3.  What was the status of the Filipino State in 1571?

Its status was that of a Province of Spain administered through the vice-kingdom of New Spain which is Mexico today.

At the beginning, the Filipino State was treated as a missionary and military outpost by its creators. The Spanish military was there to guard and protect the missionaries and the scant Spanish civil population that came to settle in the Islands.

But this situation does not affect the other fact that the constituents of the newly formed Filipino State were primarily the Spanish Conquistadores followed by the indigenous (mostly Tagalog, Pampango and Visayan) and Chinese population that accepted the King of Spain as their sovereign.

Naturally, by accepting the Spanish King as theirs, all those mentioned became Spanish citizens in fact.  And as Spanish citizens they shared in whatever attributes of sovereignty that Spain had at that time.

This is the reason why Spain was referred to as their State’s Mother Country. And this also may explain why Filipinos stood with Spain, for almost four hundred years, against all the several invasions of their islands launched by the Dutch, Limahong and the British.

We may add that under the United States of America, the Filipinos stood by her against Japan because they  lived with the thought of sharing with Americans their country’s attribute of sovereignty even if General MacArthur, unlike Sim�n de Anda, chosed to flee from the Philippines leaving Filipinos to themselves with the phrase ‘I shall return’.

The tragedy of the Filipino war veterans waiting for American compensations in the form of a grant of U.S. citizenship with all its benefits, is a drama that we are witnessing up to now and well into the new millennium. But this fact is merely noted as a footnote to the relative “attribute of sovereignty” due the existing Filipino State.

Going back to the establishment of the Filipino State in 1571, we moreover note that when the reigning King of Spain became Felipe II, the name Felipeno acquired a more pragmatic connotation. It meant ‘one who paid tribute, or taxes’, to Felipe. Thus Felipenos were also the Indios who rendered service in his name and the Chinos Cristianos that paid the necessary licencia  (a form of tax) to him for doing business in the Islas Felipenas. The other Felipenos were, or course, the Spanish Conquistadores and Frailes that served Felipe II.

 (As a linguistic note, we remind our co-Filipinos that the two letters “E” in Felipeno were eventually replaced with the letter “I” because the indigenous Al�bata did not have neither an “E” nor an “O” in its composition. Being influenced by Arabic it only had three vowels or phonemes, —-namely A, I, U).

The form of government that came with the founding of the FILIPINO STATE was monarchial and it had the main feature of being one with the Catholic Church because of the Patronato Real. This was an agreement of unity between Madrid and Rome.

From this Patronato Real, the unity between the Spanish monarch and the Pope produced the first aim of Spanish colonization which is to Christianize.

By 1599, or twenty eight years after the founding of the Filipino State, a Synod was organized in Manila wherein all the Maharlic� Chieftains, R�gulos, Principales, Rajahs and Datus or heads, of the  different Ethnic States that were still existing in the entire archipelago, were assembled in Manila to answer the simple question (called a requirimiento) if they accepted, or did not, the Spanish King as their sovereign. (See John Leddy Phelan’s “The Hispanization of the Philippines”, p. 25 as edited and presented by historian Renato Constantino’s Filipiniana Reprint Series, Manila, 1985).

The Synod had this one simple and main question addressed to all the representatives of the native Ethnic States. “Do you accept the King of Spain as your lawful sovereign?”

The question was translated to them in all their different native languages.

Before answering Yes, the Chieftains conferred among themselves and then frankly asked the Spaniards under Legaspi what benefits they would get if they elected the Spanish King as their sovereign.

The Spanish answers were, more or less, the following:

(1) They would have the organizational benefits of Christianity since their acceptance of the Catholic Religion will not only mean the salvation of their souls but also the conversion of their barangays into sitios, their several sitios into a barrio, their several barrios into a municipio, their several municipios into a provincia with a cabecera, and, their several provincias into a “estado regional” under a Concejo de Indias of the Crown of Spain. By the 1800s, Las Islas Felipenas would fall under the Ministerio de Ultramar as an over-sea province (Provincia de Ultramar) along with Cuba and Puerto Rico.

(2) The indigenous people would become, so to speak, CITIZENS of Spain because “your friends will be our friends and your enemies will be our enemies”, in the tenor of the Requirimiento read to them.

(3) They would also have a better economy, from one that was of subsistence in character to one that was utilitarian. This would occur upon the arrival of new industrial and agricultural plants, root crops and vegetables like the maize, the caf� bean, the chocolate cacao, patties, camotelc, (camote) tobacco, cassava, papaya, man�, lanca, calabaza, tomatoes, onions, sincamatelc, (sincamas) camachictelc (camachile), etcetera, aside from the introduction of the arado (araro) and the azad�n (asarol), the sistema de caj�n of planting rice and a working irrigation system with the introduction of the horse (kabayo), the cow (Baka), the carabao (imported from Vietnam), the sheep and new fowl like the ganza, the pavo and a new breed of pato.

(4) From Manila, the capital city, a national system of government would improve the local pre-Hispanic system of governance for every Ethnic State since with Christianization and the founding of the pueblos or municipios the integration into one, single, Filipino State of all the previously different local, or ethnic, nations would be achieved.

(5) There were other things, relevant to a national Filipino infrastructure, that were possibly mentioned and explained like the organization of parochial schools, colleges and a university (UST), a foreign trade v�a the Acapulco-Manila Galleons, a system of land ownership with the encomiendas that would later become partitioned into haciendas, an inter-island transportation system, etc..

(6) The gradual spread of Spanish, along with the principal languages (Tagalog, Bisaya and Ilocano) as the primary official language of the courts and public documents would be the hallmark of progress. The mentioned principal native languages would also be developed with a common phonetic and Hispanic alphabet in order to convert them into better tools of Christianization and basic European civilization and education for the indigenous people.

*** Webmaster’s Note: Guillermo Gomez Rivera is a Premio Zobel awardee, a member of the Academia Filipina and former National Language Committee Secretary, Philippine Constitutional Convention 1971-73.