When my family and I emigrated to Canada decades ago, we brought a couple of hand-carved bookends packed in a rigid box, among other memorabilia handed down from my grandfather Francisco Lavides. The weight of these bookends must have left a huge dent on the scales at the airport, as my wife, eldest child, and I embarked on a long journey to Toronto. These bookends crafted from kamagong hardwood are of seated Igorot figures designed with humongous feet to support hard-bound books. Imagining Lolo Kiko writing behind his large mahogany pedestal desk adorned by these exquisite bookends became an inspiration to an impressionistic portrait I painted of him entitled “Native Pillars”.
These vintage figural pair of hand carved keepsake are relics of an abandoned era forging through the rubble of forgetfulness. The pieces were retrieved from the abandoned ancestral house in history-rich Pasay. Weighty as they are in its significance, the remains of an indelible past have become an anchor to an imagined history that my notable forebear had been part of. The fated estate had encased my childhood memories, thus it left a scar of resentment when it was replaced by an imposing marker of structural development – the modern condominium.
The decision to migrate is driven by a willful parting with a past that has spawned experiences that shaped who I am as an exile. Migration is uprooting from the native soil and unbinding from one’s cultural ties; yet mementos somehow mitigate the separation and loss. The bookends, having been sculpted by Igorots of the northern province brought a quaint symbolism as I arrived at a piece of similarly expropriated indigenous lands of North America.
The wooden pair originated from Baguio City, the summer capital of the Philippines. When Americans took over the islands after the Philippine-American War, the Governor-General established a summer government retreat in this mountainous region for its cooler climate and strategic location, not to mention the primordial lure of gold that would spice up neo-colonialists to explore the mineral-rich territory. As the United States was carving a niche for supremacy in the grand geopolitical theatre in the Pacific, the Filipino subject became its apprentice in handling affairs of American-sponsored institutions. A young generation of aspirants were educated and trained in the legal profession, who subsequently became statesmen assuming high positions in the government.
My grandfather, Francisco Lavides, born in Atimonan, Tayabas (Quezon) in 1892, was among the selected pool of neophytes who rose to the ranks with impressive portfolios that caught the attention of progenitors of Asia’s first democracy at the turn of the century. He became one of the longest-serving Assemblymen during the Commonwealth era representing the second district of what was then known as Tayabas. From 1935 to 1946, he was the representative to the National Assembly of sixteen towns, from Alabat Island in the east coast of Southern Luzon to one of the oldest towns located in the central part of the province, Unisan.
His eminent colleagues, most of whom were born in the 1890s went to the same school and practiced law under the prying eyes of American superiors. For four decades, the Filipino echelon of legislators had to hustle against machinations of a power structure influenced by monopolist agro-industrialists who had unlimited access to Philippine market.
Years later, the disenchantment among Filipino nationalists trawled by the country’s inability to defend itself from the Japanese onslaught in the Second World War created a political vacuum that was capitalized by purveyors of American hegemony. Patriots and protectionists who disavowed the restored interference of so called liberators were shunned while a string of avowed Americanistas and their stooges were fielded in the administration sharing similar traits to those who ran banana republics in Latin America.
One must call to mind that during the annexation campaign at the turn of the twentieth century, America propagated its depiction of Filipinos as either savages or innocent children needing education and fostering. The independence movement fought by insurrectionists led by Emilio Aguinaldo swayed some American legislators and public opinion to let Filipinos run their own affairs. But the administrations of Presidents William Mckinley and his successor Theodore Roosevelt both maintained a keen interest in preserving a U.S. imperial hold and connection with the Philippines. Thus, the legacy of subordination to the mercantile and geopolitical interests of its assimilationist benefactor persisted.
In 1904, the World’s Fair in St. Louis Missouri celebrated America’s conquest of the islands by showcasing the traditional customs of Igorots, an ethnic group from the North, in real life. The barely clad presence of a mountain people who had been unconquered for more than three hundred years were exhibited for the first time to the American public. To placate sentiments sullied by the horrors inflicted against Filipinos who resisted the Americans during the war that lasted for three years (1899-1902), the carvers and weavers among other ethnic craftsmen on display became ‘spinning tools’ of a public relations propaganda.
More than a thousand indigenous inhabitants were transported from the Philippines and exposed in the flesh, deliberately to substantiate America’s intervention in the archipelago’s domestic affairs. Together with a battalion of Philippine scouts who served under white officers in quelling insurrections, the exposition served as a testament to America’s immeasurable ambition of consigning the newly discovered untamed “sullen peoples”, as exhorted in Rudyard Kipling’s poem, to the future progress of civilization.
As is often the case in history of conquests, America’s ‘benevolent assimilation’ campaign had a double-edged nature of ‘divinely ordained’ mission of educating and civilizing people while sleazily exploiting its resources and strategic location, flexing its muscle in the Far East to prop up its regional hegemony. The conquest was ‘bookended’ by promises of progress and independence, planting their own large feet on governmental affairs. To facilitate this civilizationist agenda, a cadre of Filipinos was created to rubber stamp national policies that would be instrumental in securing America’s political and economic interest in the region.Thus, the old scheme of psychological warfare to dampen morale pervades in keeping nationalists at bay or making them yield to the whims of belligerent democratizers.
As a child in the late 60s, I remember being prodded by one of my elders to call my aging grandfather from his office for lunch. Disillusioned by the turn of events in post-war years, he retired from his political career and focused instead on his legal and academic profession, once the Dean of Law at Far Eastern University in Manila. In his sunset years, Lolo Kiko would leave the room still absorbed in his thoughts after poring over documents or books, yet always acknowledging me with a placid smile whenever we headed towards the dining room. I did not have the faintest idea on how something mundane as watching my Lolo’s routine around the house would later be drawn as impetus to a particular painting and corresponding musings on the historicity of a country’s compromised past.
Salvaging bookends from the ancestral house must have engendered in me a deep sense of curiosity regarding my grandfather’s oblique role in Philippine history, just as the anonymous carver from the ‘cordilleras’ piqued my interest in the heritage of a colonially smothered nation, once deemed ‘uncivilized’ by crafty Yankees. ####