What is the Philippines like? and what sort of art do its artist make?
This essay tries to answer the first question and gives the context for their work. The discussion of what sort of art they make is mainly to be found in the 23 short essays that discuss each artist.
Probably you know that the Philippines is a tropical country with some beautiful beaches and that it gets hit by terrible typhoons. The Filipino you are most likely to have heard of is the boxer Manny Pacquiao who, you may be surprised to read is also a senator in the Philippines parliament. The Filipina you are most likely to have heard of is Imelda Marcos who with her husband President Ferdinand Marcos was driven out of the country, leaving behind a vast collection of over three thousand pairs of shoes. You may be surprised to read that despite being accused of stealing billions of dollars from the country, she is back in the Philippines and is in congress and that her daughter Imee, like Pacquiao, has recently been elected as a senator.[1]
It is a country about the same size as Italy but spread across 7107 islands and with a population nearly twice as large.[2] Typhoons, come every year, hitting the East coast most severely. The consensus is they are getting worse with global warming. There are thirty-seven active volcanoes, but they have made the soil especially fertile. We get earthquakes too, sometimes very bad ones. The cathedral of Manila has been destroyed by earth quakes four times.[3]
To someone living in Slovakia or, indeed, any European nation the Philippines must seem “a faraway country of which we know nothing.” However, those words should make us pause, for they are how Neville Chamberlain described Czechoslovakia in 1938 when he returned from Munich having appeased Hitler by giving him permission to march into the Sudetenland and effectively dismantle that “far away country”. It was a milestone on the road to a world war, for in fact even then no country in Europe was “far away” – they were all connected by history, trade and culture.[4]
Today it is the whole world that is connected – by air travel, the container trade and, of course, the internet.
Moreover, when we as Europeans, start to look at a country such as the Philippines we begin to recognize, in similar or dissimilar guises, the same problems, concerns and desires as we have: ecological degradation, income inequality, corruption and the need for clean democracy, urban congestion, self-identity, the desire for spiritual grace, a home of your own, getting by and making do… and so on.
What of the artists? What sort of people are they? How do they respond to the issues of today, both global and those specific to their own country?
And here the subtitle of this exhibition, “Twenty-three artists from the Philippines”, acts as a reminder or warning: artists are, above all else, makers, not political commentators. This is an exhibition of individual artists, each with their own vision and language. All are affected by their environment, all respond to it, but that response is often coded or unconscious. As artists they often work instinctively, normally concerned with making in a way that either seems right or that challenges them. No-one goes into the studio thinking “I will make Filipino art” or “I will make a work about the need for clean democracy” – or not very often.
HISTORY AND REPRESENTATION
Two artists in this exhibition have often referred back to Filipino painters of the late nineteenth century: Buen Calubayan to Juan Luna, Jill Paz to Félix Resurrecíon Hidalgo. Every book in the Philippines will tell you that Luna and Hidalgo won the first gold and a silver prize in the 1884 Exposicíon Nacional de Bellas Artes in Madrid for their paintings Spolarium by Luna and Las Virgenes Cristianas Expuestas al Populacho (The Christian Virgins Exposed to the Populace) by Hidalgo. They have become foundational works for the Philippines. They are seen as emblematic of the colonial persecution of Filipinos: dead gladiators dragged of the arena to be stripped of their armour, Christian women stripped and made available as slaves in front of lecherous Roman men. Schoolchildren, police and army cadets are taken to see the Spolarium in Manila’s National Gallery as an inducement to patriotism.
Juan Luna, Spolarium, 1884. 422 x 766cm. National Museum of the Philippines. Plus police cadets having a lesson in patriotism.
2. Félix Resurrecíon Hidalgo Las virgenes Cristianas expuestas al populacho (The Christian Virgins Exposed to the Populace).
Why should two nineteenth century academic paintings be so valued? Because they helped give the people belief in themselves. That they could perform as equals with their colonial masters. What art though was there in the Philippines before 1884?
