Introduction: coincidence of declines
From the beginning of the American period in the Philippines, the Spanish community maintained a wide influence over its own fate, but from November 1935, after the start of the Commonwealth, this capacity of the community radically declined. Besides the need to adapt during this transition period toward independence, the Spanish community intensely suffered from external events that also disrupted the Philippines’ path to independence. First, in 1936, the Spanish Civil War and the community were driven apart by infighting among three groups. Second, in 1939, the outbreak of the Second World War led to attacks by the American government on the Hispanic legacy following Madrid’s alignment with the Axis, while increasingly pitting Spanish citizens and their legacy against the Americans. Third, in 1941, the Japanese occupation impoverished and traumatized the whole country, committing numerous massacres in the last period. Fourth, when the Philippines obtained its independence in 1946, the Americans branded the Spanish legacy as “feudalism.”
At the proclamation of the Republic of the Philippines, the ability of the Spanish community to define its contribution to the country had declined tremendously despite the fact that their wartime traumas were similar to those of many Filipinos. Professor Ricardo T. Jose recalled, “The war was seen by many as something worthy of remembering, commemorating and being proud of,” (Jose Reference Jose2010: 115) and the collective memory in the Philippines as a symbolic representation of the past through a set of practices and interventions has included the sufferings of the Spaniards and the Hispanic community, but, nonetheless, was diluted. Instead, through numerous disputes and convergences with other narratives, full of ups and downs, and comparisons, but without being a zero-sum game, Spaniards participated in the multidirectional process of shaping their own collective memory with their own commemorations.
This article aims to study the memory of the Spanish community using Paul Connerton’s modes of forgetting to understand both the interplay of frameworks and the multidirectional memories working in the Philippines after the Second World War. Beyond the overall context of the country, this article focuses on the community’s internal problems that also limited the possibility of considering both Spanish and American colonial legacies as complementary to the Philippine nation, mostly regarding leadership and wealth. Before the Commonwealth, the community had a wide influence over its own fate, with wealthy leaders. They formed a lobby for Hispanism in the Philippines while largely influencing Spain’s policy toward the Archipelago. Over time, however, the fate of the country changed—and with it, the Spanish community’s ability to frame the country’s suffering during the Japanese occupation. The historical colonial privilege that made Spaniards proud and comfortable with their memory turned into a context where their influence in recovering their past was marginal and, certainly, they ended up being uncomfortable and desiring to forget their own memory.
In order to understand the difficulties the Spanish community faced in remembering those wartime sufferings, this article begins with an account of prior research done by the author on the prewar situation thanks to a grant from the Toyota Foundation (1993). This research hoped to understand the various changing parameters of Spaniards or Hispanics living in the archipelago through archival research and interviews. Section two recalls what happened to the Spanish community during the Japanese Occupation, while the third explores the community’s legacy and the fourth focuses on the postwar period, particularly the neglect of the community’s sufferings during the Battle of Manila. Lastly, the fifth section explores the processes related to memory that have influenced the four main facets of the Spanish community’s memory of the war—in relation to the Americans, Philippine society, the Spanish government, and its internal life, including those on the fringes of the community, such as the younger generations, supporters of the Republic, and those with peripherical identities, such as Basques or Catalans.
Prewar memory regimes
The Philippine revolution and the departure of the Spanish officials after 1898 did not lead to the definite decline of Spanish presence in the Philippines. Besides the many stories of Spanish citizens siding with or moving to the Philippine armies after the outbreak of the war in 1898, the community soon recovered some of its influence, partly because of what Fernando Coronil describes as the enduring privileges of empires, their ability “to make their histories appear as History” (Coronil Reference Coronil and Coronil2019: 429). Indeed, its members included some of the country’s top businessmen, and a considerable number of prominent Filipino politicians were Hispanic, while economic ties between the two countries remained strong, with the headquarters of the Philippines’ leading company located in Barcelona. Furthermore, possessing influential institutions and strong leaders, based on their lineage, and financial and religious power, as well as making up a large number of Filipino citizens, the community not only lobbied for its own interests with the American and the Spanish governments, but also in the Philippines.
The community’s intricate relationship with the rest of the country is explained in a paragraph by US Military Intelligence Official J. Weldon Jones, after serving as acting High Commissioner. Weldon Jones wrote a long report on the “Spanish community” stating: “An understanding of the political set up in Spain prior to and during the recent revolution [the Spanish Civil War], is necessary if one is to fully understand the political situation as it exists among the Spaniards residing in the Philippines. The Spanish community in the Philippines includes Spaniards, many Spanish mestizos and Filipino citizens of Spanish ancestry. The mestizos and Filipinos of Spanish ancestry socially and by affinity of sentiments, are members of this group, consider themselves as Spaniards, and actively participate in all affairs of the community.”Footnote 1 Prewar publications in Spanish, in fact, usually had a section dedicated to what it referred to as “the Spanish community.” It covered events concerning the Hispanized—generally weddings, important gatherings, and parties held by groups who spoke to each other in Spanish. In other words, their identity centered around a community not recognized by their citizenship or country, but for being part of a specific culture in the Philippines associated mostly with a religion and language, who mostly belonged to a well-educated, upper-middle social class. The Spanish community had very porous relations with the rest of society, and I use the term “Spaniards” to refer to those with citizenship (if known) and regardless of whether they were born as insulares (in the Philippines) or as peninsulares (in Spain). Many of the Spanish mestizos and Filipino citizens of Spanish ancestry who didn’t have a nationality card but regarded themselves as being part of the community are referred to as Hispanics.
Before the establishment of the Commonwealth, the Spanish community enjoyed a particularly privileged position, led by a small elite. The priors of the religious orders (who occupied the most prestigious locations due to their long-standing presence) and the highest officials of the Compañía General de Tabacos de Filipinas (from now on, referred to as Tabacalera), the largest employer in the country, whose headquarters was in Barcelona, were especially influential in the Philippines. Lastly, there were the successful businessmen with family links, such as the Zóbel de Ayala or Elizalde, whose influence was also exerted through prestigious institutions that reached wider society; in Manila it was the Casa de España, which housed the Casino Español and other charitable, commercial, and educational organizations.
This leadership in the Philippines had a large capacity to define the community’s collective memory and spread it also in Spain. This was partly due to the vast resources that allowed them to bring American modernity to Spain (its first air-conditioned building in Spain, the Capitol, in Callao place, was built following the Philippine one) and which enabled them to influence Spanish policy to the Philippines—not only by hosting the consulates and financing activities but also by influencing appointments. Besides their wealth, they were not limited by regional leadership. While other countries had Galician, Asturian, or Andalusian institutions, in the Philippines, there were only festivals held on the feast day of a region’s patron saint. Lastly, their influence increased because of the community’s geographical concentration. Unlike in other former Spanish colonies, much of the Spanish-speaking population in the Philippines lived in the so-called “mesticerias,” where Spanish was widely spoken.
As in other Latin American countries, the Spanish community defended the memory of the Hispanic legacy in many different ways, but the country’s future independence made the community the spearhead of Filhispanism, known then as hispanistas—who considered a Hispanic future best for the islands, whether looking to Latin America or to Spain, in contrast to so-called Saxonists or Japonists. Filhispanism was different from ethnicity. Even though many envisioned it and many Spaniards favored it, some preferred a country less inclined toward the Filhispanic option, then represented by the Casino Filipino, while other Filipinos without Spanish ancestors could consider Hispanism the best option.
This article is part of research on the many twists in the evolution of the Spanish community after 1898. With the wider goal of tracing the characteristics of the Spanish community in the Philippines, the writer travelled to the country to research and interview members of the community. For several months, sometimes accompanied by Professor Belen Mabel Alampay or by Regalado Ricky Trota Jose, I conducted around 30 interviews with Spaniards and Hispanized Filipinos in the country, both in Manila as well as in the most Hispanized parts of the archipelago, such as Ilocos and the islands of Panay and Negros, where a small colony of Spanish-speaking planters continued to reside. While meeting members from different positions within the community and conducting semi-structured interviews about their lives during the war, answers and free commentary while chatting and dining also helped the writer to understand their identity, complexities, contradictions, and the meaning of the Spanish community on the different islands of the archipelago.
