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Pamitinan and Tapusi: Using the Carpio legend to reconstruct lower-class consciousness in the late Spanish Philippines
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 June 2018
Abstract
Reynaldo Ileto, in his classic Pasyon and Revolution, sought the categories of perception of the Filipino ‘masses’ that guided their participation in the Philippine Revolution. Among the sources he examined was the Carpio legend, which he unfortunately subsumed to the separate, elite Carpio awit (Tagalog poem). Through a detailed examination of the legend's historical and geographical context, with its invocation of two locations, Pamitinan and Tapusi, I arrive at a different understanding of lower-class consciousness than Ileto. Rather than a counter-rational expression of peasant millenarianism, the legend of Bernardo Carpio was a ‘hidden transcript’ celebrating the history of social banditry in the region.
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- Copyright © The National University of Singapore 2018
Footnotes
The author would like to thank Jeffrey Hadler.
References
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52 The word tulisan, as banditry, was appropriated by the Spanish. Felix Ramos y Duarte in his 1898 dictionary defined ‘tulis’ as ‘ladron, ratero’ (bandit, pickpocket). See Duarte, Diccionario de mejicanismos (Mejico, 1898), s.v. ‘tulis’. Tulis, rather than tulisan, had entered Mexican Spanish by the late nineteenth century as a word meaning bandit. The Diccionario Porrúa attributes the origin of the word ‘tulises’ to a ‘grupo de bandoleros del Edo. De Durango’ (most notably, the bandolero El Cucaracho) who escaped from the jail of the town of San Andres de Teúl, in approximately 1859. See Diccionario Porrúa de historia, biografıa y geografıa de México quinta edición (México, D.F.: Editorial Porrúa), p. 3013, s.v. ‘tulises’. From Teúl the dictionary derives the word ‘tulis’ as bandit. Gironière, among others, was already using ‘tulisan’ as a Tagalog word for bandit long before these events in Teúl, thus ruling out this etymological reconstruction. Paloma Albalá Hernández suggests instead a Náhuatl origin for the word, deriving ‘tulisán’ from ‘tule, plant from which is made bedrolls, which etymologically proceeds from the Náhuatl tullin or tolin, according to Molina (1571), sedge or bulrush, and according to Siméon (1885) tollin or tullin, rush, sedge, reed-grass’. See Hernández, , Americanismos en las Indias del Poniente: Voces de origen indıgena americano en las lenguas del Pacıfico (Vervuert: Iberoamericana, 2000), pp. 106Google Scholar, 173. No further explanation is given for this proposed etymology, but it would seem that petate, bedrolls, were considered a standard item of the bandolero, and since these bedrolls were made from tule, the bandoleros became known as tulis. Teresita A. Alcantara, ‘The Spanish American Lexicons in Filipino’ (paper presented at Philippine Latin American Studies Conference, Pamantasan Lungsod ng Maynila, December 2008, p. 6), follows the same path for the entrance of ‘tulis’ into Tagalog. This etymology seems far-fetched. It would seem likely that the word ‘tulisan’ travelled from Manila to Acapulco in the final years of the galleon trade. Teul, in the Estado de Durango, was on the west coast of the Mexican isthmus, north of Acapulco. En route, the word also entered Chamorro, as ‘tulisan’ rather than ‘tulis’. Chamorro is an Austronesian language and its speakers would have found the desinence -an familiar. Regardless of the path taken by the word tulisan in its trans-Pacific peregrination, what is important is that there was a specific historical phenomenon in the nineteenth century in both Mexico and the Philippines with which the word was associated: social banditry.
53 Hobsbawm, Bandits, p. 20.
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60 This makes even more embarrassing the strange New Age academic attempt to ‘revive’ this tradition. Consolacion Rustia Alaras, a professor of literature at the University of the Philippines, in her work Pamathalaan: Ang pagbubukas sa tipan ng Mahal na Ina (Quezon City: Bahay-Saliksikan ng Kasaysayan, 1988)Google Scholar based on Pasyon and Revolution, has advocated the revitalisation of the nation through sacred sojourns to ‘Tapusi’, in the steps of Bonifacio, who was a great spiritual leader. She leads these treks every year. These sojourns seem more reminiscent of the wide-eyed jaunts into the wild made by European tourists in the late nineteenth century than anything to do with Bonifacio.
61 Reynaldo C. Ileto, ‘History and criticism: The invention of heroes’, in Filipinos and their Revolution, p. 217; Ileto, Reynaldo C., ‘“Methodological” implications of a dispute on Andres Bonifacio’, Anuaryo/Annales 1, 3 (1982): 12Google Scholar; Ileto, Reynaldo C., ‘Bonifacio, the text, and the social scientist’, Philippine Sociological Review 32, 1–4 (1984): 27–8Google Scholar.
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65 ‘Ang sinasabing ito ni Bonifacio ay isang malaking kasinungalingan pagkat ni tao ni baril ay wala sa Tapusi at ni siya naman ay di nakarating doon. Ito'y isang kalupitang pandaya lamang sa tao! Ronquillo’ (ibid., p. 684); the footnote is Ronquillo's, as indicated by the initials CVR.
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