Milagros Camayon Guerrero. Luzon at War: Contradictions in Philippine Society, 1898–1902 (with an introduction by Vicente L. Rafael)

Abstract

Luzon at War: Contradictions in Philippine Society, 1898-1902 (with an introduction by Vicente L. Rafael) Milagros Camayon Guerrero Quezon City: Anvil Publishing Inc., 2015, 295p.Luzon at War has been long in coming. As a dissertation at the University of Michigan in 1977, it has eluded Filipino historians for years; that it is finally out as a book is a happy occasion. Prior to the writing of Luzon at War, its author-Milagros Guerrero-has co-written with the celebrated Filipino historian Teodoro Agoncillo the highly influential History of the Filipino People, and has also worked with renowned historian Renato Constantino in the edition of the five-volume compendium The Philippine Insurgent Records. As such, when she arrived in the United States for her graduate studies, wrote Vicente Rafael, she "was already known" as a scholar of the Philippines (p. 3). She has delved into the genre of "history from below" and studied the tumultuous period of the Philippine Revolution and the nascent republic from the perspective of the periphery and the marginalized. She has looked beyond the political developments in social and political centers of Malolos and Manila, examining the social realities of the Revolution among the masses in the provinces instead. Using declassified sources on the Filipino state, taxation, landownership, and popular movements in particular, Luzon at War illustrates the variegated discord in society from 1898 to 1902, as the Spanish colonizers exited and the republic fought for its existence by warding off the onslaught of the American imperialists on the islands and its people.Five chapters comprise the book. Guerrero painstakingly provides a "serious and realistic analysis of the mechanisms of political and social change outside Manila and Malolos" and introduces her readers to the difficulties of both the government and the governed during the birth of the Philippine nation state (p. 23). She claims that in 1898 the Tagalog provinces of Luzon welcomed the Revolutionary Government by Emilio Aguinaldo. Townsmen organized militias, which attacked Spanish outposts and welcomed state envoys and other insurgent troops. To underline the country's independence and prove that Filipinos could govern, Aguinaldo called for a nationwide reorganization. In response Manila, still at a quandary from the occupation of American and Filipino forces and nearby provinces elected prominent members from the cacique ilustrado or principalia (landowning, educated or privileged) class. Conflict characterized the transfer of power-civilian appointees contended with military commanders, who were uneasy to share powers or refused to accept their subservience to civilians. Free from the constraints of the outgoing colonial regime, which they also served, and far from the central Aguinaldo government in Malolos, new provincial officials collected taxes and rents and maintained peace and internal security with impunity. Longentrenched ruling families used their new position to demand personal services, extort old and new taxes, and embezzle public funds, earning the ire of the masses who expected real and lasting change following the Spanish colonizers.In Luzon support for the revolution, according to Guerrero, rested on people's opposition to the colonial taxation and friar control of political and social life and vast tracks of arable land. Correspondingly, upon its ascent to power, the Aguinaldo government abolished forced labor and took control of friar lands. To support itself and its ongoing war with the Americans, the Aguinaldo government enforced a war tax on every citizen, required those who could not pay to serve either in civil or military public works and demanded rent from the use of agricultural land. It disbanded militias and encouraged citizens to return to cultivation. The economy stagnated, nonetheless. From 1898 to 1902 typhoons, floods, and epidemics like malaria and rinderpest repeatedly hit Central Luzon, its people, and animal resources. …