In Japan, preparation was completed with the help of the Forum for the Survey of Reports concerning the Japanese Occupation of the Philippines. This allowed me to interview members of the Japanese corps that ran the military and civilian administration during the occupation, the results of which were subsequently published.Footnote 2
Furthermore, my research parallels those on the relationship between the Chinese community and the rest of the society. A project carried out by Marcelino A. Foronda Jr.’s (1985) Chinese in the Philippines Oral History Project (CPOHP), which sought to investigate the experiences of the community, their perceptions as temporary or permanent residents, and their views of Philippine society—with a special focus on interracial couples—has served as an important basis.Footnote 3 Furthermore, for a comparison of the ties between the center and periphery of the Chinese community in the Philippines with those of the Spanish community, Richard T. Chu’s work has been significant (Chu Reference Chu2002: 329–70). Its focus was more on the tsinoys, who apparently formed a more important faction of the Chinese community than the Spanish mestizos at this time. The terms are not equivalent, because few Chinese sought to extend their ethnicity to the rest of Philippine society, while the tsinoys have received more attention from researchers than filhispanics.
Wartime politization of memory
Following the establishment of the Commonwealth, the community began to experience its first challenges, as new laws were decreed favoring Filipino (and American) citizens. However, the major issue was the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, which divided the community not only between pro-Republicans (a minority, due to their relatively high standard of living) and pro-Rebels (the majoity), but also between pro-Falange and anti-Falange (the Spanish fascist political party founded in 1933). This was the expatriate community with the most intense internal struggles in the world, as asserted in Spain. Their differences started as a continuation of the long-standing rivalry between the Zóbel de Ayala and Elizalde families, which supported rival institutions in the Philippines: Zóbel de Ayala’s unofficial pro-Franco consulate and Elizalde’s Falange fascist party. Over time, the Falange came to represent the desire to end traditional leadership, and first provoked all the former rightist groups into uniting against them, followed later by numerous clashes, separate celebrations, and mutual accusations. The rise of fascism during the 1930s exacerbated ideological indoctrination, causing old rivalries to spiral out of control, fueled by the general rise of fascism and by the total lack of military among the community—the very group that had brought order to these rivalries in Spain.
Furthermore, the image of the Spanish legacy deteriorated additionally, partly due to the war’s violent images in newspapers and documentaries, and partly because Filipinos witnessed the fanaticization of a group that, until then, had been described as the epitome of “distinction.” Seeing radical anti-friar loyalists demanding the killing of friars, the fascist supporters of the Falange party shooting ardently and raising their hands during masses, and the conservatives-reactionaries vehemently arguing with their former compatriots was a shock to many. Ultimately, internal disputes within the Spanish community undermined much of its capacity to develop its own collective memory and, of course, to share it with the rest of the country.
Soon afterward, in 1941, the start of the Second World War in Europe transformed how the Spanish legacy was remembered with renewed hostility coming from the US government and the rest of Philippine society. Until then, the Americans and many Filipinos had perceived the Spanish legacy as complementary to the American one, but Francoist Spain’s friendship with Italy and Germany, and the possibility of Madrid entering the Second World War changed many people’s attitudes. Spaniards in the Philippines were accused of being possible fifth-columnists and newspapers published sensationalist stories such as those regarding Axis deals to allow Spain to reseize the Philippines after their triumph. The Spanish community could not make any credible denial of this kind of news and, in fact, many of its citizens applied for Filipino or American citizenship, including the former unofficial consul, Andrés Soriano (Rodao Reference Rodao2002: 218–24). Spanish identity started to be perceived as opposed to America and the community was strongly divided, with some backing the Allies and many others siding with the Axis.
After Pearl Harbor, the Japanese occupation of the Philippines marked a new turn in the Philippine Spanish community’s collective memory, though the life of the community must be studied differently from the consideration of its legacy, which will be studied in the following section. Spain was an officially neutral country but actually hoped for an Axis victory; but while in 1940 it wanted to enter the fray, by late 1941 Gen. Franco’s government was not so confident. At the beginning of 1942, debates in Spain centered on how the Soviet Union and the US participation in the war could change the conflict, but ultimately, Madrid merely proclaimed its support for the islands’ independence. In any case, with Germany and Italy involved in the fight, the Spanish government didn’t care much about the rest of Asia, and Franco’s regime contributed the most to the Japanese war effort, with a new spy network in the United States and by representing Japanese interests in most of the Americas.
As for Japan itself, the Japanese knew that the Spanish legacy could play a crucial role in the Philippines and by the summer of 1941 a census was taken of Japanese able to speak and read Spanish.Footnote 4 Japan, however, had no policy toward Spain in spite of the issues that needed to be discussed with its authorities: from the Catholic Church’s influence on the population to how neutral Spain could assist the Japanese in their war effort.
The Spanish community felt harassed by both sides. With the Japanese, Spaniards initially enjoyed general advantages such as the possibility of sending open code telegrams in English. In January 1943, Gen. Takaji Wachi (鷹二和知) expressed Japan’s desire to accelerate the aims of their occupation (Martin Reference Martin2015: 824). Furthermore, although the former consul was allowed to remain in Manila, he protested when soldiers requisitioned cars owned by Spaniards, when their buildings were occupied, and even when some of them were included in the regiments of compulsory labor force.Footnote 5 The consul also protested energetically when a Spanish resident was slapped while his Filipino chauffeur was not, in Angeles City, Pampanga: “the act of slapping a Spaniard is not a punishment, but an insult.”Footnote 6
However, the rabidly Falangist Consul José del Castaño y Cardona did not represent the community as a whole. He welcomed the Japanese, due some to their anti-Americanism and their desire for an Axis victory (Rodao Reference Rodao2023: 134–6), but mostly to a desire to have their Falange affiliates dominate the community. Castaño exploited Japanese harassment for his own advancement, and to those asking for a document, he added a Japanese translation that exceeded his authority: “The holder of this document is a Spanish citizen sympathizing with the Franco regime.”Footnote 7 Besides Castaño followers, many Spaniards knew that they would be worse off under the Japanese, especially the wealthiest, who preferred to keep a low profile after their leader, Andrés Soriano, left the archipelago to join the American army. On the other hand, the Tabacalera attempted to leverage political ties on its own to send a ship between Spain and the Philippines. Finally, many anti-Japanese Filipinos routinely accused Spaniards of being fifth-columnists, leading to around a dozen deaths at the hands of retreating guerrilla forces.Footnote 8 The community certainly lacked a leader and rather than feeling well cared for by Japanese general directives for appeasement, they were divided about how to deal with the occupiers.
The institutions of the Spanish community continued to operate, but were led by Falange affiliates. Consul Castaño organized regular lunches with Japanese officials and Spaniards, who didn’t wear yellow bands as the Germans did.Footnote 9 The Spanish Casino was authorized to operate but then Consul Castaño pushed for the renovation of the Board, now dominated by Falangists, and substituting the former one with wealthy followers of Soriano. Admission of non-Spaniards became less strict, in a process already accelerated in the prewar period. Spanish classes at the Patronato Escolar Español as well as social welfare activities were authorized, including Makati’s Hospital Español de Santiago,Footnote 10 and the charitable Falange’s organization, Auxilio Social, though it stopped serving food on its premises and merely distributed them uncooked once a week.Footnote 11 Charity plays and beer purchases for Spanish Day receptions or films formerly considered as Fascist propaganda were authorized, while The Sea Hawk—an American film about an English privateer defending England from the Spanish Armada—was withdrawn from cinemas. This kind of token favor was also granted to other foreign communities. For example, the German Club was authorized a small truck and given a special ration of beer. The Jai Alai court was authorized to reopen and Japanese officials frequented their premises, including the top civil official Shōzō Murata (省蔵村田), upon the invitation of Claro M. Recto (Fukushima Reference Fukushima1969).