3. Various bulols as shown at Gallery Mabini 1335
About 170 different languages or dialects are still spoken in the Philippines: people are very aware of their own language or ethnic grouping: Cebuano, Ilocano, Tagalog, etc. (Most artists live in the Tagalog speaking areas around Manila.) The Igorot tribes who live in the mountains of Northern Luzon were never Christianised by the Spanish and their art, especially their bulul, wood carvings of ancestors who act as rice guardians, is often seen as indicative of what pre-Christian art elsewhere would have been like.[5]
But most Filipinos became passionate Christians, devoted to the Virgin Mary and the infant Jesus. Their society had been, if not fully matriarchal, one where women were treated as equals. So instead of bululs the carvers made skilful, beautiful images of the Virgin and child for the faithful to adore.
4. Our Lady of La Naval de Manila, 1593, c.140cm high, ivory and wood. Clothing and jewellery added later. The oldest dated carvng in the Philippines
In 1521 Magellan had visited the islands on his journey around the world. In 1565 López de Legazpi led an expedition from Spanish Mexico to colonise the islands, he brought with him six Augustinian friars. Colonisation and Christianisation went hand in hand. Muslims were driven out of all but the southernmost islands of the archipelago. Today the Philippines is perhaps the most Catholic country in the world: perhaps eighty per cent of the population are regular Catholic church goers. It is the only nation, other than the Vatican, where divorce is not allowed. The church struggled long to ban contraception but the 2014 Reproductive Health Bill aimed to get free contraception to all who wanted it. No politician would dare to propose legalising abortion. (Not surprisingly, over-population is now a massive problem for the Philippines: when the Spanish came it was estimated to be about one million, by 1900 it was about seven million, now it is well over one hundred and eight million.)
Indicatively, opposition to Spanish rule began with religion. The racism of Spanish rule was typified by the injunction that Filipino men could not tuck their shirt in and that, despite their Catholic fervour, they could not aspire to the higher reaches of the church. In 1872 three much admired Filipino priests were garrotted in public on trumped up charges of insurrection. One of them, Fr. José Burgos had regularly castigated the Friars for their corruption and desire to ‘Keep the poor natives in a state of ignorance and boorishness.’[6] The Friars had long refused to teach the natives Spanish, the language then of power. The Jesuits had been expelled in 1768 from the Philippines, as they were from other Spanish, Portuguese and French colonies, precisely because they sought to educate the Filipinos and supposedly give them “ideas above their station.”
Jill Paz, who is herself a descendent of Hidalgo, (creator of The Christian Virgins exposed to the Populace) left the Philippines aged one for the USA and who has only recently returned, was curious: why in the Philippines was Hidalgo seen as a “master” of painting, but in the USA he was just one of many minor academic painters that were unmentioned in books that told the history of art?[7]
She has chosen in many of her works to combine images by her iconic forebear with another icon of Filipino culture, the balikbayan box, either intact or broken down as a surface to paint on.
5. Balikbayan Boxes awaiting delivery
Balikbayan is Tagalog for returning Filipino. Supposedly, eleven per cent of the Filipino population, twenty-two per cent of the working age population now live abroad as either long term residents or temporary workers. These OFWs = (Overseas Foreign Workers) send back money for their families. In 2018 they officially they sent back 31 billion US dollars – if more informal money transfers were included probably over 40 billion. Family structures are very strong: children assume they should support their parents once they are adults. Mothers will sometimes leave their children with relatives and grow abroad to earn money. There are close on four million Filipinos in the USA, nearly a million in Saudi Arabia, a hundred and fifty thousand in the UK, thirty thousand in Austria, there is a Filipino community in Bratislava. Sadly, one of them, Henry Acorda, was murdered last year.
