In any case, true to his lights, Suehiro returned from his travels to enter the political arena. He was elected to the Diet as a (genuine) liberal democrat, and even served briefly as its Speaker. Alas, he died of cancer just a few months before his Filipino friend’s execution.110

  Takayama, the Filipino hero of Suehiro’s political novel Oonabara, asleep in his student digs. His story was partly based on Rizal’s life and experiences.

  CHINESE CONNECTIONS

  In his second letter to Aguinaldo, dated June 8, 1899, Ponce wrote:

  Malaki po ang tulong na ibinigay sa akin ng mga reformistang inchik, at si Dr Sun Yat-sen na siyang nangungulo sa kanila ang siya ko pong kasama at kagawad sa lahat.

  The Chinese reformists have given me a great deal of help, and Dr Sun Yat-sen, their leader, has been my companion and helper in everything.111

  Two years younger than Ponce, Sun had been leading an adventurous, but as yet not very successful life. Leaving China in 1894, he had gone to Hawaii where he founded the Hsing Chung Hui (Revive China Society); he then moved its headquarters to Hong Kong early in 1895. That October, in alliance with various local secret societies, he launched a disastrous uprising in Canton. Hong Kong was now too hot for him, and he left for Europe. The following year he became internationally famous when agents of the Ch’ing regime attempted to kidnap him in London. Thereafter he spent most of his time in Japan, propagandizing and organizing among the large community of Chinese students, political exiles, and businessmen.

  Ponce met Sun for the first time in early March 1899, when the Filipino-American War had just begun and the Filipinos were still holding their own. Sun was brought to Ponce’s home in Yokohama by Hirata Hyobei, a Tokyo lawyer and political fixer who had earlier helped José Ramos become a naturalized Japanese citizen.112 The two young nationalists (thirty-five and thirty-three years old), chatting in English, hit it off at once, and eventually became lifelong friends.113 It is notable that Ponce, perhaps of partial Chinese descent, and in any case quite familiar with Chinese from his student days in Manila, found nothing in the least strange or exotic about his new comrade. Barely four months later, Sun made possible the only large shipment of arms that came close to being successful. He brokered a deal by which Wan Chi, a rich friend of his, joined hands with Nakamura Yaroku, a sympathetic Japanese nationalist, to buy a ship, which was then rented to the Filipino revolutionaries. Loaded at Nagasaki, the Nunobiki Maru had stowed on board six million cartridges, ten thousand Murata rifles, one fixed cannon, ten field-guns, seven field-glasses, a pressing machine for gunpowder, and another for making ammunition.114 The passengers included Japanese military men knowledgeable in gunnery, engineering, and munitions manufacture.115 Leaving Nagasaki, the ship detoured towards China to divert suspicion, but was caught in a typhoon and sank on July 19 off the Saddle islands, a hundred miles from Shanghai.116

  Why did Sun Yat-sen go to all this trouble on the Philippines’ behalf? Quite aside from the real friendship between the two men a revolution had been developing in the thinking of Chinese intellectuals, which has been splendidly described by Rebecca Karl. Such intellectuals had been accustomed to seeing China as far “behind” Western Europe, the United States, and Japan. But from about 1895 on, the telegraph was bringing to the local newspapers accounts and photographs of the Cuban insurrection (1895–98), the Philippine Revolution and war against American imperialism (1896–1902), and the Boers’ armed struggle against the advancing British empire (1899–1902). On three continents, so to speak, small peoples previously ignored or despised by educated Chinese were showing themselves, thanks to their unity and courage, well “in advance of” China. Karl convincingly shows that as a result of following the close-by Filipino insurrection parts of the intelligentsia now started to view their struggle against the Manchus as anticolonial, and to visualize “revolution” for the first time.117 Ponce, a humble man, was perhaps surprised that after the Japanese version of his book came out it was immediately published in Chinese and quickly went through several printings. But he should not have been.

