Readings on the Philippine revolution

College-level Philippine history is now taught using primary sources in a course called “Readings in Philippine History.” Its acronym,“RIPH,” reflects students’ feedback on death by boredom. The problem is not history or course content but a learning gap of seven to eight years. Only one course on Philippine history is taken in Grade 4 or 5 before students step into RIPH. Course designers intended to deepen student knowledge and appreciation of the Philippine past by studying history in the words of the actors themselves. For example, RIPH should ideally include texts from: Zhao Rugua’s description of the islands and the people in the 13th century, to Antonio Pigafetta’s account of the 1521 Battle of Mactan, and Antonio de Morga’s description of Filipinos in the 17th century. To contextualize our heroes, students should discuss the 1896 Trial of Rizal and the 1897 Trial of Bonifacio. If teachers cannot find suitable texts on their own and provide the proper background, all the good intentions of RIPH fail in actual execution in a classroom.

RIPH presumes knowledge of Philippine history from the prehistoric period to our times. But how can all that be taught and covered for a Grade 4 or 5 level? From the questions I receive from students daily, it is clear to me that many are left to their own devices, literally, and are not taught to use the school library or how to find primary sources from reliable sites online. Many are thrown into the waters of Philippine history without first teaching them how to float. How do you expect students to find texts online or in a physical library on their own if they do not even know how to use an index to a multivolume work, a skill presumed learned in K-12?

Basic primary sources on the 1896 Philippine Revolution, Andres Bonifacio, and the Katipunan that are useful for students and interested general readers should be accessible from any college library. The standard, secondary source for the period remains Teodoro A. Agoncillo’s “Revolt of the Masses: The Story of Andres Bonifacio and the Katipunan” (1956). Post-Agoncillo, the most prominent is Reynaldo Ileto’s “Pasyon and Revolution: Popular Movements in the Philippines, 1840-1910” (1979). Other secondary works recommended are: “The Philippine Revolution” by Teodoro M. Kalaw (first edition in Spanish, 1924, and in English, 1925), “The Philippine Revolution” by Gregorio Zaide (1968), Onofre D. Corpus’ “Saga and Triumph: The Filipino Revolution Against Spain” (2002), and last but not least, Milagros C. Guerrero’s “Luzon at War: Contradictions in Philippine Society, 1898-1902” (Ph.D. dissertation 1977, published 2015).

We do not lack primary sources from participants in the revolution who left memoirs. Emilio Aguinaldo has three: “Reseña Veridica de la Revolución Filipina” (1899) that historians thought was ghostwritten by Felipe Buencamino until Aguinaldo’s handwritten drafts in Tagalog surfaced in the United States Library of Congress; “Mga Gunita ng Himagsikan” (prepared from 1928-1946) in translation became “Memoirs of the Revolution” (1967) published to disown the 1957 “A Second Look at America,” which Aguinaldo co-authored with Vicente Albano Pacis.

Other memoirs are: Artemio Ricarte’s “Himagsikan nang mga Filipino laban sa Kastila” first published in Yokohama, Japan in 1927, English translation “Memoirs of General Artemio Ricarte” (1963); Santiago Alvarez serialized his memoirs from 1927 to 1928 in the Tagalog weekly “Sampaguita,” it was translated by Carolina Malay as “The Katipunan and the Revolution: Memoirs of a General” (1992); Carlos Ronquillo’s “Ilang Talata tungkol sa Paghihimagsik nang 1896-97” (1996); and last but not least is the lone work by a woman, Gregoria de Jesus’ “Mga Tala ng Aking Buhay” (1928).

Many of the original documents in the hands of Andres Bonifacio have been lured out of hiding by the six-figure sums paid for them at recent auctions. Previously inaccessible in private collections, these documents were made public at auction previews and remain accessible on the website of the Leon Gallery, which allowed me to handle, examine, and document the originals before they slipped away again from one private collection to another. Being allergic to book dust, I prefer to work with digital copies because these can be magnified and color-adjusted for easy reading.

Materials that need to be studied are the Katipunan documents in the Spanish Archives that have been made available to the National Historical Commission of the Philippines. Historian Jim Richardson has transcribed, translated, and annotated much of these and published them in “The Light of Liberty: Documents and Studies in the Katipunan, 1892-1897” (2013). A companion volume also by Richardson is “The Fight for Liberty: Notes on Andres Bonifacio and the Beginnings of the Philippine Revolution” (2023), which he shared previously on his blog. These volumes supplement the compilation of documents by the Jesuits Pedro de Achutegui and Miguel Bernad “Emilio Aguinaldo and the Revolution of 1896” (1973).