As a gesture of thanks from the government OFWs are allowed to send special balikbayan boxes back home free of any import duties. The balikbayan companies pledge to deliver to the most obscure community. It makes it easy to send back not only money but presents and luxuries. There is a strong tradition of Pasolubong, giving gifts. If you fly to the Philippines you will see many returning Filipinos proudly carrying teddy bears and other soft toys for nephews and nieces,
Calubayan apart from re-working Luna’s great painting, also has an especial interest in the act and politics of representation. Ideologically, what Filipino artists make, like artists from any colonised or marginalised nation or community, is an act of Re-representation, explicit or implicit. The act of colonisation is always an act of naming and representation: this land belongs to Philip[8]: you are primitive, we are civilised.
This exhibition above all else focuses on representation.
In an ongoing series of paintings Annie Cabigting has painted people looking at paintings. In paintings like the one exhibited here we see a live dark-skinned woman looking at a painting by a dead white man, Mondrian. The inevitable questions arise: can they share a culture as equals? Yes, of course. There have been enough good and on-the-ball artists coming out of the Philippines in recent decades to subdue any sense of inferiority: there is no need to mention Luna and Hidalgo’s prizes anymore. Furthermore, as this exhibition shows there are as many good female artists in the Philippines as male ones.
TRAFFIC AND TRAPOS
It apparently became official last year: Manila has the worst traffic in the world. As in many other countries people have flooded from the countryside in search of work. It is chronically crowded: there are perhaps two million people without a permanent home. The infrastructure, especially the rail network, has not kept pace with the growth of the city. It is not uncommon for someone to spend so much time commuting to and from work they must sleep once they get home and go back to work immediately on waking. Kiri Dalena told me recently it took her six hours to get from the airport to her home on the other side of Manila – a drive of about ten kilometres.
You get used to spending long periods in traffic jams. The wall installation by John Santos developed from his thoughts when stuck in a jam: a road that once you get close enough to see properly, is clearly taking you nowhere. If travelling in Manila one takes a smart phone or book to keep oneself occupied. Street sellers wander around the stalled cars and jeepneys selling cold water, snacks, newspapers and trapos. Trapo in Tagalog means “rag” but it also stands as an abbreviation of Traditional Politician, i.e. a corrupt one. The two installations by Poklong Anading are covered in the trapos, rags bound together for cleaning or polishing purposes.
Though graft has contributed to the weak infrastructure, especially the lack of public transport, another factor was the sloth of the Spanish colonial administration and the uncertainty of the succeeding American administration as to what to do with the country they had acquired from Spain. Even American politicians such as Theodore Roosevelt who had argued for the annexation and conquest of the Philippines came to see their new colony as a mistake and an “expensive nuisance.”[9]
The Filipinos who had rebelled against the Spanish and liberated nearly all the country had declared their independence in 1898, but within months American soldiers were spreading out across the island pursuing the poorly armed revolutionary army. The American soldiers, who had come straight from the wars against the indigenous tribes of America (the “Indians”) were profoundly racist and denigrated the Filipinos as “gugu”. Sixty years later this term would morph into calling the Vietnamese “gooks.” There were massacres, torture and atrocities; concentration camps were used and villages torched. It was an extremely savage war. Perhaps as many as a million people died. But the wealthy, land-owning families soon sided with the Americans, as they had with the Spanish and as many of them would do with the Japanese in 1942.
Like many – probably all – colonised people Filipinos feel they have been demeaned firstly by the Spanish, then the Americans. The feeling of being patronised and condescended by the Americans was epitomised by President McKinley’s notorious claim that it was the American duty to “educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilise and Christianise them.” An extraordinary claim seeing as how the Philippines had been catholic for over three hundred years, and that the first university in Asia (the University of St. Thomas in Manila) had been set up there in 1611 – twenty-five years before the founding of Harvard University.
But American culture has had a massive impact on the Philippines, not just in an addiction to KFC, beauty pageants and American sports such as basketball, but also in the introduction of modernism. In the years after the second world war artistic modernism, especially abstract painting was far more “advanced” than in any other country of South-east Asia. Artist such as Hernando Ocampo and Jose Joya were significant painters. Above all a national art world of artists, galleries, critics and collectors was developing.
