New York—Lately, I have been reading a fair amount of historical materials that deal with the Philippines. I have always been interested in what the late nationalist historian Renato Constantino termed, variously, a “usable past,” “the past revisited,” and “the continuing past.”

The past, evidently, is never past. Always present, it constitutes a society’s DNA, providing clues to its behavior and character. A crucial factor in this is how terminology is constructed, the processes by which names are decided upon, and the uses to which we put them.

When, for instance, Ferdinand Magellan and his salty crew in 1521 found themselves enjoying the hospitality of the Visayans (a hospitality extended in part because our forebears were wary of the foreigners’ powerful guns), the intrepid Portuguese navigator thought to name the islands the Archipelago of San Lazaro, for it was on that saint’s feast day that his expedition espied the islands. Given the fact that he and his men had just survived a harrowing passage across the Pacific, he might have also been thinking that, like Lazarus being raised from the dead, they were fortunate to be rescued from near-death by the bounty and generosity of the Cebuanos.

Had Ruy de Villalobos not rechristened the archipelago Las Islas Filipinas in 1541, after the Spanish crown prince Felipe II, we might very well now be known as the Republic of San Lazaro, and ourselves referred to as what? Lazarites? Lazari?

If the Spanish hadn’t come along and Christianized the archipelago, and if subsequently the islands didn’t coalesce into an independent political entity, we might very well have become incorporated into Indonesia or Malaysia, our landscape marked by mosques and the crescent, and our colonial tutelage either under the Dutch or the British.

Another would-be christener was Artemio Ricarte, a general in the Philippine Revolution and the 1899 Philippine-American War, who doggedly and admirably refused to pledge allegiance to the United States. Though born in the Ilocos region, Ricarte was active in what was initially a Tagalog revolution, being a member of Aguinaldo’s Magdalo wing of the Katipunan.

According to Nick Joaquin’s excellent A Question of Heroes, “In July 1914, Ricarte proclaimed the constitution of a republic to be set up in the Philippines (including Guam), henceforth to be known as the Rizaline Islands and its people Rizalinos. The terms Filipino and Philippines were to be abolished, but the Philippine flag was to be kept. The Rizaline Republic, when established, would ‘recompense’ all those who had joined the ‘Liberating Army’ to ‘overthrow quickly and by whatever means the present foreign government.’ Cried Ricarte to his people: ‘I shall not consent that you remain under a foreign government and, fully decided, I shall cross the seas to seek you.’ “

And cross the seas he did: banished a number of times by the U.S. colonial authorities, the general finally found a more or less permanent home in Japan. Expelled from Hong Kong, where the British had until then provided Vibora (or the Viper, Ricarte’s nom de guerre) with refuge, per Joaquin, “the last rebel found a new asylum in Japan, teaching Spanish in a school in Tokyo, running a restaurant in Yokohama, and perishing from memory, from national memory during the ‘20s and the ‘30s of coddled amnesia. When he appeared among us in 1942, it was as if a ghost had come back from the grave.”

By then the Japanese were the archipelago’s new masters, dragging us forcibly into their Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, heralded by the triumphalist slogan, “Asia for Asians.” They brought the aging general back to what they—and he—had hoped would be a victorious if last hurrah. With his impeccable revolutionary credentials, he could perhaps be the president of the so-called independent republic.

But, as Joaquin points out, if in the late 19th century the revolutionaries looking to the Japanese as colonial liberators made sense, it seemed at the very least foolhardy now. Ricarte was viewed as a sellout, a collaborator. Sickly, disillusioned, he managed to flee to the Cordilleras, to Kalinga territory, and there he instructed his aide, Colonel Konochiro Ota, presumably in Spanish (Ota-san had been a student of his in Tokyo), per Joaquin, to “erect my tomb both in the Philippines and Japan,” giving up the ghost in July of 1945. If Ota did indeed erect a tomb, it has never been found.

The man whose name Ricarte proposed for the country had his own surname changed, from Mercado to Rizal. This was to throw the Spanish friar-hounds off the track who would have linked his nombre de familia to that of his older brother, Paciano, a protégé of Father José Burgos, canon of the Manila Cathedral, one of three clerics falsely implicated in the 1872 Cavite Mutiny, and garroted at the Luneta.

“Rizal” is of course punchier and more vibrant, to my mind, than Mercado. (Mercado itself was chosen by Rizal’s paternal ancestor, a 17th-century Chinese immigrant, to protect him and his family from Spanish hostility and at the same time indicate his mercantilist roots.) If Rizal had kept his patronymic, would Ricarte have proposed renaming our country as the Mercado Republic, and its inhabitants as Mercadistas? Mercadans?

(Interestingly enough, doing an Internet search for persons named José Rizal living in the United States, I came across fifteen individuals so named-- none for “Joseph Rizal” and six for “Joey Rizal.” The only one who most likely could get away with calling José “Joe” was Josephine Bracken, whose own nickname would of course have been Jo. Jo and Joe—names to carve on a tree trunk but not to inspire heroic and/or romantic tales.)

In the 1970s, during martial law, Marcos half-heartedly attempted to rename the nation “Maharlika,” part of his skewed notion of aristocratic lineage and dressed-up history. One foreign writer, easily duped by some practical jokers, seriously believed the term referred to the penis in a glorified manner.

So what is in a name? Plenty. One clear indication of how much power, negative or positive, a name holds is seen in the attitudes of many Filipino voters in the United States. Apparently, a good number have said that it would be difficult to vote for a candidate with the non-Anglo name of Barack Obama, especially with Hussein as a middle name—which by the way is a common Arab name. They state this sans apology, as though it were self-evident that only candidates with good, solid WASP names should run for the country’s highest office. Would they then profess to vote for Barack if instead his name were Kennedy? Surely not. The man would still be black—in their eyes, an insurmountable barrier.

What is glaringly self-evident is the lingering, deeply rooted legacy of colonialism, one of whose most noxious flowers is that of not just racism but racial self-hatred. When the Spanish friars compelled our ancestors to convert, it wasn’t just Christian names that were passed on but centuries’ worth of bigotry and parochial thinking. Hence the paradox that flourishes even today: Indios looking down on fellow indios.

Copyright Luis H. Francia 2008