Our Generation Was Not Taught And Did Not Learn Spanish

CITY OF NAGA, FORMERLY NUEVA CACERES—Whoever had moved to abolish Spanish in our college curriculum had no foresight of its importance to really educating the Filipino.

When I stepped into college in 1992, our course syllabus at the Ateneo de Naga did not include Spanish anymore. I enrolled in a humanities course but didn’t have to take Spanish. Later I would learn that the subject was not being offered anymore.

I wonder what our lawmakers in those years had in mind when they abolished it. If at all, they certainly didn’t know that most of our past—our recorded history—had been written in Spanish. If at all, they were not thinking that the abundance of information about our past can be mined in the Spanish archives—for more than three centuries, they had been our colonizers, masters and oppressors.

As early as the primary grades, we had been taught about the widespread, far-reaching hundreds of years of Spanish colonization of the Philippines. Foremost, the country’s name itself—Filipinas—is nothing but a tribute to Felipe, then the king of Spain.

I find it odd that Spanish was not encouraged to be taught at the Ateneo, rather an institution begun some 400 years earlier by a Spaniard par excellence, St. Ignatius of Loyola. Surely there must have been protests, but what could the Jesuits have done?

I remember in 1993 how our history teacher—now the master historian Danilo Madrid Gerona—would share with our class about his trips to Sevilla and Madrid—to do historical research or archival work about Bicol, or anything that had to do with our history.

Five years before Gerona became my teacher, he published From Epic to History (Naga: AMS Press, 1988), a seminal book on Bicol history which became a required reading for every Atenean studying history.

Some thirty years later, on the 500th year of the arrival of Spaniards in our soil, I see that he has been making waves across the campuses, on social media and online—sharing and broadcasting his latest discoveries in Philippine and Bicol history.

Of late, I came to know how—through his incisive archival work of firsthand Spanish sources—he has redefined and officially reconstructed the old concept of the robust, military-age man Lapulapu to one of an ageing warrior—a sage, as it were. I wonder why they had to scrap the subject—which was about studying a rather beautiful language. Spanish may be an old language, yes— but it's not dead.

 Today, all we can do is romanticize it. Every now and then, we would fondly refer to a Spanish teacher who spoke the language beautifully—and ultimately remember her person because of such flair.

Also, there were days when we were awed by Miss Venezuela, Miss Chile or Miss Argentina candidates flawlessly answering questions in beauty pageants in their own language. For years we also religiously patronized Thalia in Marimar and other countless Mexicanovelas. We likewise sing our hearts out to the songs of Trio Los Panchos, Jose Feliciano and Julio Iglesias—to us, they feel soulful and affecting. We have always been Spanish at heart—but our generation has been deprived to learn the language. Today, if we want to learn Spanish, we would need to rather enroll in Instituto Cervantes or other language schools or be tutored in it.

 Whatever they did, our lawmakers probably thought it best to scrap Spanish because it is the language of the oppressor. They must have thought that we would be better to do away with it—to forget the bitter past. They didn’t realize that if we do so, we would also be forgetting ourselves.

 These days, we gasp in awe at the latest discovery about ourselves mined through the Spanish resources. We are awed all the time because not so many of us know Spanish.

 I wonder how different it would have been if Spanish were not really foreign to us. What if it were like just another dialect, rather a variant—like Partido Bikol or another language from another region, say, Hiligaynon? Would we be a lot different?

 If we knew Spanish by heart, probably we would have more poets, musicians and artists who would use this beautiful language to romantic but also social and political ends.

 More often, we would probably be referring to our ancestors more familiarly because we knew them and their Spanish lineage or affinities. We can just recall our sense of Spanish in utter nostalgia. Most of us are named or carry Spanish names but never even know the history behind these names.

 We treat anything Spanish in different ways—true, some of us treat it as piece of the past, belonging to our ancestors long gone.

 When I go to the burial sites in the coming days, I will again marvel at the names of the dead—carrying Chinese but most especially Spanish names.

 In the 2000s, inside the Molo and Jaro churches in Iloilo, I was awed seeing and reading the names of the dead—couples, infants, etc. and their epitaphs in Spanish. I mouthed them quietly and found them beautiful but could hardly understand what they really meant.

 I wonder if most of us knew Spanish like the back of our hand. We wouldn’t really be drooling over our own past. Because we would be able to read about them in Spanish. We would have more translators. We would have more authors. Not only of our own history. We would probably have dozens of Agoncillos or Constantinos; or batches of Geronas and Ocampos; and maybe, a string of Zaides, too. These and other Filipino historians—some would say except the last one—worked their Spanish hard to read about our past and offer it back to us.

 The Spaniards know us more than we do ourselves. They had been in and out of our country for a long, long time—trading with us, exploiting our natural wealth, but also stealing our souls, as it were, like they did a number of Latin American countries.

One day, we may just be awed again when some author from around us writes his own Three Hundred Years of Solitude, inspired not only by Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s magic realist novel but probably by some real magic he may have seen from the pages of our own history.

All these years I have been inspired by how Gerona and the rest of the Filipino historians have been traveling to and from the land of our master colonizers to retrieve the raw and rather more authentic parts of ourselves.