6. Jose Joya, Granadean Arabesque,1958, oil on canvas, 305 x 118cm, Collection Ateneo Art Gallery
THE EXERCISE OF DEMOCRACY
Democracy isn’t just about voting for your leaders every few years, it is also about the right to question, criticise and protest. Because of how democracy works, or fails to work, in the Philippines, questions and criticism by press and others are especially important. As in many other countries politics has been dominated by patronage. The Tagalog phrase “Utang na loob” (the debt you owe to a patron) typifies the way politics is framed by promises and personal obligations. As Luis Francia in his history of the Philippines wrote, ‘post-war party politics became almost exclusively personal politics. With the implicit view that governance was primarily for the benefit of those in power, the system encouraged personal and individual rather than party loyalty, with turncoats rewarded rather than punished. Short-term interests invariably prevailed over long-term ones.’[10] Strong political parties with established constituencies and policies have not emerged.[11]
Kiri Dalena and Cian Dayrit both work as activists as well as making art. Dayrit’s concerns are with land ownership, the land reform promised after the fall of the Marcos regime was flawed. Large estates and businesses continue to push or squeeze the weak and poor off what they believed was their land. In recent years Dalena has been engaged with the Artist’s Alliance in both protesting the war of drugs and aiding the victims. President Duterte was elected in 2015 as a sort of Judge Dredd – tough but fair. He promised to rid the country of drugs, especially crystal meth or shabu, by declaring war on drug pushers and users. Over five thousand deaths are acknowledged by the police but it is assumed the true figure is much higher.
7. Artist Alliance protest in Oporto, Portugal, 2019, photo Kiri Dalena
As has been acknowledged by Duterte, some in the police are corrupt and there is considerable concern that apart from extra-judicial killings by vigilante groups many of those that have been killed by police were if not innocent, certainly shot and then framed so the police could claim it was self-defence. How this is done is what has provoked the two works shown here by Mike Adrao, not normally a political artist.
Perhaps above all, what concerns people, as it does Leslie de Chavez here, is the Marcos dictatorship, how so few people involved in it were punished and how, in an age of populism, it could return.
SURVIVING AS ARTISTS
Many of these artists (de Chavez and Anading for example) have worked as graphic designers, or production designers (Cordero,) but very few of them have taught: the art school system in the Philippines does not revolve around practising artists coming to in to do occasional teaching.
There is very little state or municipal support for the visual art in the Philippines, and much of what there is is focused on traditional forms of craft – heritage. Some older artists speak nostalgically of the support for art given up to 1986 by CCP. (The Cultural Center of the Philippines, opened in 1970 by Imelda Marcos whose personal project it was.) But after the 1986 fall of the Marcos regime there was to be very little government support for art: ‘there was so much hatred for everything that Imelda Marcos did and CCP was her masterpiece.’[12] Art itself seemed tainted by association. However, hopefully a sign of a greater commitment has been the government support for a pavilion at the Venice Biennale since 2015.
There a number of small museums attached to universities which work hard to exhibit contemporary art (Vargas museum at UP, Ateneo Art Gallery at Ateneo University, MCAD at St Benilde’s) but none of them have funds to actually acquire art.
In the first decade of this century the energy was mainly in alternative spaces, but in the last ten years as the number of collectors have grown and the Galleries became more ambitious the energy as mainly been there. They, and the collectors, are growing more open to challenging art. All these artists are surviving, more or less, by sales and for some by occasional residencies or performances abroad.
