Description
Philippine Genealogy & Religious & Art History
The Luciano P.R. Santiago Reader
Edited by JOBERS REYNES BERSALES
With a foreword by Ino Manalo
Co-published with University of San Carlos Publishing House
Series: Academica Filipina +
Copyright © 2022
528 pages; 15.24 x 22.86 cm
In his long and distinguished career as a medical psychiatrist, Dr. Luciano P. R. Santiago cultivated a keen understanding of the frailties and vagaries of human nature. This is a skill that he applied with equal precision to the study of Philippine culture and history—specifically the stories of liminal, transitional figures who occupied the often dimly illuminated interstices of Philippine colonial history during Spanish rule. He was most interested in transformational arcs, when individuals—by virtue of ancestry, will, or circumstance—emerged from historical obscurity to embody history-making change and self-actualization.
Dr. Santiago’s approach to historiography did not focus on grand sweeping narratives nor did he attempt to interpret the zeitgeist of a particular historical moment in the context of purposive scholarship. Instead, he was an inveterate chronicler, employing the miniaturist’s compulsive attention to detail to the quotidian world of a vanished culture and the long-forgotten personages that inhabited it.
In the works of Dr. Santiago, Philippine history becomes a series of “revealed” memories, especially of seminal Filipinos whom modern readers may otherwise have not known because they were not necessarily heroes or larger-than-life figures who reversed the course of history. Instead, their lives unfolded in the obscure annotations on a family genealogy, in a baptismal document, in a marriage certificate, in the codicil to a will, in the documentation of a legal dispute, and finally, in the remembrances delivered by families or friends upon their often ordinary deaths.
This definitive reader features twenty-two of Dr. Santiago’s key essays on genealogy, art history, religious history, and pioneering Filipinos. The reader is invited to reflect not just on the breadth of Dr. Santiago’s scholarship, but also his particular and carefully detailed investigations into what he called the terra incognita of Philippine colonial history.
Reading Santiago’s pieces is not just a pursuit of chronological events. It is also a form of remembering, of participating ever so briefly, in his world of real men and women who are living, loving, and clearing a path for themselves.
— Ino Manalo
Chair, National Commission for the Culture and Arts
from the Foreword
CONTENTS
Foreword by Ino Manalo vii
Introduction by Jobers Reynes Bersales xi
Of Gentle Blood: From Lakan to Principalia
The Brown Knight: The Rise and Fall of Don Nicolás de Herrera (1614–1680) 5
The Filipinos Indios Encomenderos (ca. 1620–1711) 23
Don Pascual de Sta. Ana (1762–1827), Indio Hacendero 47
The Last Hacendera: Doña Teresa de la Paz, 1841–1890 73
To Love and To Suffer: The Paradoxes of Action and Contemplation for Filipino Women in the Spanish Period
To Love and to Suffer: The Development of the Religious Congregations for Women in the Philippines During the Spanish Era (1565–1898) 95
Mother Sebastiana de Santa María (1652–1692): A Filipina Forerunner of the Beaterio de Sta. Catalina 131
The Flowering Pen: Filipino Women Writers and Publishers during theSpanish Period, 1590–1898, A Preliminary Study 139
The First Spanish Filipino Woman Author: Doña María Varela de Brodett (1814–1864) (With a history of devotion to St. Mary Magdalene, the subject of her book, in the Spanish Philippines, 1565–1898) 175
The First Filipino Woman Printer-Publisher in the Spanish Period: Doña Remigia Salazar Talusan viuda de López (ca. 1800–ca. 1860) 203
Doña Mercedes Lina Rivera (1879–1932): A Filipina Maestra in the Colonial Transition. 229
Filipino Firsts
The Hidden Light: The First Filipino Priests 239
Doctor Don Mariano Bernavé Pilapil (1759–1818): Passion and Transformation 291
The First Filipino Doctors of Medicine and Surgery (1878–1897) 315
Damián Domingo and the First Philippine Art Academy (1821–1834) 347
Miguel Zaragoza, The Ageless Master (1847–1923) 365
The Painters of Flora de Filipinas (1877–1883) 393
Chronicles and Memories
The Roots of Pila, Laguna: A Secular and Spiritual History of the Town (900 AD to the Present) 419
Casa Ordoveza of Majayjay, Laguna: The Evolution of a Provincial Ilustrado Family (1637–1990) 443
The Lineage of Mójica: The Super Principalía of Cavite (1677–1898) 457
Pomp, Pageantry, and Gold: The Eight Spanish Villas in the Philippines (1565–1887) 473
Acknowledgments 490
Bibliography 492
Index 508
ABOUT THE SERIES
Academica Filipina+ is an interdisciplinary series that pushes the boundaries of scholarly publishing with smart, literate, and thought-provoking works exploring the Philippine past, present, and future