Old news, new insight
Students who laugh sheepishly when I tell them that there is a lot more to the internet than TikTok and porn have been uncovered. They surely paint me as a joyless nerd who spends countless hours surfing: the Biblioteca Nacional de España, the Archivo General de las Indias, the United States Library of Congress, or the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin in search of rare “Filipiniana.” There are local sources as well: the National Library of the Philippines Digital Collection, the Memory Project of the National Historical Commission of the Philippines, the Filipinas Heritage Library, and even the University of the Philippines and the University of Santo Tomas libraries have digital collections. My life and career would have been way easier if I had these 40 years ago.
In those days, a historian needed to go to a physical library to access physical books, an archive to access physical manuscripts, or a museum to view or handle physical artifacts. Filipino historians had to travel abroad to access physical materials in various libraries, archives, and museums. With no smartphones, one had to reproduce materials as photographs, photostats, or plain paper (Xerox) copies. Since reproduction could be costly, the only way to bring materials home was to copy them by hand verbatim or take notes. Once, I had a portable typewriter that led to complaints from the other guests at the hostel I was staying in. With a laptop, tablet, or smartphone, research is so much easier.
Like many historians, I ruined my eyesight poring over faded manuscripts or squinting at the glare of a microfilm machine. The newspaper website I have been trawling for the past year yielded revolutionary newspapers from 1898-1899: “La Independencia” (edited by Antonio Luna), “La Republica Filipina” (platform of Pedro Paterno), and “Heraldo de la Revolucion” (later “Heraldo Filipino”), the official bilingual (Spanish-Tagalog) newspaper of the Aguinaldo or Malolos government. I first came across physical copies of these at the Lopez Museum and Library, and now they are available online and downloadable for free. These scanned newspapers also have OCR or “Optical Character Recognition,” so when you type in a keyword, all the references are generated. It saves time leafing through page by page in search of a particular name, place, date, or event.
Much of the material is engaging, but few items can be worked on to fill a “Looking Back” column. I just keep these bits and pieces of “useless information,” knowing that one day, with the right associated material, what was once a stray historical reference can be useful or relevant. Due to speaking engagements last month in Hong Kong and Macau, I focused on their newspapers from 1895 to 1899, and found odd articles. In November 1897, a dispatch from Singapore reported on a German national who entered the races with a horse named “Aguinaldo.” This would have gone unnoticed except that the Spanish consul in Singapore announced that, “he would not attend the Races [because] it was highly improper of the British Government to allow the horse to be named [after Emilio Aguinaldo, the name of the rebel leader of the Philippines] and that was an insult to Spain!”
There is a lot of material from 1899 to the 1900s concerning Apolinario Mabini in the Hong Kong papers. On July 21, 1899, The Hong Kong Telegraph carried a special section on “Philippine News” from correspondents in the rebel camp partial to the Filipino side in the war of independence against the US. Quoting from the newspaper El Progreso, it was reported that Señor Mabini:
“late president of the Filipino Government has now retired from political life and is quietly living in a small village named Cuyapo in the province of Nueva Ecija. Some startling rumors are more current in this capital [Manila] as to the state of his health, which was known to have been enfeebled for a long time past.”
After his capture by the enemy, Mabini was jailed in Manila but was later released in deference to his meekness and disability. The news item, “Mabini at Liberty” from Oct. 5, 1900, reads:
“Last Sunday, General [Arthur] McArthur liberated the poor old paralytic Sr. Mabini, who has been slowly failing in the Anda Street jail. Mabini is probably the staunchest and ‘brainiest’ insurgent that the war has produced. In spite of his shattered and useless body, he has been at all times the head and centre of the insurrection. He has been most considerately treated through all the months of confinement, and he has been more the guest of the government than a prisoner of war. Once before, he was liberated, but his rash utterances soon caused his rearrest. He still refuses to swear allegiance to the United States, but he agrees to assume a passive attitude and not stir up trouble.”
On May 19, 1903, the Hong Kong Telegraph carried sad news: “Mabini, the ‘irreconciliable,’ the ‘leader,’ the ‘brains,’ backbone, and sinew of Aguinaldo’s insurrectory government, passed away at his home in Manila, says the Cablenews. Late Wednesday evening as a result of cholera.”
Mabini was disabled, but in the eyes of the enemy, he was the most dangerous man in Manila.
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Comments are welcome at ambeth.ocampo@inquirer.net
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