Weary of the conservatism of the art fairs in the Philippines in 2013 three young collectors launched a new more vivacious and up-to-date art fair (Art Fair Philippines or AFP). It has become the main event for the Manila art world, always crowded with a generally very young audience. Each year it also hosts several artist’s projects: in 2014 Louie Cordero made a set of tables for table tennis which he later sold as paintings. During the fair many artists joined in a table tennis competition he set up. In 2015 Geraldine Javier made dolls of many of the gallery owners and got a quote from each of then about what art was for them. These were written on fabric speech bubbles and more such fabric speech bubbles were made available for anyone else who wished to write what art was for them. So many wanted to write that these were soon used up and stick-it notes provided instead. Eventually people resorted to writing and drawing directly on the wall. It was a carnival atmosphere. Eventually there was no space left on the walls and the crowd subsided. In 2018 Nilo Ilarde made a play on the fact that the space used for the fair is normally used as a multi-story car park and filled his booth with the thousands of miniature toy cars he and his friends had gathered.
8. Louie Cordero. Table Tennis tables at AFP 2014. Louie Cordero and Nona Garcia playing
9. Geraldine Javier. What is art for you? Interactive installation. AFP2015. As seen at end of fair.
10. Nilo Ilarde. The art fair is full of objects, more or less interesting, I want to add 24,124 more. AFP2018.
EXOTIC? AUTHENTIC? ARE THE FILIPINOS REALLY ASIAN?
Geographically balanced between China and New Guinea, between Asia and the Pacific Ocean, culturally the Philippines is not so much an Asian country, as one balanced between Europe, Asia and the Americas.
‘I feel Asian, but kind of precarious,’ Wawi Navarroza told me. ‘When I’m in the West, they say I’m not really Asian enough. When I’m here in the East, I appear not Filipina to some. Like most Pinoys, I’m not a mild-mannered/zen/buddha Asian, I don’t bow, eat with chopsticks, nor write with a native script. Kidding aside, this is what makes us peculiarly Filipino compared to our neighbours actually. When I was recently in Laos for a contemporary art survey show on South-East Asia, it was really remarkable to experience the subtle but notable differences to the Indochina landmass SEAsians (Thais, Vietnamese, Laotians, Cambodians…). In Laos, the food is similar to Vietnamese, the language similar to Thai. Temples everywhere, they’re all comfortable with chopsticks, their cordial bowing admirable even among the hip and young. Compared to them, I can feel a much stronger connection to a loud Hispanic, Latin sense of humour. Of course, I identify with eating rice and with the more communal way of doing things, but our melodramatic way of doing things is more like the Mexicans. I got on so well with the Spanish and their humour when I lived in Spain – they call it Catholic humour, I don’t know exactly what that means but I’m guessing the passions (biblical drama) and pleasures (fiestas); we laugh off the human condition. It’s warm; not dry like English humour which is hard to describe but fascinating!
When I spoke to her in her studio she was reading, Authentic, though not exotic: essays on Filipino Identity by Fernando Nakpil Zialcita.[13] He suggests there is no such place as Asia, it is too diverse to be seen as a coherent entity, a sentiment that I heartily endorse.[14] He claims that all Filipinos are mestizos even if they are not by blood[15], but by religion, food and other cultural elements. It is a hybrid culture which has absorbed things not just from Spain and China, but from the Malays (if we do not eat with our hands, we use spoon and fork) and the Americans (beauty pageants, McDonalds).
Why did the Filipinos absorb Catholicism so readily? I asked Navarroza.
‘Perhaps we assimilated Catholicism because it was fused with our pre-existing pagan/animist/mystic rites and rituals. A god inside a god. Have you noticed that in all the many apparitions of the Virgin in the Philippines she emerges in a tree? We also got a hybridised Mexican-infused strain of Catholicism.
‘What about the culture of amnesia,’ I asked, ‘this willingness to forgive sinners – you look at Philippines politics and it is full of people who have been accused of gross corruption: Imelda Marcos, Erap Estrada, Gloria Arroyo. They still elected into office!’
‘The culture of amnesia is maybe a coping mechanism,’ she suggested. ‘This urge to forgive is a form of fatalism I guess, humanizing sins and errors like telenovela characters, nobody is perfect, let us not confront the ugly and instead pin our hopes and dreams to the people with a compelling backstory, a dirty past, the repentants, the comeback kings and queens, those redeemed in the drama of the everyday. A slice of the cake we can lump into the “Tropical Gothic”.’