  PAWA: INTERNATIONALIZING THE WAR

  In a letter to “Ifortel” of February 19, 1898, from Hong Kong, Ponce reported the arrival within Aguinaldo’s entourage of three exceptional contributors to the armed revolution. Two were well-known ilustrado nationalists, Miguel Malvar and Del Pilar’s nephew Gregorio Del Pilar. But the third was absolutely not. Ponce described him admiringly as “el coronel Pawa, un chino sin coleta, más valiente que el Cid y muy entusiasta” (Colonel Pawa, a Chinese without a pigtail, braver than The Cid, and very ardent).118 José Ignacio Pawa was born in an impoverished Fujian village in 1872, with the name Liu Heng-fu.119 At the age of eighteen he emigrated with his uncle to Manila, and became a skilled blacksmith, while taking up Chinese martial arts as a sideline. He was an early and enthusiastic recruit to the Revolution, and became a great favorite with Aguinaldo. While the general was still fighting in Cavite, the twenty-four-year-old immigrant recruited a number of his Chinese blacksmith friends to set up an arms factory for the badly under-armed Filipino troops. Teresita Ang See describes his activity like this:

  Under his skillful supervision, old cannon and broken Mausers captured from the enemy were repaired, large bamboo cannon taped with wires were manufactured, numerous paltik [crude firearms] were made, and thousands of cartridges were filled up with home-made gunpowder.

  José Ignacio Pawa – “a dashing officer with a colonel’s uniform, but with a pigtail.”

  Pawa also trained Filipinos how to melt down metal objects, especially church bells (!), to create weapons, and proved himself a very resourceful and brave battlefield commander. See quotes the Filipino lawyer Teodoro Gonzalez’s unpublished memoirs as follows: “It was a strange sight in camp to see him—a dashing officer with a colonel’s uniform but having a pigtail. His soldiers were Tagalogs, all veteran fighters, yet they were devoted to him, and were proud to serve under his battle standard, notwithstanding the fact that he was a Chinaman.”120 Finally, sent by Aguinaldo to Bicol to raise money for the Revolution among the local Chinese and Chinese mestizos, he managed to raise the staggering sum of 386,000 silver pesos.

  Remarkable as Pawa was as a person, he was only one among many non-Filipinos who, for various reasons, joined or supported the Revolution. Immigrant Chinese, ghettoized, despised and often abused by the colonial regime, had plenty of reasons to want the Spaniards gone. And after the American conquest of Cuba, substantial numbers of young Spanish officers decided to “fight on” by joining Aguinaldo’s forces. Antonio Luna, as Chief of Staff, happily took advantage of their professional training to put them to work as personal aides, instructors, and creators of fortifications. Quite a number served well as battlefield commanders when the Philippine-American War broke out. There were also a few Cubans in the Spanish military who joined the revolutionary cause, alongside Frenchmen, Italians (including a captain who later joined the Boer War on Kruger’s side), a few Britons, quite a number of Japanese, and even deserters from the American forces, mainly blacks.121

  MALATESTA TO MANILA

  Meanwhile in Madrid, Isabelo de los Reyes had managed to put together the funds to start publishing a fortnightly that he named Filipinas ante Europa, with the impeccable editorial logo: “Contra Norte-América, no; contra el imperialismo, sí, hasta la muerte.”122 What Del Pilar had once maliciously called the folklorist’s “deplorable fecundity” came in handy, as most of the contents had to come from his pen.123 The loss of empire, and the humiliations inflicted by Washington, brought about a substantial change in public opinion in Spain. Anger at the Americans created a new sympathy for the Filipino cause. The change suited Isabelo’s book, since he had plenty of Spanish friends, had just married a Spanish journalist, and had always attributed the evils of colonial rule mainly to the malign power of the Orders. Hence the aim of his fortnightly was to strengthen this convergence by blistering attacks on American imperialism and what he charmingly called la codicia (greed) underlying it. McKinley was a favorite target on account of his Tartuffian claims that the conquest was designed to bring liberty to the Filipinos.124 Isabelo regularly attacked the United States for its racism and lynch law, rightly saying that this was bound to affect how the Filipinos, as non-whites, would be treated.125 Yet he also went out of his way to feature excited reports about the campaigns of the American anti-imperialists. Isabelo’s other main target was what he regarded as the treachery of those wealthy ilustrados who, having supplanted Mabini in the Revolution’s leadership, were the first to jump ship and grovel to the new colonial masters.126 Mabini was constantly held up as a shining example of steadfast patriotic refusal to buckle to the yankís. The folklorist did not forget to underline that Cuban “independence” was turning out to be a complete sham. In the middle of this he still found space for an article on how much the Boers had learned from the Filipino guerrilla fighters, and now how much the Filipinos could learn from the sober discipline of the Boers.127

  But by the summer of 1901, with Aguinaldo’s capture and quick swearing of allegiance to Washington, the Revolution was over. Those prominent men who refused to swear—including the crippled Mabini—were packed off to the new tropical Siberia: Guam.128 Isabelo saw no point in staying in Spain any longer. He had not seen his six children by his first wife in four years. Like Rizal in 1892, he would go back to face the colonialists, politely telling them that he was coming, and see what he could politically achieve, more or less within the law.129

  The Boers: subject of an article by Isabelo, who stressed the mutual benefit that both Filipino guerrillas and Boers derived from studying each other’s methods.