As for the companies, Japanese plans foresaw that economic activity would be used to promote strict cooperation between the military rulers, experts, and companies through a number of associations dedicated to the different sectors. The Japanese gave preference to small companies and Filipino capitalists while distrusting Spanish companies in general as a hindrance to the entrepreneurial spirit of the Filipinos. At the same time, the Japanese were careful not to harass the Spanish companies more than war conditions had done—as reflected in the diary of Father Juan Labrador, OP: “As for Filipino, Spanish, and German companies—apart from isolated cases—they [the Japanese] have respected them, while permitting their owners to continue operating them. However, strong doubts about them persisted.”Footnote 12 The impact was uneven, both because the decisions taken in each situation depended on different authorities such as associations or military authorities, and because the war affected each economic sector very differently.
The Japanese treated Spaniards better than many others. Assigned with the task of handling all the foreign communities was the chief of the External Affairs Bureau of the Army administration, Akira Kodaki (彬小滝), who had spent several years in the United Kingdom. The Spaniards were one of his main concerns and, in fact, Kodaki flew to Tokyo at least once in 1943 in order to negotiate with the Spanish Legation. Besides Kodaki, matters concerning the Spanish community were also assigned to different units or departments, such as the Finances or the Enemy Property Confiscation and Utilization Committee.Footnote 13
From late 1943, the Japanese authorities began to acknowledge—albeit internally without considering the possibility of total defeat—that the advance of their enemies was supported by part of the Spanish community, as shown in an army document stating that the Filipinos—both the population and its leaders—strongly supported the United States.Footnote 14 Since Spaniards were included in this group, consequences soon followed. In February 1944, the first raid among Spanish citizens and mestizos was carried out, followed by the Kempeitai’s attempt to detain one of the leaders of the German community, Max Kummer, a German citizen with an American wife—a move disapproved by the German community, which, in exchange, donated money to the Japanese authorities and replaced their leaders with Nazi party members (Jose Reference Jose1997). After autumn, property seizures expanded once more, this time including many religious buildings, while around 300 Spaniards were forced to leave their houses—in some cases, three times. Employees in many companies already found it impossible to work due to the lack of transport and security, as was the case in the Bais Sugar Central.Footnote 15
Although military necessities were the top priority, it is feasible to think that before 1944 “the Japanese military had been instructed to avoid harming the Spanish,”Footnote 16 as the Japanese foreign vice minister said to the Spanish representative in Tokyo in 1945. Just as with the German community, there was no special policy directed toward them and war-related instability affected the companies’ fortunes just as much as the Japanese directives did. The Spaniards were more affected by the overall wartime atmosphere: the raids and direct harassment, rather than by a general policy carried out by the top levels of the administration.
Reevaluation of legacies
The Japanese occupation again dramatically changed the role of the Hispanic legacy in the country. Filipinos perceived themselves as leaders of many Southeast Asian populations, attributing their superior qualities to their “Christian democracy” and Western features—some emphasizing an Americanized identity, while others a European-Spanish one. Then, when the Japanese considered how to change the mindset of the Filipinos hoping to Asianize them, some of the negative facets were associated with the United States but others to the Spanish period. The contradiction of Spain being seen both as a friendly country and as the bearer of a three-century colonial legacy revealed itself in multiple ways such as propaganda but most important were the language and, especially, its religious policy.
The lack of a cultural policy to attract the population in Southeast Asia was not a guide on how to treat Spanish legacy. Before the war, Japan had founded some institutions and financed programs that promoted cultural exchange with Spanish institutions, but after the occupation, the armies merely had general instructions to convince occupied populations of the benefits of Japan. They were influenced by past colonial policies in northern Asia, by the Nazis’ propaganda model, and by the presumption that the inhabitants lacked a sophisticated culture—in case they did have one. Certainly, other than addressing military necessities and emphasizing Japanization as the primary goal for the future, from the beginning of the autumn of 1943, Japan gave the “independent” governments autonomy even in the political sphere—to the extent that Jeremy Yellen describes Jose P. Laurel’s regime as a “caretaker” and even “patriotic collaborators” (Yellen Reference Yellen2019: 106; Goodman Reference Goodman1991: 3–5).
In propaganda work, praise and criticism of Spain were mixed with lies. From the very beginning, Spanish friendship was used to convince Filipinos of their benevolence. Just a week after the beginning of the Japanese occupation of Manila, for instance, Domei News manipulated an official Spanish announcement praising the Imperial advance in the Philippines because no Spaniard had suffered any damage. It also included an exhortation by the Dominican Superior in Hong Kong requesting that the Japanese be respected due to their care for religion.Footnote 17 Fake news was created to depict Spanish praise for the Japanese occupation of China,Footnote 18 while both criticism and praise of the University of Santo Tomas were included in a web of lies exploited by the Japanese.Footnote 19
As for the language issue, more problems emerged due to increasing suspicions. On August 4, 1942, an executive order made Japanese and Tagalog official in the Courts, temporarily permitted the use of English, and forbade Spanish. Still, it was widely used during the previous years, as shown by the copies of daily newspapers in Spanish (63,593), which was almost as numerous as in English (71,157) (Rodao Reference Rodao2012: 286–9). But the Japanese simply tried to make do with their lack of Spanish translators by provisionally authorizing English—the biggest problem was, apparently, the lack of personnel. In spite of this, Madrid perceived that the decision weeded out the last redoubt of Spanish as an official language in the Philippines, since it had already been removed as an official language of the legislative body years before. And, in doing so, the Japanese paved the way for what Spanish government feared the most from the distance: the all-embracing hegemony of English in the Philippines.
The most complicated issue, in any case, was the Filipinization of the religious legacy, which involved many more actors, both in the archipelago and outside. The Japanese largely viewed Christianity as “antagonistic to imperial state” (Terada Reference Terada, Setsuho and Yu-Jose2003: 224) but the confrontation was largely evaded. During the war, the Vatican gained prominence due to the new Japanese embassy (Lottaz and Rodao Reference Lottaz, Rodao, Lottaz and Reginboin2019: 228–9), while the role of the Spaniards and Spain itself was relatively minor. In the Philippines, however, the Spanish Catholic friars were very significant, since they were approximately a third of the total number of regular priests in the Islands and a quarter of the total—almost 500 priests and nuns.Footnote 20
Since 1926, the Vatican had long made Filipinization a goal, though it remained unfulfilled. This was partly because most clergymen were still Caucasians, including Archbishop of Manila Michael O’Doherty, an Irishman with a British passport who was widely believed to be an American. Then, to carry out their objectives, Tokyo searched for individuals—lay and religious—who could help their religious policy; with the assistance of the archbishop of Tokyo they used the Catholic Church in Japan, one of the many organizations that had chosen to follow the doctrinal and organizational directives imposed by the Law of Religious Organizations (Shūkyō Dantaihō 宗教団体法) (Garon Reference Garon1997: 84–5). However, just before the invasion, under the leadership of the Osaka bishop, Yoshigorō Taguchi (芳五郎田口), the decision was made to act not as the Church itself but as individual volunteers (Terada Reference Terada, Setsuho and Yu-Jose2003: 225).
