Municipal officers, and especially of presidents, to exercise arbitrary powers which have not been conferred upon them by law. The ignorance of the common people is, in many instances, so great as to make such abuse of power easy.”
A year later, the Commission was blaming “caciquism” for the continuing lack of law and order in the countryside. Civil government, states its report of November 1902, should teach the ordinary people their rights under the law and to help them acquire “courage and independence sufficient to assert them against attempts by their fellow Filipinos to perpetuate the system of ‘caciquism,’ or liberally translated, ‘bossism’ by which they have heretofore been completely governed.” The language of the Commission’s report locates caciquism’s origins in the feudalistic past, here equated with “Spanish rule,” which is contrasted with the benevolent and progressive rule of the United States that will ultimately stamp out the evil called caciquism. But in the context of the war, this seemingly progressive discourse against caciquism can be seen as part of the arsenal of imperial weapons deployed during the U.S. Army’s determined campaigns in 1901–1902 to extinguish Filipino resistance in the countryside.
Politicians originating from the municipal scene, who, like Davao City mayor of twenty-two years Rodrigo Duterte, succeed in reaching the heights of national politics through a supposedly “flawed” electoral system, continue to be stigmatized by a model of politics built around the notion of caciquism—a curse supposedly imbedded in the political culture thanks to the “long dark night” of Spanish rule and the failure of U.S. tutelage. We have seen that this model of politics owes its provenance to the methods employed by American officials in neutralizing and delegitimizing resistance to the U.S. occupation led by members of the municipal elite.
Perhaps a turning point has been reached in the life of this century-old discourse when a mayor-president is able to lecture his audiences on the forgotten war against the United States—from the U.S. Army’s attack on the republican capital at Malolos in 1899 to its massacre of Muslims at Bud Dajo in 1906; when he waves around photographs of the Filipino casualties of war—not those tired old images of Japanese atrocities, mind you, but of the victims of a U.S. war of conquest; when he suggests that an apology from the United States is long-overdue, and insists that the Philippines has yet to be treated as equal and sovereign by the American “father” long after the granting of independence in 1946. Whether or not Duterte’s “rhetoric” signals a substantive change in our perceptions of the special relationship with the United States, the foregoing chapters of the book will hopefully have shown how the past is actively working in the present—that the recent turn of events is far from being an aberration in Philippine history.
CHAPTER 1. A Shared History of Wars
The Philippine Wars of George W. Bush 5
Forgetting the Filipino-American War 9
The Filipino-Japanese War 11
Liberation, Independence, History Wars 12
The Moro Wars 14
CHAPTER 2. The Republic in Southern Tagalog
Municipal Rebels 21
The Banahaw Battalion 26
Norberto Mayo – Militar Ilustrado 28
Ladislao Masangcay – Jefe Local 30
“La Invación Americana” 33
The Guerrilla Regiments of Tiaong 37
CHAPTER 3. Mobilizing “People of the Barrios” 43
An Awit in a Time of War 47
Biblical Time, Historia, Nación 49
Filipinos 59
Americano 67
CHAPTER 4. Población Politics in a Time of War
Mayor Pedro Cantos 77
A Failed Surrender 80
Inspector Herrera 82
Amigo Warfare 84
The Battle of Candelaria 86
Knowing the Enemy 89
Protected Zones or Concentration Camps? 94
Candelaria’s Trauma 97
5 The U.S. Conquest
“A Howling Wilderness” 104
Surrender, Redemption, Forgetting 106
The Cholera Invasion 110
War on Germs and Amigos 114
Sanitation and Resistance 117
PART II. MEMORY, HISTORY, AND POLITICS
CHAPTER 6. Father and Son in the Embrace of Uncle Sam
The Father: From San Isidro to West Point 132
The Son: From Quezon City to Ithaca 137
Rocky Ileto’s America 141
A Filipino at West Point 143
“Enemies” and “Friends” Revisited 148
Some Ten Years Later . . . 158
CHAPTER 7. Friendship and Forgetting
Wars with Japan, and the United States 165
A Voice from the Forgotten War 167
History in the Second Republic 170
Revisiting the Filipino-American War 175
An Awit of the War with Japan 178
King Bernardo and the Colliding Rocks 181
Unfinished Revolution of 1942–1945? 195
CHAPTER 8. The Return of Andres Bonifacio
Independence and the Question of Heroes 205
Revolt of the Masses, 1948 212
Katipunan in the Cold War 215
Bonifacio and Magsaysay 219
CHAPTER 9 History Wars: Rizal in 1956
Ghost of Spain 226
Rizal as American-made Hero 229
Ghost of Japan 231
The Catholic Church between Empires 234
PART III. KNOWLEDGE AND PACIFICATION
CHAPTER 10. Benevolent Pacification
Manila Ilustrados, Rural Despots 245
Caciquism as a Philippine Problem 249
Writing the War into History 253
The Great Misunderstanding 257
“Humanitarian Dimension” of a War on Terror 261
CHAPTER 11. Tutelage and Anarchy
Compadre Colonialism 270
Patrons, Clients, and Puppets 272
Leaders, Factions, and Parties 275
An Anarchy of Families 282
CHAPTER 12. The Boss-Mayor and His Critics
“Cacique Democracy” 289
Bossism in the Philippines 294
Friar Abuses, Indio Complaints 299
Rural Ilustrados 302
Who Are Rizal’s Caciques? 306
APPENDIX: Sa mga Kabataang Filipino (by Artemio Ricarte, 1942)
Endnotes 319
Bibliography 347
Index 357
(Published version of a previously uploaded paper with the same title)
This paper was drafted as a plenary lecture for the international conference on “The Malay World: Connecting the Past and the Present,” sponsored by the Philippine Historical Association and held in Manila on 14-16 September 2017.