REVIEW: Munching on popcorn with fellow Mindanawons as we watch the idea of the Philippine nation-state unravel

BOOK: Jose Rizal, Nationhood and the Anticolonial Imagination
Author: Filomeno Aguilar, Jr. 
Publisher: Ateneo Press 2025

QUEZON CITY (MindaNews / 15 November) — I impishly thought of this title while discussing the pacto de sangre with Carol Hau over email. We marveled at how what she calls a “policy instrument,” which was “just part of a large arsenal of polycraft” deployed by Southeast Asian strongmen had turned into a fable about Spanish accomplishments, thanks to the pundit Ricardo de Puga. 

The blood agreement was then picked up by the ilustrados, who turned hijo de Puga’s arguments upside down to insist that there was already a pre-colonial Philippine civilization whose chiefs signed international treaties with other kingdoms, but who were then subsequently betrayed by the Spanish. 

What Marcelo del Pilar wrote about and painted beautifully by Juan Luna, the Botong Francisco of the ilustrados, would inspire Andres Bonifacio to incorporate the pacto de sangre as part of the Himagsikan ng mga Katagalugan, unmindful of the fact that this happened in Lopez Jaena’s Cavisayan. These were also formally inscribed by the revolutionary government’s declaration of independence, until the killjoy Americans resurrected the lack of national unity, prompting post-colonial Filipino historians – including those who wrote the dictator’s Tadhana – to “correct” this by returning to the trope of Spanish deviousness.

Jun resurrects the 1967 claim by fellow Cornellian, Cesar Adib Majul, but does the latter better by showing us the reason for this. He suggests that nationalist history has been infected by that dreadful disease called primordialism where “our complex history under Spain” has been replaced by this illusion that there was already a Philippines when the Spanish appeared. This thinking  – he writes – “has endured from the late 19^th century until the present.” 

So where does the popcorn crunching come in? Well, it is obvious that the ilustrados never cared about Mindanao, and had nothing but ill-will against those nasty Moros who would have absorbed the rest of the islands had the Spanish not shown up. Rizal and barkada made no mention of the great Magindanao and Sulu Sultanates, nor were aware of these states’ extensive relationships with other Southeast Asian orang besar and with China. Ilustrado cosmopolitanism here was palpably European (Rome, Greece, and the kingdoms of Sikatuna were the best comparisons) and their provincialism that of the Christian lowlands (excluding the Intsik!). 

Sure Rizal took a trip to Indonesia, and once entertained resettling his family to Borneo, while Marcelo del Pilar mentioned Mindanao. But you see no hint of a decolonizing mind in the former as suggested by the upcoming talk “Jose Rizal Beyond Borders” in fascist Singapore’s Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, and del Pilar actually thought that Mindanao and the Marianas be best made districts of Cebu, showing a profound ignorance of things south of Manila.

Last week, during a Zoom discussion with faculty and students from the University of the Southern Philippines, a student asked how we should write Mindanao history in relation to the quest for national identity. In the past, I thought this merely involved shifting lenses from the imperial capital Manila to Taganak Island in the Sulu-Sabah “border,” then we can look at Philippine history upside down of which an undying theme is Manila’s never-ending repression of Mindanao (I once asked a Moro elder in Cotabato what was his first encounter with the ”national government,” and he answered that it was a soldier pointing a gun at him).

Jun’s book adds a fascinating twist to this reorientation, by allowing those of us living in and loyal to the margins to witness how profoundly problematic and even dubious the nation’s narrative has turned out to be. Mindanawons like me delight in his suggestion that we explore the archipelago as part an “intentionally ambiguous realm called Eastern Southeast Asia.” The Japanese scholar Takeshi Hamashita’s studies on Nanyang (“the South Seas”), and Heather Sutherland’s new book, Safeways and Gatekeepers: Trade and State in the Eastern Archipelago of Southeast Asia, c1600-c1906, not only show that this realm is far from ambiguous. They, and Jun’s book, also recenter our island and the Sulu archipelago and marginalize Manila. More popcorn please!!!

Let me close with two more points. Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities permeates Jun’s book, but with the deference also comes the criticism. Yes, the nation is being imagined by the likes of Rizal, yet much of the ilustrados’ subplots of that imagining were a relentless invention of tradition via the Morga annotations, the migration theories, and the pacto de sangre. It appears Eric Hobsbawm was not entirely wrong after all when he expressed his second thoughts on Anderson’s sentimentalism. 

The other is Jun’s citation of Sheila Fitzpatrick, whose works on Soviet social history upended the dominant American totalitarian school of Stalinist Russia. For decades, Fitzpatrick was tagged a pro-communist and treated as persona non grata in the male-dominated Soviet Studies. Then the Soviet Union collapsed, and with it, the totalitarian illusion. In her senior year, Sheila Fitzpatrick received the distinction that had once been denied her. 

Nationalist brickbats will surely come Jun’s way given how subversive of the Philippine nation-state’s mythology it is. Still, given how pathetic the scholarly production of the heirs of the Tadhana-Pantayong Pananaw school (most are hacks and publicists), he will likely be spared the same long-term opprobrium of these authoritarian primordialists. 

(An earlier version of this piece was delivered as a response during the launching of Filomeno Aguilar, Jr.’s book at Ateneo de Manila University’s Arete Museum on November 14, 2025)

(Patricio N. Abinales has retired from his day job as Professor at the Department of Asian Studies, University of Hawaii-Manoa, and plans to go around Mindanao next year).