In any case, the contribution of the new authorities was relative, as the Catholic Church was a supranational organization with its head in the Vatican. Besides this, the military didn’t want to spend much time on the topic as they limited their actions to providing “freedom of religion as long as they cooperated” (Terada Reference Terada, Setsuho and Yu-Jose2003: 228). Certainly, they refused direct confrontation with Western Catholics; and in Indochina, for example, the military avoided harassing French anti-Japanese missionaries, failing to support the Thai nationalist campaign against them.Footnote 21
The role of Spanish Catholicism was of concern from the very beginning of the Occupation. Japanese Catholics organized a mission (日本天主公教教団, Nihon tenshu kōkyōkyōdan) that arrived in Manila immediately, settling in Intramuros. There, they acted as a Religious Section (with different names) under the orders of Christian army officials such as Lieutenant Colonel Tomoji Narusawa (友次成澤) and his deputies, Hiroshi Iijima (博飯島) and Sakae Mihara (栄三原). They visited Bishop Michael J. O’Doherty on January 11, 1942, and a week later they paid another visit to the leading representative of the Spanish clergy, the provisional president of the University of Santo Tomas (UST), Father Tomas Tascón DM, followed by meetings with school directors in May.Footnote 22
In March 1942, the Japanese seem to have formed their strategy. They focused on administrative negotiations on issues such as taxes on the economic activities of the church, the prohibition of religious instruction in the schools, and the authorization of divorce (Terada Reference Terada, Setsuho and Jose1999: 234; Strate Reference Strate2011: 60, 74). Education, however, was their main battlefield and Spaniards had a role in it. More than a quarter (28%) of the properties of the religious orders were educational buildings where many Spanish citizens worked, or which were even run by them, including buildings especially affected by the Japanese attacks after Pearl Harbor. The main problems were due to the requisitions to lodge Japanese soldiers or the citizens of enemy countries, just like in the España campus of UST.Footnote 23 During those operations, the Japanese soldiers did not respect Spaniards, such as when they searched San Sebastian church and slapped San Beda priests in February. In some ways this was supported by Filipino clergy and “lay intellectuals” who were, following Terada, “thrilled at the prospect of the Japanese deporting the Caucasians clergy in the pursuit of their East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere” (Terada Reference Terada, Setsuho and Jose1999: 236; Rodao Reference Rodao2012: 281–3). Then, on the island of Guam, the Spanish Bishop, Capuchin Monsignor Miguel Ángel Olano, was forcefully deported to Japan (Rodao Reference Rodao2005: 92–3).
Over time, some issues were resolved. In September 1942, classes were allowed to start in schools like San Beda, San Juan Letran, and even in UST, which were partly moved back to Intramuros, where they had been before, or using parts not occupied by internees in the España campus. The stated Japanese opposition to religious education and the “liberal” education of the American period had to be sidelined because there was no new personnel nor new books and classes started with the same teachers and the old books (Terada Reference Terada, Setsuho and Jose1999: 235–6). Bishop Olano, upon his arrival in Tokyo, was allowed to leave the Japanese empire for India, and his removal from Guam appears to have been expected to watch the reaction of Catholics to Filipinization in the Philippines (Rodao Reference Rodao2005: 92–3).
Apparently, the Japanese policy toward Catholics and their schools was meant to become more assertive. In 1943, the effort to accelerate “national independence” directly influenced the Catholic Church since the second Japanese target (besides the “reorganization of the economy”) was the restoration of the Filipino’s Asian identity, both spiritually and intellectually (Nakano Reference Nakano, Setsuho and Jose1999: 23). In February 1943, for example, Japanese officials met with the church’s highest-ranking officials in the Philippines including Papal Nuncio Guglielmo Piani, Archbishop O’Doherty, and all the provincial fathers of the religious orders, such as the Dominicans, their prior, Tomas Tascón, and the vice rector of UST. But the Religious Section was dissolved, and their members returned to Japan or were reassigned to different units. In the end, the Spanish legacy did not suffer due to a policy targeting it, partly because many measures were postponed. The Japanese measures proved more benevolent than the war-like context.
Wartime trauma and remembering
In February 1945, during the Battle of Manila, Hispanic influence underwent another upheaval. Besides deaths and destruction during the years of occupation, the Spanish community was particularly affected because the area that experienced the worst pillaging during the battle was its “mesticería”. Many Spaniards, Spanish mestizos, and Filipino citizens of Spanish ancestry resided in the Malate and Ermita areas while convents and missionaries were mostly located in Intramuros. Further, one of the largest massacres was in the Spanish Consulate, where a number of Filipino and Spanish families took refuge, believing that the Spanish flag would protect them; instead, the crowd may have just drawn the attention of the soldiers. Troops attacking homes and firing on defenseless groups at will was the norm at the time and all of those who took shelter in the Consulate perished, except a seven-year-old girl, Ana María Aguilella. Out of a total of 50,000 Filipino civilian deaths, the number of Spanish subjects killed was 238 while the number of people affected was around 650.Footnote 24
The trauma of those massacres during the war, especially in Manila, persists to this day. As we have already seen, the community had not only experienced murders half a century earlier, during the Philippine Revolution, but also internal disputes and ongoing accusations. However, the memory of these deaths in 1945 is different, because it has been remembered not only by the survivors and their descendants, but also by Filipinos and Americans. For the Philippines, the massacre was the final painful prelude before the promised independence, resolved thanks to American aid, and as a trauma that must be remembered to overcome new difficulties, as the aforementioned quote from Professor Jose indicates. For the United States, the battle for Manila was part of that final victory after a treacherous attack, a fight that lasted longer than expected (almost a month), but with no extraordinary record of deaths.
For Spain, the massacre was a failed springboard to the United States. Initially, the battle attracted significant interest; anxiety peaked during the six days in which there was no information from Manila and, once news of the massacre arrived, support for the community was widespread. Besides public opinion, however, the Francoist government sought to politically exploit its own tensions with Japan in order to be invited to the San Francisco Conference, which established the United Nations. The massacres in Manila, then, became part of the efforts to be accepted by the Allies in 1945, when Axis defeat was already foreseen, leading Madrid to take some formerly impossible decisions, such as banning the Roman salute, permitting performances of killed-by-Francoist author Federico García Lorca’s plays, stopping representing Japanese interests in Latin America and even suggesting to Allied officials they could declare war on Japan. Furthermore, waiting for the Allied reaction, Madrid launched a press campaign portraying the Japanese as “savages” to show how genuine their anti-Japanese feelings were, while allowing foreign press to report freely.
The plot was unsuccessful. Spain failed to accomplish its objectives since London and Washington rejected its suggestions, while Gen. Franco’s government was not invited to attend the San Francisco Conference. Ultimately, Madrid, finally, only severed diplomatic relations with Japan (Rodao Reference Rodao2023: 282–8). After one year, in July 1946, the Philippines independence was proclaimed with an American discourse referring for the first time to the Spanish legacy as “feudalism.” In 1938, American communist James Allen was the first to use that adjective to depict Spanish companies, but the official usage of this term in 1946 limited additionally the possibility of considering its legacy as complementary to the American legacy. Isolated, Franco’s Spain initiated a “crossing of the desert.”
The collective memory of the Spanish community once again started a new period of coexistence with other memories, as part of an ongoing negotiation with different narratives, cross-referencing, and borrowing, as Michael Rothberg suggests (Rothberg Reference Rothberg2009: 3). It was the same with the memories of American soldiers and officers, with those of the communist or pro-American guerrillas who fought against the Japanese occupation, with the population that had to endure Japanese atrocities, and with the remembering of each massacre suffered during the Battle of Manila itself. In some cases, the Spanish narratives coincided with others who reflected upon the same enemy, Japan. In other cases, not. In many instances, the accounts are conflicting; in some, the Spaniards are forgotten; in others, they are placed on the opposing side, and finally, some of these former Spaniards insist on not being considered part of that Spanish community, as in the case of the Basque guerrilla fighter, Higinio Uriarte.