  Isabelo set sail for Manila in early October 1901.130 In his bags he had packed a small idiosyncratic library: Aquinas and Voltaire, Proudhon and the Bible, Darwin and Marx, Kropotkin and Malatesta. There is every reason to believe that these were the first texts of Marx and the leading anarchist thinkers, perhaps even of Darwin, to enter the Philippines. Isabelo’s reputation as a staunch adversary of American imperialism had preceded him. The Manila Times, mouthpiece of the swelling population of American business vultures, immediately denounced him as a dangerous agitator and bloody anarchist. Not by chance: the previous month President McKinley had been shot to death in Buffalo by the 28-year-old Polish-American anarchist blacksmith Leon Czolgosz. The new colonial regime immediately banned Isabelo’s planned newspaper, El Defensor de Filipinas, and prohibited his proposed Partido Nacionalista.

  But he was a man not easily put down. In old age he recalled that he “took advantage of the occasion to put into practice the good ideas I had learned from the anarchists of Barcelona, who were imprisoned with me in the infamous fortress of Montjuich.” So he set himself, under the noses of the Protestant conquistadors, to radicalize and organize the working class in Manila. In this endeavor he had some perhaps unsuspected advantages. He had always been a partial outsider for the ilustrado nationalist intelligentsia, which was overwhelmingly Tagalog: not exactly aristocratic, since there had never been an indigenous feudal state in the Philippines, but with aspirations (above all the landowners among them) in that direction—especially in the face of a Spanish imperialism which both had strong feudal roots and continued to fancy itself in feudal fancy dress even when the reality was bare-faced corruption, shady caciquism, and Orderly landlordism. Isabelo was just the opposite: an honest businessman, publisher, printer, and journalist, who had employees rather than servants, and treated them in a democratic spirit. Better still, he was, as we have seen, an upcountry man from northern Luzon, the home of the Ilocanos, an ethnic group legendary for its thrift, hard work, plain speaking—and clannishness. (Ilocos is still the one area of the Philippines, aside from the mountain slopes south of Rizal’s Calamba, where one sees every poor peasant home surrounded by a tiny, beautifully tended garden of flowers and flowering shrubs.) He was not the only Ilocano in the nationalist elite, but he was the only provinciano among them. The Luna brothers were also Ilocanos—Juan the painter, who in a jealous fit murdered his wife and mother-in-law, escaped heavy punishment in a Paris solicitous of crimes passionelles, especially by artists, and died miserably in Hong Kong; and Antonio, trained as a chemist, who became the most brilliant general in the war against the Americans, and was assassinated for his pains by Aguinaldo’s clique. But both were Manila-bred, and assimilated themselves to elite Hispano-Tagalog culture.

  The crucial thing was this: as Rizal had rather disdainfully put it to Blumentritt, the Dienstleute of late-nineteenth-century Manila were overwhelmingly industrious immigrants from hardscrabble Ilocos. The incipient working class were too, though one would never guess this from reading Noli me tangere and El Filibusterismo. Isabelo could talk to these people in their own language, which, in those days, virtually no educated Tagalog knew. (Did Rizal ever meet a Filipino urban worker and talk to him or her? No worker appears in his novels.) Isabelo was also perfectly familiar with their sturdy culture of the street and the barrio.

