Nicolei Buendia Gupit’s Tracing the Absences in Our Histories
Written by Stephanie Cuepo Wobby
What a lonesome place it is to be in, the depths of the archive. And yet, you wade through page after page of text, most of them written in languages neither your ancestors nor you can understand. So, you translate, taking great care with each word to parse through the historian’s version of events: a mutiny1, he writes, a revolution. In other words, a legitimate reason for death. Wonder, for a moment, what it had been like in the beginning in the islands, when the Spanish first arrived. Wonder—and be careful here—what it would have been like had they failed and retreated. Pull yourself back from wishful thinking, but linger in the anger. In the fact that the country had been named after a child who would never step foot on its lands—
and that the country would be sold to another empire, become its little brown brother. What had it been like in the beginning, when they first arrived? I wish you to kill and burn, the more you kill and burn the better you will please me2. Wade through generation after generation of war, most of them silent—but make an attempt, anyway, to breathe some life into the stories you have the smallest fragments of. Think of the conversations in the mountains when the supplies dwindled and the sounds of artillery neared and the realization set in: they were alone. There are times when men have to die, someone3 said from far away, and it seemed that was more than enough to warrant desertion. You know what happened next. The surrender. The March. The prison camps. And when they returned4 years later, they sacrificed thousands of lives to recapture the country, only to leave it again, with but a fraction of the help5 that they had promised. Linger in that decision and the consequences that followed.
What a lonesome place it must have been for the elders, the labyrinth that is American bureaucracy. The fees, the paperwork, the understanding that they are at the mercy of a system whose sole purpose, it seemed, was to delay them in perpetuity. Wonder, for a moment, what it took for them to leave all that they knew, only to live in a country that has acknowledged nothing of what it’s done to destroy their home. And yet, they looked past every desire to leave, their lives buoyed by the vision of a better one—for you. Over a shared meal, you commiserate with another like you, share timelines and resources, say, simultaneously, My grandfather was there, too. What is it that you are both trying to do? To reach, past the documents, past the wondering, back to your ancestors.
[1] In 1872, Filipino military personnel in Cavite participated in an uprising that historian José Montero y Vidal referred to as a mutiny against the colonial rule of the Spanish government. This resulted in the execution of three Filipino clergymen—Mariano Gomez, José Burgos, and Jacinto Zamora—who were accused of inciting the mutiny.
[2] U.S. Army Gen. Jacob Hurd Smith was quoted telling his subordinates what to do to the people of Samar during the Philippine-American War.
[3] Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson told President Franklin D. Roosevelt when it was clear the Imperial Japanese Forces were gaining the upper hand in the Philippines.
[4] U.S. Army Gen. Douglas MacArthur famously said, as he was leaving Corregidor Island, “I came through and I shall return.”
[5] According to Duty to Country, U.S. Congress provided a one-time $200 million-dollar payment to the newly independent Philippine government to help care for their WWII veterans. The estimated cost of benefits, calculated by the Veterans Administration, was $3.2 billion.