The Philippines has remembered the trauma of the Japanese occupation in many cemeteries, battle sites, veteran groups, stamps, or films reminding them of their suffering. As for the Spanish community, there are quite a number of points to note. Of course, Spaniards are routinely mentioned, especially in many of the commemorations. A single monument was built in the crypt of the San Agustin church, engraved on its four walls with the names of people who died, not all of them Spanish citizens. Also, plenty of memories have been written in Spanish by survivors of the Battle of Manila.Footnote 25 But, besides a doctored diary of the Japanese occupation written by a Spanish priest, Father Labrador, OP, there is only one book devoted to the Spanish community, commissioned by the Spanish Foreign Minister Antonio Pérez de Olaguer, who travelled to the Philippines and published in 1946 in Spain. Still, this is scarcely known in the Philippines and only translated into English in the year 2006. Besides this, no memories have been published about the internal disputes of the Spanish community during the Spanish War, despite the fact that there are quite a number of hagiographies of important persons such as Enrique Zobel de Ayala or Andrés Soriano, who even had a memory museum dedicated to him. As suggested by Soriano’s example, many were ashamed of their behavior during the Spanish War and preferred to remain silent over the years. In fact, there are only two published accounts of Falangist leaders; Paulino Miranda Sampedro in 1940, to refute accusations against him, and Martín Pou y Roselló, the recollections he told to his psychiatrist before his death in 1973.
The different remembering of the collective memory
This section will follow the framework of the memory of these events through the main powers that have influenced it, starting with the United States, followed by the Philippines and then Spain. It will end with the internal processes experienced around that community, looking first at the core and later at the former peripheries that later stopped being part of it, such as leftists, regional identities, and later generations. The community underwent many critical changes, much like the Philippines itself, and its memories have gone in different directions.
The United States provokes humiliating silence
The United States initially commemorated the liberation of the Philippines and the Battle of Manila as an important part of their struggle against the Japanese empire. The soldiers who died in the Philippines and the battles have been commemorated on numerous occasions, as were the massacres committed in Manila, of course. However, other moments have received greater attention such as Japan’s final defeat with the atomic bombings as well as other battles that resulted in numerous casualties like in Iwo Jima. Spain’s image during this conflict was framed at the beginning of the war, when it was feared for its influence in the western hemisphere, and it could contribute to an Axis penetration into the continent and erode the influence of the United States. This cognitive framework embraced also the Hispanic legacy in the Philippines, partly because military officials like Douglas MacArthur associated this country with Latin America and partly because the archipelago was menaced by the war, although by a different Axis country. The accusations of Spanish residents in the Philippines as being fifth-columnists or the reports on the possibility of the Philippines once again flying the Spanish flag are examples of it. An example is the book by Allan Chase, Falange. The Secret Army of the Axis in the Americas, published simultaneously in English and Spanish, in 1943, which began with the Philippine example.
This framework of incompatibility also defined the Spaniards’ situation during the Battle of Manila and afterward. The Americans remembered and reminded people of the Franco regime’s close ties with the Japanese, which resulted in the immediate expulsion of Consul Castaño and the alleged “blacklist” of Falange officials who had to leave the Philippines. Further, at the speech inaugurating the independence of the Philippines, Washington used the term “feudalism” to explain the country’s longtime backwardness while also mentioning Japan’s guilt for its most recent suffering, implying that it was only the colonizers of the United States who tried to place the Philippines on the road to progress.
By framing Spain’s legacy in the long term, the United States somewhat buried the major suffering the Spaniards experienced during the Battle of Manila, which they considered to be more of a personal, rather than collective, trauma. They also attributed the negative influence of this feudalism to powerful families characterized by their Spanish ancestry, who indeed largely benefited from the country’s social differences.
Hispanism was also included in this frame of incompatibility. Whereas speaking Spanish had previously carried no political implications, this changed after the war. After the 1952 Magalona Law made teaching Spanish mandatory in every private university and school for two consecutive years, Keith Whinnom, with a grant from the University of Hong Kong, wrote a book and a scholarly article on the Spanish language in the Philippines, where he brought a new twist to the meaning of Hispanism by dividing Filipinos between pro- and anti-American. While denying with multiple data the importance of Spanish language in the Philippines (“Scarcely a week passes without the appearance in print of some remarks on the subject” [Whinnom Reference Whinnom1954: 129]), Whinnom insisted that there was no market for books in Spanish, and used a new term implying a kind of contempt: “Anti-Americanism is left to the Filipino hispanists” (Whinnom Reference Whinnom1954: 167). By portraying Hispanists in the Philippines as anti-American, Whinnom not only emphasized their backwardness by defending a lost cause with no social support but degraded them for not having their own ideas and only knowing how to attack, in a classic example of orientalizing the enemy. The historian Ileto, in fact, points to the influence this concept had on his professor, Benedict Anderson, in analyzing the Philippines through Latin American models, although he mostly emphasizes the contributions of other scholars: “Anderson’s attempt to racialize and ‘feudalize’ the Filipino leadership sounds in fact like the efforts at representation by American observers and pacification authorities at the turn of the century” (Ileto Reference Ileto2001: 63).
This might help explain why the memory of the Spanish community became unspeakable through its convergence with US “feudalism” narratives. During the multidirectional interaction in multidirectional ways between Filipino nationalism, Franco’s diplomatic needs, and the Spaniards own remembering, the American framework caused the community to participate in forgetting the events rather than resisting the framework. Pointing to wealthy Spanish families made many accelerate their process of detaching from their Spanish identity which influenced the whole Spanish community in a “collusive silence,” which was defined by Paul Connerton as a kind of collective shame that is “both a desire to forget and sometimes the actual effect of forgetting” (Connerton, Reference Connerton2008: 67). In 1995, the famous Spanish Filipinist and ambassador Pedro Ortíz Armengol, when asked by this author about his initial opposition to the publication of a scholarly article about the Spanish Falange and the JONS in the Philippines, he argued: “It’s best not to rehash it.”
Perhaps as a consequence of these imaginative links that are the substance of multidirectional memory (Rothberg Reference Rothberg2009: 18), “feudalism” had a later life. Jose Maria Sison, Communist Party of the Philippines’ founding chairman, pointed to the United States instead of Spain for having encouraged feudal relations in the Philippines: “to perpetuate the poverty of the broad masses of the people, subjugate the most numerous class, which is the peasantry, and manipulate local backwardness for the purpose of having cheap labor and cheap raw materials from the country” (Guerrero Reference Guerrero1980: 29, cit. in Claudio Reference Claudio2013: 50).
Philippine nationalism: the anti-Spanish framework
Philippine society thanked the Americans for liberating them from Japanese oppression even to the point of many of their soldiers dying in the archipelago. Gen. Douglas MacArthur not only became the country’s great hero but also its most influential figure, while the American worldview strongly influenced the nation. Further, after several years, the American narrative was reinforced, when the communist guerrillas challenged the elites in the country and US financial and military prowess was needed to maintain their privileged status. With pro-US fervor leaving little room, prewar schemes on the future of the Philippines greatly changed, as the American conceptual frame was the preferred to devise the future of the independent Republic. The sajonistas won, the nipponists disappeared, and the hispanistas were limited to specific issues. Interest in Spain or any Latin American country almost disappeared, with Franco’s dictatorship in Spain isolated from the world while the former grandiose perspectives of Argentina disappeared, along with those of other Latin American countries. The Spanish community and everything Hispanic was now mostly perceived as one of the explanations for the problems of the country and a hindrance to further development. Philippine anti-Americanism was at its lowest, with some criticizing American misgivings related to the 1898 War and the guerrillas looking to the Soviet Union or the People’s Republic of China as possible solutions.
