More Hispanic Than We Admit 2: Insights Into Philippine Cultural History

More Hispanic Than We Admit 2: Insights Into Philippine Cultural History

For almost three hundred years, the destinies of Spain and the Philippines were closely intertwined. As Spain's colonial outpost in Asia, the Philippines symbolized the apogee of Spanish imperial ambiion and poht. And while narratives of rebellion and discontent are woven throughout colonial life under Spanish rule, Filipinos for the most part managed to redefine and revitalize native cultural identities within a distinctly Hispanic framework.

Yet with little less than 50 years of American recolonization and after on six decades of postwar independence, the Philippines has managed to purge Spain from its collective imagination, matched only by the indifference that Spain has cultivated toward its former colony. Even with a rich shared past, Spanish and Filipino interpretations of Spain's legacy in the Philippines have rarely converged. Spanish scholarship has largely ignored Filipino historiography; and Spanish scholarship has been neglected in the Philippine academe.