  In classical fashion Isabelo first organized the printers. But his success with organized strikes encouraged other sectors to follow suit and the union became quite quickly a Barcelona-style free-wheeling central—a Unión Obrera Democrática that would have delighted the Tarrida of anarquismo sin adjetivos. The American rulers watched with disbelief and alarm a huge wave of strikes in Manila and its surroundings, many of them successful because they were unexpected by capitalists and administrators alike.131 The Americans were also befuddled by some of Isabelo’s methods. Street demonstrations he had learned in his revolver-waving days in Lerroux’s Barcelona. But when he raised money for the strikers and his organization by holding a series of popular balls combined with lectures, and staging zarzuelas and other theatricals with themes hostile to the Americans and their elite Filipino collaborators, he was shrewdly tapping the Filipino passion for fiestas, dancing, theatre, and music.132 The rulers eventually found various ways to bar Isabelo from the labor scene. In late June 1902 he was arrested and tried for “labor conspiracy,” but he was sentenced to only four months in prison when it became clear even to the judge that many prosecution witnesses had been suborned. Before going to jail he threw a huge party at a newly formed workers’ club in the working-class neighborhood of Tondo, and resigned his leadership. He was succeeded first by Dominador Gómez, a fellow returnee from Spain, active in the circle of La Solidaridad, and Isabelo’s collaborator on Filipinas ante Europa, who soon lived up to his authoritarian name;133 and eventually by his secretary, Hermenegildo Cruz, a slum boy still illiterate at the age of twelve, who became an admirable obrero consciente from his reading in Isabelo’s little library. Aside from his organizing activities, Cruz would publish detailed notes on the Spanish translation of Élisée Reclus’s anarchist L’Homme et la terre, as well as a Tagalog translation of parts of La Ilustración obrera by Pablo Iglesias, the old founder of Spain’s Marxist Socialist Party. Isabelo, meanwhile, was getting alarmed by the possibility that the Americans would return to the Orders the estates which the Revolution had confiscated. So he turned to agitating against the Catholic lobby, and busying himself with the organization of the “schismatic” nationalist Aglipayan Church, formed by a fellow Ilocano, the revolutionary priest Gregorio Aglipay, in the time of the First Republic.134 The UOD collapsed in 1903, but out of its ashes came many other labor organizations, and eventually a Socialist and a Communist party which merged in 1938, led the Hukbalahap guerrilla movement against the Japanese military invaders, and ultimately carried on a revolutionary war against the American-arranged Second Republic inaugurated on—when else?—July 4, 1946.

  In 1912, perhaps as a way of distracting himself from the grief caused by the death of his second wife, Isabelo turned to the electoral arena, and ran successfully for membership of a Manila Municipal Council controlled by appointed Americans.135 Serving in this capacity he was a consistent champion of the city’s poor. In 1922 he returned to Ilocos to run as an independent for a seat in the Senate. Insisting, as he always did, in the manner of his old anarchist friends, that he was both an individualist and a collectivist, he was elected, to his own surprise, against the well-heeled machine of the dominant, cacique-ridden Nacionalista Party of Manuel Quezon. He appalled his fellow senators by coming to the assembly’s session in a horse-drawn calesa, saying it was better to give money to a coachman than to throw it away on a car and its gasoline which would only benefit American business. At the same time, he insisted on living for the rest of his life in working-class Tondo, erecting an apartment building for poor tenants who were never evicted for being in arrears. After 1929, when he was partly paralyzed by a stroke, he confined himself to work for the Aglipayan Church. He died on October 10, 1938.

  AFTERGLOW WEST: ISABELO DE LOS REYES

  Isabelo had on occasion been treated disdainfully by Rizal, who disliked his Ilocano patriotism and thought he wrote too much, too fast, for any depth, but the folklorist was not the type to brood over slights and for the most part he greatly admired what Rizal had achieved. Filipinas ante Europa often ran articles about Rizal as the exemplary patriot, even if they rarely mentioned the novels. But appearances can always be deceiving. Already in 1899 the first translation of Noli me tangere into a non-Spanish language was published—in Paris (which must have delighted the martyr’s shade).136 It is very unlikely that Isabelo had no hand in this, since one of the two joint translators was his long-time Montjuich cellmate, Ramón Sempau, while the other was a Frenchman, Henri Lucas, who was also probably an anarchist. Under the slightly depressing title Au Pays des Moines, this translation was advertised in La Revue Blanche as volume no. 25 in the Bibliothèque Sociologique of Pierre-Victor Stock—who inherited a publishing company dating back to 1708, but between 1892 and 1921 issued a long line of anarchist titles under this rubric. The catalogue is riveting. No. 1 (1892) was Kropotkin’s La Conquěte du pain; it was followed by Jean Grave’s La Société mourante et l’anarchie (1894), the French anarchist Charles Malato’s De la Commune á l’anarchie (1895), Bakunin’s Oeuvres, vol. 1 (1895), Grave’s La Société future (1895), Kropotkin’s L’Anarchie: sa philosophie, son idéal (1896), Georges Darien’s Biribi: armée d’Afrique (1898), the Dutchman Ferdinand Domela Nieuwenhuis’s Le Socialisme en danger (1897), Tarrida’s Les Inquisiteurs d’Espagne: Montjuich, Cuba, Philippines (1897), Elisée Reclus’s L’Évolution, la révolution et l’idéal anarchique (1897), and Louise Michel’s La Commune (n.d). Then Rizal’s novel, wholly innocent of anarchism, appears sandwiched between the Italian historian Guglielmo Ferrero’s Le militerisme et la société moderne (1899) and Charles Albert’s L’Amour libre (1898).