THE WORLD TURNED ON ITS HEAD
When we look at the work of Mariano Ching, Louie Cordero and Dina Gadia we realise that there has been a strong indigenous comic book tradition in the Philippines. One especially admired comic book artist Francisco Coching was made a national artist, an indication of how seriously it is taken.
But these artists also play with the grotesque, and the inversion of normal that we associate with carnival and the carnivalesque. There is an exuberance not just to art in the Philippines but culture generally: pageants, karaoke and talent shows are phenomenally popular. The artists take this further, make it critical, not just entertainment. Carnival is where that exuberance, that love of partying, goes a bit further, breaking down barriers, upending social norms. This is when the world is turned on its head and we can look at things from a different perspective. Carnival is when the desire to play and be wilful is both liberated and serious. And, of course, for a full bloodied communal enactment of carnival one only has to watch Martha Atienza’s film of the festivities in the island Bantayan.
IMPROVISATION AND COLLAGE
For many, nothing epitomises Filipino culture so much as the jeepney. Originally constructed on the bases of jeeps left behind by the American army in 1945 these have subsequently been built on the chassis of old trucks and minibuses from Japan. Remade as buses they hold sixteen people or more, sitting side by side in two rows, plus a couple hanging off the back and, in the provinces perhaps some people on top. A ride in Manila normally costs eight pesos (about ten cents). The construction and subsequent customisation have often been cited as exemplifying both Filipino ingenuity or improvisation, and their love of flamboyant decoration.
11 & 12. Photographs of jeepneys in Manila and Bagiou by Louie Cordero
Improvisation is also the order of the day in the barrios or shanty-towns that the poor people moving to Manila looking for work build. Learning to make a home with sheets of corrugated iron, scarp wood, cardboard and old tyres is all a matter of making do and getting by.
13. Houses outside Maya Muñoz’s studio in Manila. Photo Tony Godfrey
Given this, it is not surprising therefore to find that collage is a medium often favoured by Filipino artists. Both Nilo Ilarde and Yasmin Sison exhibit collages in this exhibition, works that are at once thoughtful and elegant. They were taught by Roberto Chabet at UP (University of Philippines) who privileged collage as a way of making and thinking about art.
The works of Maya Muñoz are far more baroque. (The indigenous style of church architecture is termed “earthquake baroque”. Baroque like Spanish churches of the seventeenth century, but with super large buttresses to resist the periodic earthquakes). Some would see this as typical of Tropical horror vacui – the need to fill space up. With their many added collaged elements, perforations and marks, the paintings of Kawayan De Guia are closest to the aesthetic of customisation in Jeepney culture.
THE VISIONARY
The works in this exhibition range from the conceptual to the visionary, though as we can see, those categories are not mutually exclusive. Jose Legaspi’s work is clearly visionary: images of dreadful crimes, destruction and Hell. His is a very personal, traumatised vision, in some ways tragic, but in other ways comic. Geraldine Javier’s work is visionary in a different way, it is about being within nature, or being transformed by nature, of being in a world of plants and flowers, but also being where decay is ever present and where women like bats hang upside down, waiting for night to fall.
However, these are not illustrations of visions but very made images: Legaspi with a extraordinarily vigorous but sure handling of charcoal; Javier with a very complex and unusual way of constructing a painting or textile work.
We can say the same about many other artists in this exhibition. What makes much art in the Philippines so interesting is the ability to fuse skill and delight in making and/or conceptual rigour with a vision or perception of the world that is heightened, or compelling, or personal – strange but familiar
PORTRAITS AND MASKS
Above all else what we are encountering in this exhibition are people or things made by people. And those things have the handwriting or character of the individuals who made them. Everything is to some extent a self-portrait.