The only Hispanicism that continued in the Philippines was driven by Filipinos, some of whom were in high positions. In 1948, when the United Nations, alleging that Franco’s government was Axis-installed, requested the withdrawal of foreign diplomats from Spain, Manila was one of the few countries that supported Madrid, and afterward, numerous visits were made by presidents and high-ranking officials, while appointments of Filipino diplomats had a certain political importance. This support for Madrid, however, was not anti-American, neither for Filipinos nor for Franco’s government, as it was explained simply by cultural issues, while the anti-American significance was secondary and oblique, as in the case of Claro Recto. The most significant were the laws approved in order to force the teaching of Spanish and the reasoning was a further problem. It was explained as a way to reinforce nationalism: students should know the language of their heroes when devising their country. Then, with this rationale, the two-year teaching included one year of grammar and another reading the texts of the heroes of the homeland, like the poem El Ultimo Adios, by Jose Rizal. In reality, Rizal’s texts and others ended up being memorized in a pedagogic contradiction that increased opposition and public demonstrations against the measure.
The role of Hispanicity, then, was much more limited than in the prewar period. Although many families continued to speak Spanish, it was no longer a source of pride to do so among outsiders, and while many young people could use it at home, they preferred not to do so outside or with their children—conscious of the general accusations against Spaniards and the understanding that their influence basically served as a handicap to the Philippines’ progress. Further, the pejorative meaning of the term Kastila increased, while the image of the Spanish community was reduced to just the most oligarchic families in the country.
The Spaniards reacted by creating a term to divide Filipinos—“anti-Spanish.” It has probably been the most used word I have heard in conversations I have had, especially by the person considered to be the leading source on the Philippines in Spain, Pedro Ortíz Armengol, first as attaché, then later Spanish ambassador and a great expert in Philippine literature. Others have also preferred to use a similar division, as it appears on one of the few occasions when the Spaniards agreed with the Japanese during their talks over compensation for damages suffered by Spaniards in the Philippines, in the First Joint Fact-Finding Commission. In the 1950s, both critically mentioned “partial and false slander” made by “Filipinos who are giving false testimony” driven by “strong anti-Japanese sentiment at the time and their own selfish desires” (Arasawa Reference Arasawa2019: 114). Such a simple division certainly suggests scorn similar to references to “anti-American,” but it was also a product of a more elevated social situation that was apparently shared by many in the rest of high classes of the Philippine society—as shown by the numerous expressions of support of the Spanish rebels in the Civil War by Filipino politicians after the World War, even after the UN’s diplomatic blockade.
This binary framework helps us understand some of the most unexpected responses among the people interviewed. Some continued to defend Manila’s Spanish consul during the Japanese occupation, José del Castaño y Cardona, in spite of his being the most politicized diplomat to ever be stationed in Manila—“More of a Falangist than a consul” as his own son acknowledged back then (Rodao Reference Rodao and Moreno Cantano2013: 179–208). In fact, some of the wartime accusations of collaborationism against him were true—such as his denunciation of eight Spaniards (some of whom had actually already changed nationality after Franco’s victory) to Japanese authorities, and his May 1942 congratulations to the Japanese army after the US surrender at Corregidor Island. Castaño also instigated infighting among the Spanish community—of which documentary evidence exists in the archives of the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs which I myself showed to his daughter who asked me “not to speak bad” about her father. However, the Spaniards I interviewed, in spite of not having contact with the family, have preferred to disregard this new information—apparently out of discomfort, fearing that they would only provide further ammunition to “anti-Spaniard” sentiments.
This “anti-Spanish” framework can also be found in reactions to my working hypothesis for my previous work on the Philippine Falange, which was published in the Revista Española del Pacífico (1993). The initial rejection by the Editorial Board was not due to the revelations about Consul Castaño’s misdeeds as mucH as to the bibliography used, starting with Hernando Abaya and Teodoro Agoncillo. One significant citation was that of a “well-known” author Benigno del Río, the son of a former Spanish soldier, who was denounced by Consul Castaño during the Japanese occupation and imprisoned in concentration camps—he was labelled as “anti-Spanish.”Footnote 26 It appears that criticism of the Spanish legacy, and especially against some of their members, has strengthened a siege mentality of “us vs. them,” reflecting latent orientalist representations of Filipinos, as expressed in some memoirs by Europeans (Martin Reference Martin2015: 827).
Spain: repressive silence
Spain’s role in shaping the memory of the Philippine Spanish community has been preferably repressive, because in its desire to forget its anti-American past, it blocked the community’s need to remember its traumas. As we have seen, Spain sought to enter the Second World War using the Battle of Manila as an excuse, but its attempt to declare war on Japan was just one of its strategies to move closer to the United States.
Madrid’s interests have influenced the Spanish community’s life. Just a month after its failed attempt to join the United Nations by declaring war on Japan, Franco’s government went on to proclaim that Neutrality had been the policy of its government during the Second World War—in spite of the fact that in 1945 Madrid suggested joining the war on the side of the Allies and in 1940 on the side of Germany. The government’s new policy implied not raising too much awareness of the deaths in the Philippines, cognizant of the remembrance of the former links with Japan that the massacre entailed. And then, although a Committee of the Hispano-Filipino Community held several masses, outrage over the sufferings of its compatriots in Manila died down gradually, and interest was changed to restoring previous commercial ties, with an unofficially recognized Chamber of Oriental Commerce receiving more attention (Rodao Reference Rodao2002: 479).
In 1945, Spain’s interest in rapprochement with the United States recycled Spain’s most famous memory from the Spanish–American War in 1898. T
he defense of tens of Spanish soldiers trapped in Baler for more than a year during the Philippine Revolution, refusing to believe that the war was over and only surrendering their weapons when their superiors asked them directly, had had an important impact, and they were depicted as popular heroes. In fact, the first president of the Philippine Republic, Emilio Aguinaldo, allowed them to freely return to Spain despite having killed Filipinos during their futile resistance. In 1945, a film on their story, Los Últimos de Filipinas (The last of the Philippines), included some scenes depicting American soldiers ready to rescue Spanish heroes and the narrative took a qualitative leap. By emphasizing collaboration with the Americans through the Philippine Revolution, the Spanish government tried to bury the hostility from the Second World War.Footnote 27
The next Spanish initiative took place after the massacre of Manila, since the Foreign Affairs Ministry sent Antonio Pérez de Olaguer, whose father and brother were born in the Philippines and had died in the Spanish War, to the archipelago. Pérez de Olaguer published some books on the “Red Terror” during the Spanish Civil War: El terror rojo en Cataluña (The Red Terror in Catalonia, 1937), El terror rojo en Andalucía (The Red Terror in Andalucia, 1938), and El Terror rojo en la montaña (The Red Terror in the Mountains, 1939). And, as one can imagine, his new book was titled El Terror Amarillo en Filipinas (The Yellow Terror in the Philippines, 1947).
After the year 1950, the Philippines became politically relevant for Spanish foreign policy when East Asia served as a “backdoor” for maintaining ties with the United States, and the Foreign Affairs Ministry created a “Philippines and Far East” department (Rodao Reference Rodao1995: 233–41). Later, in 1955, Spain made one last attempt at rapprochement with the United States through the Manila massacre, when the Philippines was at the center of the difficult negotiations with Japan for wartime reparations. With memory issues at the center of the discussions, Spain insisted including an “expression of regret” 「遺憾の意の表明」 in the final joint declaration, in spite of the initial Japanese refusal (Arasawa Reference Arasawa2019: 101–3). After 1956, however, when Spain joined the United Nations, its interest in the Philippines was secondary, although the country was one of the few represented by its president (in fact, Imelda Marcos, his wife) in the funeral after Gen. Franco’s death in 1975. Madrid never had a genuine interest in the new Hispanic country and in spite of the numerous opportunities to commemorate those wartime deaths during visits made by important Spanish officials to the Philippines—such as Foreign Ministry Alberto Martín Artajo (1953) and the Spanish Prince Juan Carlos and Princess Sofia (1974)—there are no records of efforts to commemorate suffering.Footnote 28
The Franco regime wanted to forget its links with the Axis, certainly, but many in the community felt the same way. This would explain their selective memory of other events despite the fact that the community itself could have known about them but refused to share them. Several facts not only demonstrate the Franco government’s desire to forget them, but also that of powerful leaders in the community as well due to how inconvenient they were. The most obvious example is the fact that General Francisco Franco’s half-brother was born in the Philippines. The dictator’s father, Nicolás Franco, was a sailor stationed in the Philippines who sired a son, Eugenio Franco Puey, born on November 1, 1889, from an affaire Nicolás had with a 14-year-old girl, Concepción Puey. Eugenio Franco y Puey was officially acknowledged by his father, Nicolás, before he left the Philippines for Spain to marry María del Pilar Bahamonde y Pardo de Andrade, the dictator’s mother. In 1912, Eugenio moved to Spain and worked at the Instituto Geografico y Catasral (Geographic and Cadastral National Institute) but he never had a relationship with Gen. Franco, though the dictator was apparently aware of him. There is no trace that the community was aware of the indirect relationship of the Spanish dictator with the Philippines, even though some articles have been published on it since 1977, and the Pueys were a well-known family in Manila. The reason seems to be that the community’s leaders were aware of the Spanish chief-of-state’s discomfort at the subject (in 1940, when Nicolás Franco Sr. died, the woman living with him was not allowed to attend the funeral) and they decided to silence the half-brother issue.
