Forgeries and false claims in Philippine history
ONE of the typical features of recently created nations is the elaboration of a historical narrative that provides legitimation to the existence of the country. The past gives legitimacy to the present and that search is not carried out innocently. Historians and cultural agents in general need to look for heroes and traitors, great men and women, old myths and legends, archival sources and material culture, etc. When José Rizal published in Paris an annotated edition of SucesosdelasIslas Filipinas (1609) by Antonio de Morga, he was trying to feed his own narrative: that the indigenous people of the archipelago had an advanced and industrious culture prior to the arrival of the Spaniards. But when the poem “SaAkingMgaKabatá” was attributed to José Rizal when he was only six years old, the creator of the forgery was only trying to exaggerate the genius of Rizal — whose memory, by the way, did not at all need that poem to magnify his figure. The forgery was debunked by Ambeth Ocampo and Virgilio Almario, though.
The same thing happened with the “Will of Fernando Malang Balagtas,” a document raised by Isabelo de los Reyes and whose dating — 1539! — would be enough to debunk any suggestion of authenticity. The forgery was elegantly proved by William Henry Scott. Better known is the case of Jose E. Marco, whose childishly fabricated documents were believed to be great discoveries by James A. Robertson, director of the National Library. The socalled Pavón manuscripts, dated 1838 to 1839, included Las antiguas leyendas de la Islas deNegros (The old legends of Negros Island), which included the “Kalantiaw Code,” a set of laws supposedly written in 1433. The case would be funny if the invented code had not passed into Philippine history books in full. President Ferdinand Marcos created the Order of Kalantiaw in 1971 and there is today a Kalantiaw shrine in the town of Batan, Aklan, Panay. Scotty, again, debunked the forgery in his 1968 doctoral dissertation for the University of Santo Tomas.
One more case is La Loba Negra (The Black Wolf), a novel falsely attributed to Fr. José Burgos. Its fakeness was unnoticed by Teodoro Agoncillo and E. San
Juan Jr., who edited a translation in 1970. Its fakeness was proven by Fr. John N. Schumacher soon after but, still, an opera by Francisco Feliciano based on the novel was presented in 1984. Still, an academic book by a University of the Phiippines professor saw the light in 2008 claiming the book was written by José Burgos.
If those forgeries are persistent it is because they are aimed at feeding the national pride, although, in the long run, they do little favor to the citizens of the Philippines.
Last Tuesday, I published a column article titled “Rice terraces were a consequence of Spanish colonization.” Surprisingly, the article went viral on social media. However, a respectable number of readers raised questions regarding the authenticity of the findings of Dr. Stephen Acabado ( University of California, Los Angeles). They seemed to be offended by his finding that the rice terraces are not 2,000 years old. Does it make the terraces less worthy? Not at all.
In this case, the old dating was given by United States anthropologist H. Otley Beyer, but it was just estimation, as with any scientific evidence. Beyer, unlike Marco, was not inventing a hoax, but just throwing a possible date, like a hypothesis. That would have meant that the rice terraces were contemporaries, for example, of the public works built by the Roman Empire. But science is science, and it is attached to data, methodology, observation and rigorous interpretation.
The findings of Acabado can be traced back to his researches from the year 2009, but last year, a team of 10 scholars from the US and the Philippines published in the prestigious JournalofFieldArcheology an article aptly titled “The Short History of the Ifugao Rice Terraces: A Local Response to the Spanish Conquest.” Archeo-botanical evidence and pottery residues show that the people of Ifugao used to cultivate taro, and that the sudden shift to wet rice cultivation happened around 1600 and kept happening during the Spanish presence in Luzon as a reaction to the pressures of the Spanish presence.
According to the researchers, “The migration to the interior of the mountain range was a conscious effort to consolidate their economic and political resources, which allowed them to resist Spanish conquest.” Their evidence are quite sound and any claim defending an older dating will have to debunk the mu.ltiple evidence provided by Acabado and company. Therefore, book histories need to be updated, again.