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If only our ancestors could be resurrected!
(Rizal 1890, 90)
Racial Science and the Quest for Origins
History was the key to identity for the pioneers of Filipino nationhood in the late nineteenth century. John Schumacher has recounted the struggle by which the youthful Europeanized originators of Filipino nationhood-the ilustrados, literally "enlightened"-reacted to the "chauvinism common to members of governing races" (1973, 191-220). Amid the onslaught of Spanish colonial racism, these educated youths defended their collective pride by searching the past for dignified roots. They proposed and debated various approaches, which included Pedro Paterno's extravagant claim that "ancient Tagalog civilization" had long been Christian (Schumacher 1979, 26869). But whatever the view, ilustrados desired to illumine their origins in order to know themselves. Such "knowledge" was seen as vital to further political action. Understandably, a manifest tendency to glorify the ancients emerged. The foremost patriot, José Rizal, articulated "the ilustrado nostalgia for lost origins" by constructing "a flourishing, precolonial civilization, the lost eden," argues Reynaldo Ileto (1998, 31), "to reconstitute the unity of Philippine history" (35). Guided by European notions of order, linearity, and rationality, yet himself implicated in the "underside of history," Rizal, in Ileto's view, consciously imagined a past that effaced the differences in colonial society.
Diversity and divisions did mark the Spanish Philippines. But while studies of this group of pioneering youth have considered a range of factors and moments in the formation of national consciousness-such as class, religion, politics, economics, discourses of kinship ties, gender, and literary strategies1-none has analyzed it in the context of nineteenth-century popular and scientific theories of race and attendant discourses of migration-diffusion. The period's dominant paradigm of "positive science" gave rise to the belief that peoples of distinct "races" moved into territories in discrete waves of migration. Each successive and progressively more advanced wave pushed the earlier arrivals into the interior. The extant cultural groups encountered by European ethnologists in their "primitive" state were assumed to be "survivals," residues that closely approximated the races of antiquity. Spanish friars in the Philippines had long speculated on the origins of its inhabitants (Scott 1994, 9), but the first systematic formulation of the migration-waves theory purporting to explain the peopling of the Philippine islands with two races and diverse cultural...