There are three more relevant examples. First, Gonzalo de Beaumont Colmorio was implicated in a case of money theft in 1940. He worked at the Spanish consulate in Manila, had gambling debts and ties with the Axis espionage, while his affairs were widely known and commented in Manila at this time. Second, a Philippine citizen residing in Washington, Porfirio Sevilla, denounced Joaquin Miguel Mike Elizalde appointment in Washington as Resident Commissioner in 1938 as illegal. The US Constitution required a minimum of seven years as a citizen to hold such a position and Sevilla obtained the support of a considerable number of Congressmen in revising his appointment, since Mike Elizalde had Filipino citizenship since 1933. Third, Spanish deputy Rafael Antón arrived in the Philippines in 1938 after having served as one of the judges who sentenced Falangist prominent leader Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera to death in 1936. He hid his identity and used a pseudonym, Ramiro Aldave, for his anti-Axis articles in the press.
Among these four cases—Franco’s brother, Andrés Soriano’s employee, Elizalde’s adversary and Rafael Antón—only the deputy involved in the death sentence for the Falangist leader was remembered. Antón was identified by his opponents and questions about the veracity of his identity have been continuous. This fact points to the importance of leaders and their wealth, more to hide inconvenient facts than in divulging the collective memory to the rest of the country. The money from the leaders was crucial to the Spanish community, and he aided many people after the war, despite previous political differences.Footnote 29
The Francoist regime and the Spaniard’s forgetting, however, is not a “collusive silence.” They did not pay much attention to the community of Spanish-speaking Filipinos who wished to adopt Spanish culture as a means of expression. It is doubtful whether Los Ultimos de Filipinas was able to change US or Philippine society’s opinion of Spain, just like its diplomat’s insistence on Japanese expressing regret in 1955 or a book using the term Yellow Terror in the Philippines. Gaspar Vibal has used the phrase “habitual disdain of the Spanish community” (Vibal Reference Vibal2021: 63) when referring to Foreign Minister Martin Artajo’s absence in a play written by the Filipino, Francisco Liongson, in 1954. This is, perhaps, the most important fact about the Spanish community’s memory of the Asia-Pacific War in the Philippines. The hispanistas’ interest in remembering their dead and loss of Spanish culture has been sidelined partly due to the political reluctance of Spanish authorities and Spaniards to remember their friendship with Japan. Furthermore, that rejection of Peninsulars has led to people labeling them as chulos or the Ilonggo term, tikalon. Footnote 30
A divided community
The Philippine Spanish community lost its ability to express its memory collectively while individual and family memories gained ground. Infighting led to countless applications for Philippine or American citizenship and the community’s general economic decline as a result of the Japanese occupation. The birth of the Philippine Republic placed legal restrictions on foreign ownership, with the exception of Americans and most of those Spaniards who managed to retain power changed to Philippine nationality. Emigration also played a role: with so many deaths, companies and houses destroyed, the size of the postwar diaspora was substantial; some went to Spain in two ships sent by the government (Halekala and Plus Ultra), while others migrated to the United States or Australia. Among the families who stayed, their primary concern was their future in the Philippines. Something similar happened with the religious orders, where Spaniards gradually lost their importance. Tabacalera’s prominence also gradually declined (they stopped helping Spaniards buy land)Footnote 31 even in their own headquarters: the new Casa de España established in Manila in the 1960s was much more modest than the one in the 1920s.
The most significant was how those “mestizos and Filipinos of Spanish ancestry” lost influence within the Spanish community. When Spanish citizens managed to build a community in the postwar period, it was modest and small, and the possibility to influence the rest of the society was no longer possible. In fact, money from the Philippines continued to influence Spain; there had been clear signs of a Hispano–Filipino relationship: in Madrid, among significant businesses such as Hotel Mindanao, the Capitol building had a cafeteria called Manila, and to this day, it still has a plaque calling tobacco merchant Enrique Carrion “the creator of this building.” But they have been the result of private decisions, not from a community. Even the perception of mutual ties, thanks to famous personalities, is diluted. Famous socialite Isabel Preysler has been well-known and identified in Spain as a Filipina, but not Junior (Antonio Morales Barreto). Born in Manila in 1943, the husband of another singer and famous socialite, Rocio Dúrcal, and a famous singer himself, in popular music bands in Spain, such as Los Brincos, Los Pekenikes and Juan y Junior, the origins of Morales Barreto are unknown to Spaniards.
After the war, certainly, official interests marginalized those of the community and there were not many efforts to rebut the critics. With so many traumas to hide, the issue was perhaps how to articulate their own discourse, to generate a vocabulary associating appropriate words and concepts with appropriate things (Stoler Reference Stoler2011: 125). The only known debate on their collective memory has been on the list of Spaniards fighting during the Civil War, as shown on a plaque in the Casino Español, that still refuses to include the names of Republicans. Without coordination between them, the predominance of familial or individual narratives in recounting the events of the Pacific War is absolute over those of the community. When I asked the son of one of the Ferrer brothers about Castaño’s congratulatory message to Japanese authorities after they took Corregidor, which I was told had been influenced by his father, he responded by blaming the one responsible for the decision: Everyone should take responsibility for their own actions!!!Footnote 32
Besides the loss of leadership and the growing role of personal or family experiences to refer to collective memory, the community’s biggest challenge was its inability to recover and maintain peripheral members. Besides those who applied for Philippine citizenship and those who emigrated to other countries, the community lost its ability to attract both newer generations as well as those in the forefront of the community, either due to regional identity or political differences.
The children of many Hispanized Filipinos ceased to be Filhispanic after the war. The memories of the “generation after” were different, partly because they were now visual and the experiences are only by means of stories, images, and behavior among which they grow up. And connection with the past, rather than a temporal delay, is also mediated by “imaginative investment, projection and creation” (Hirsch Reference Hirsch2012: 5) As with writer Hiraki Murakami in his search for “commitment” in relation to the massacres committed by his father’s generation when writing The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1994–1995), their generational distance—a spatiotemporal, psychological, and political one—from the original events enabled them to remove themselves from the myopic view of Japanese historical (ir)responsibility (Abe Reference Abe2023: 624).
Prewar Filhispanics faced many challenges in trying to convince their children of the advantages offered by the culture they had received. With this framework of incompatibility, the disputes between fascists and reactionaries, and without iconic images or printed testimonies to pass down the Manila massacre as a collective event, younger generations experienced a kind of forgetting that is constitutive in the formation of a new idea, part of an active process of creating a shared identity in a new setting including both emancipation of individuals, tacitly shared silences, and embracing a new language, even forgetting Spanish words. They mainly emphasized the advantages of letting go of useless memories (Connerton Reference Connerton2008: 63–4). After several decades, most of the children of the Filhispanic families could no longer be considered as such, either because they could no longer speak Spanish or because they didn’t feel any special link with their culture. In fact, I currently believe that I should have focused my research on these Filhispanics before the war and interviewed the new generations of families who were Filhispanics before the war, but not after.
