Selective memory and digital archives

1998, the centennial of Philippine Independence, was a glorious time to be a Filipino historian. That year, I wrote 100 essays on various aspects of the Philippine Revolution for the front page of the Inquirer. It is a feat I do not think I want—or can—do again. Back then, I made use of primary source materials gathered from physical manuscripts, books, and photographs in libraries, archives, and museums both at home and abroad. Research is much easier these days for a new generation of historians, who have access to those same materials—and much more—online.

Philippine genealogical and relevant notarial records can be accessed via FamilySearch.org. Rare Filipiniana preserved in the National Library of the Philippines are now accessible on their “Tekno Aklatan” website. Much of the paper collection of the late President Manuel L. Quezon in the National Library has degraded, but the documents were preserved on microfilm decades ago by the University of Michigan’s Bentley Historical Library, which subsequently digitized them and put them online. Thousands of digitized photographs and many rare books are also available from the University of Michigan Library Digital Collections, organized under a page titled “The United States and its Territories, 1870–1925: The Age of Imperialism.” The Filipinas Heritage Library has placed some of its reference material online, as has the National Historical Commission of the Philippines’ Memory Project.

For those without a language barrier, rare printed Filipiniana from the Spanish colonial period (1565–1898) are accessible in specialist libraries across Manila. However, due to their age and fragile condition, physical handling may be restricted. Soft copies can be downloaded in high resolution from the Biblioteca Nacional de España Digital. I was told that researchers in the Archivo General de Indias in Seville are not allowed to photograph physical documents with their smartphones as they do in the United States. Yet, a vast array of rare manuscripts on the Philippines can still be downloaded online from the Portal de Archivos Españoles.

So far, the deepest research rabbit hole for me has been the US National Archives, which digitized all 682 microfilm reels containing the “Philippine Insurgent Records” and made them available online. Before this archive was physically transferred to the care of the National Library of the Philippines in 1957, it was estimated to contain roughly 3 tons of documents captured by the enemy during the Philippine–American War and sent to the US, where it became part of the records of the US Bureau of Insular Affairs. Different sources place the count at roughly 200,000 documents. With each document ranging from a single page to over a hundred, there must have been at least a million scraps of paper read and processed by Capt. J.R.M. Taylor, who selected what he deemed relevant for publication in a five-volume reference set (two volumes comprising a history of the Philippine–American War and three volumes of exhibits containing original manuscripts transcribed and translated from Spanish or Tagalog into English). Filed and numbered in folders and boxes marked “Selected Documents,” these comprise around 2,000 of the original 200,000 papers—meaning that countless untold histories of the period lie in wait for young Filipino historians to write about.

Requesting funds to publish Taylor’s volumes, the chief of the Bureau of Insular Affairs noted that these records were drawn from:

“… correspondence of [Emilio] Aguinaldo with his leaders, decrees for the government of the portion of the Philippines under his control, orders issued by his subordinates pursuant to his instructions, and general correspondence. There are also many papers which show the genesis of the movement for independence. These papers contain material for the formation of a definite opinion as to what the government formed by Emilio Aguinaldo and his followers really was, and accordingly give a measure for the capacity of the Filipinos to govern themselves. They are also of interest for historical reasons, as they give the Filipino side of the history of the insurrection … if they are ever going to be rendered available, they should be rendered so now, when the recollection of the events to which they relate is still fresh, and gaps and breaks in the narrative as given by them can be filled in. In addition, many of them were written with bad ink on poor paper, and they are fading…”

Looking at the scanned original manuscripts instead of the printed translations, I remember Inquirer editor in chief Letty Jimenez-Magsanoc, who did not congratulate me on the 100-day countdown, but instead asked: “Why do you have such a negative view of the past?”

I replied defensively, “That’s what the documents tell me. I didn’t pull that out of a hat.”

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‘Bagong luma’

Her question now haunts me. Do the primary sources really bring out the Filipino side of the story? Were these documents deliberately selected at the time to prove that Filipinos were incapable of self-government—that if granted independence, we would establish a government of anarchy and corruption, glimpses of which we see today?

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Comments are welcome at ambeth.ocampo@inquirer.net