And we recognise shared problems and situations, as in the works by Pam Santos where we encounter a family situation that is sadly familiar to many of us: the death of a parent.
And in the portraits of Nona Garcia we get to see many of the artists exhibiting in Danubiana. They don’t look so strange, though we may be puzzled to see them only from behind.
Wawi Navarroza includes self-portraits in her photographs but they too may puzzle: is she being authentic or exotic? Is it a masquerade? What, we may ask ourselves, do you expect someone from the tropics, from the Philippines, to look like? Eisa Jocson too in her dances gives us portraits of herself, though not as herself, but as a Disney princess, or as a man dancing, watched by gay men. It seems familiar and strange – both at the same time. Representation and re-representation are often, as here, and throughout this exhibition fascinating but complex – like our own lives.
- This text was written in 2019. In 2022 their son, to the horror and disgust of many, is now running as a presidential candidate. ↑
- Italy has a population of 59.2 million, the Philippines one of 108.2 million ↑
- The first one burnt down, another was flattened by a typhoon, the seventh to be built was destroyed in the Battle of Manila by American bombing. The current building is the eighth. ↑
- This quote is normally given thus, in fact what he said was, “How horrible, fantastic, incredible it is that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas-masks here because of a quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing. It seems still more impossible that a quarrel which has already been settled in principle should be the subject of war.” BBC Broadcast by Neville Chamberlain, Prime Minister of Great Britain, 27 September 1938.” Quoted in Martin Gilbert, Descent into Barbarism, a History of the Twentieth Century, 1933-1951, Harper Collins, 1998, p. 201. ↑
- Many artists own a bulol: it is something specifically Pinoy or Filipino. ↑
- Quoted in Luis H. Francia, A History of the Philippines, The Overlook Press, NYC, 2nd edition, 2014, p. 108 ↑
- At a meeting of Filipinos in Madrid after the awards in 1884 Rizal claimed the two prizes were important because they showed Filipinos were as capable as the Spanish and should thus be treated as equals. ↑
- The Philippines, originally Filipinas, was named c. 1543, after Felipe the son of emperor Charles V, who was also king Charles I of Spain. Felipe later 1556 became king of Spain and is known, in English, as Philip II. He is known best in England as the husband of Mary I (Bloody Mary in the popular mythology of England), and as later sending a fleet (the Spanish Armada) to conquer England, unsuccessfully. ↑
- Hugh Brogan, The Penguin History of the USA, Penguin, 1999, p. 442 ↑
- Luis H. Francia, A History of the Philippines, The Overlook Press, NYC, 2nd edition, 2014, p. 191 ↑
- One exception is probably the banned communist party. The history of the communist party in the Philippines is very different from that in Slovakia and elsewhere in Middle Europe. Under the guise earlier of the Huks and then the NPA (New People’s Army) their constituency is predominantly rural, farmers wanting their own land, not working long hours and underpaid by rich landowners. Their guerilla groups were the most committed in the war against the Japanese but they and their demands were ignored and then suppressed by McArthur and the American administration, who instead favoured the old elite, even though many of them had collaborated with the Japanese. However, to this day, they continue to control several mountainous areas in Luzon ↑
- Jose Legaspi interviewed by Eva McGovern-Basa in No Chaos, No Party: 28 artists in Metro Manila, edited by Eva McGovern-Basa, Solutions, 2016, unpaginated. ↑
- Authentic, though not exotic: essays on Filipino Identity by Fernando Nakpil Zialcita, published by Ateneo de Manila University Press. ↑
- In a book I once made the same claim albeit rather more bluntly: “there is no such place as Asia”, culturally the Islamic world, the Indian sub-continent, China and Japan are all distinct entities. South-east Asia is a remarkably heterogenous region shoved between China and India. Tony Godfrey & Keiko Hooton. Contemporary Photography in Asia. Prestel. 2013 ↑
- Many Filipinos have some Chinese or Spanish blood. ↑