Republicans were another group that left the Spanish community. After their defeat, with the fall of the Second Republic, these Spaniards lost their passports, becoming stateless and experiencing their own diaspora. In spite of their problems, they continued to promote Spanish culture and shape their own community, one of their first activities being to create a center for spreading the Spanish language, while some advertisements appeared in the press against Franco’s regime. The two former deputies of the parliament who emigrated to the Philippines had to go into exile: Spain’s Plenipotentiary Minister in the Far East, Antonio Jaén Morente, received a job offer that was withdrawn later, and finally exiled to Ecuador, while Benito Pabon, defender of POUM Trotskyite party leader Andreu Nin, later assassinated by a pro-Stalin squad, emigrated to Panama in the postwar period. For those who settled in the archipelago, their main option was to assimilate into the wider Philippine society, either in a kind of exile from Manila, such as one of the leading Republicans, Basque Buenaventura de Erquiaga, who ended as rector of the Legazpi College, or distancing from the community, such as the children of Tomas del Río. While his daughter has been called “The Pasionaria of the Philippines,” in memory of Dolores Ibarruri, the Spanish communist leader who pronounced highly militant speeches, her brother, Benigno del Río, published famous books against the Franco regime. The most important legacy has been that of Juvenal Sanso, a member of the family of Catalan anarchists who arrived in the Philippines and remained with his family in Paco, Manila.
The Basque community in the Philippines, on the other hand, has always had a peculiar identity. Their role in the Spanish War was notable, because they mostly followed the Basque Nationalist Party, a Catholic conservative party that sided with the Republic. The only Catholic order that refused to join the rebellion was Basques, and the most important contribution of money to the Republic was made by wealthy Basque hacenderos from Negros Island, who also financed the president of that party in exile during the Second World War. After the Spanish War, Falangist consul Castaño wrote to his superiors that the Basques opposed the Japanese during the war and one of the most famous works from those years touched on one such Basque guerrilla fighter, Higinio Uriarte (De Borja, Reference De Borja2005: 134–6; Uriarte Reference Uriarte1962; Anasagasti Reference Anasagasti2019). Basque pelota or Pelota Vasca players have also taken pride in their anti-Francoism, but part of their story is inaccurate. They were successful in popularizing the sport, making it one of the most popular attractions in the Philippines and in China. But the Basque Pelota expanded through Falange networks and there is no record of them being anti-Francoists.Footnote 33
Republicans, leftists, nationalists, and most of all, Hispano-Filipinos who offered an alternative to Hispanism, gradually abandoned an ever-decreasing community. If prior to the war, its central nucleus of peninsulares—with its conservatism and elitism—was capable of exercising power, after the war, although it remained very conservative, it could no longer convince neither the society nor the insulares (that is, those attached to the Philippines) to follow their Hispanist route.
Conclusion: from comfortable to uncomfortable
Over time, traumatic memories of the war have faded. The Spaniards in the Philippines have tended to forget the internal tensions that existed since the beginning of the Spanish War by the de-politization of memory. Anti-Francoist Benigno del Río had a lengthy correspondence with Blas Piñar, director of the Instituto de Cultura Hispánica and the foremost leader of the extreme right in Spain after General Franco’s death (Vivó Reference Vivó and Casanova2025: 326). Famous journalist Andres Aberasturi attributed Benigno del Río’s anti-Francoism to Mercedes Ferrer, the sister of two Falange leaders in the Philippines, because she preferred to marry another man, who happened to be a Falangist. I myself have revealed to many descendants previously unknown facts about their families and, in fact, similar cases have happened in many political movements, even among those who took pride in their past. The daughter of the last commander of the International Brigades’ Lincoln Battalion during the Spanish Civil War, Milton Wolf, unwittingly befriended a man whose father had also fought in Spain during the conflict, and it was only when the fiancée informed her father of whom she was going to marry that Wolf told his daughter about his past.Footnote 34
Further, Spanish democracy was restored and the image of the country has changed completely, while memories of friendship with Japan were dispelled, along the inclination to forget prevailed together with the renewed political interest in the Philippines. Using the Barcelona Olympic Games of 1992, many companies started to use the image of democratic Spain for selling their products. In 1998, during the centennial of Spain’s departure from the archipelago, the Philippines played a special role—mainly because Spain needed to compensate for its strained relationships with Cuba and Puerto Rico, the other two colonies it lost that same year. Despite the many speeches and rhetoric, mutual relations have slightly improved and following the European approach to Asia, the two countries have improved political relations and held so-called Tribunes, an annual gathering to expand relations.Footnote 35
The memory of the Manila Massacre of 1945 has faded irremissibly. In the Philippines, there is only a private organization that consistently commemorates the wartime massacres, Memorare Manila 1945,Footnote 36 but in Spain there is no commemoration. The 2011 Islamist terror attacks in Atocha have surpassed the number of deaths in Manila as the largest prior massacre of Spaniards and, while there were some articles on the 75th anniversary of the massacre, there was no commemoration in the 80th, even though Ana Maria Aguilella, the only survivor, is still alive. The only seeming remnant of those memories was the death sentence of a descendant of a Basque ball pelotari that galvanized the Spanish society to ask for the revision of the sentence, to the extent that President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo signed the abolition of the death penalty in the Philippines before a visit to Spain (Rodao Reference Rodao, Beneyto and Pereira2011: 486–7).
In the Philippines, the Spanish community lost its political and economic influence and its ability to construct a representation of the past embedded in social action. After the infighting and the new perception of Spain during the Civil War as a bloodthirsty country, followed after the outbreak of the Second World War by accusations of fifth-columnism and requests for naturalization, and by the material destruction and the massacres during the Japanese Occupation, the postwar ended definitively its political, economic, and cultural clout over the country. After the war, certainly, the Spanish community changed and no longer represented a cultural or economic elite but was restricted to people with direct ties to Spain. Under this more restricted definition of the Spanish community, the community itself diminished. The past influence of its institutions over the rest of society—such as Santiago Hospital—gradually declined. It also led to the peninsulares community’s alienation from the rest of society, as shown by its insistence on classifying Filipinos as either pro-Spanish or anti-Spanish—even though Hispanism had become irrelevant to the great majority of Philippine society.
The memory of the Asia-Pacific War appears to have played a decisive role in this change. While after 1898 many in the Spanish community boasted of their contribution to the creation of a new country, after 1945 the mood was completely different. To the Filipinos, the Spanish community became identified with pro-Japanese sympathies, with the feudal legacy, and with a backward influence, to which the Spaniards did not respond as a community or as individuals, and this silence appears as the most relevant example of how uncomfortable the memory of those years has been.
Supplementary material
The supplementary material for this article can be found https://doi.org/10.1017/apj.2026.10061
Acknowledgments
The author would like to thank Carlos Madrid, as well as the reviewers and the editors of this volume for their invaluable insights and comments on previous versions of this article.
Financial support
This article has been researched thanks to a grant from the Toyota Foundation program (1994).
Competing interests
The author declares that he has no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.
Author Biography
Florentino Rodao García holds PhDs from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid (1993) and the University of Tokyo (2007) and is professor of Modern History at the Universidad Complutense in Madrid.
Rodao has worked extensively on the history of Spanish interactions with East Asia, with books authored on Thailand, Japan (From Allies to Enemies. Spain, Japan, the Axis and World War II¸ 2023, 『フランコと大日本帝国 』 (Tokyo: Shobusha 晶文, 2012), and on the Philippines (Franquistas sin Franco. Una historia alternativa de la Guerra Civil Española desde Filipinas¸ 2012).
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