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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 November 2010
A 1910 Normal School Yearbook featured six young women in basketball uniforms. Sixteen-year-old Paz Marquez, the tallest among them and the captain of the team, looks out unsmilingly. In the early years of the century, photographs of women's basketball teams appeared in hundreds of normal-school yearbooks across the American landscape, but this photo came from the normal school in Manila. Two years later, sharing another American ritual, the former team captain graced the cover of the weekly magazine Renacimiento Filipino, this time dressed in a luxurious gown befitting the Queen of the Carnival. That same year, 1912, Paz Marquez graduated with a B.A. in the first class from the College of Liberal Arts at the newly formed, secular University of the Philippines. Participating in commonplace American events, Paz Marquez (later Benitez) acted as a bridge, a link, between two cultures. Over the next decades, Paz continued in this role. In addition, however, she also became a cultural broker, as she confronted the conundrum that the use of English as the official language had imposed on Filipino culture. In these ways, Paz illustrates the complicated and intriguing story of U.S. nation-building from an intimate and distinctly Philippine viewpoint.
28 Manlapaz, Edna Zapanta, Our Literary Matriarchs, 1925–1953: Angela Manalang Gloria, Paz M. Latorena, Loreto Paras Sulit, and Paz Marquez Benitez (Quezon City, 1996), 8.Google ScholarThe popular term, “La Girl Filipina,” originated as the title of a series of articles by Teodoro Kalaw, published in El Renaciemiento between 1903 and 1907;, Kalaw, Aide-de-Camp to Freedom, trans. Katigbak, Maria Kalaw (Manila, 1965), 41–43Google Scholar.
29 “Basketball Team, 1910,” “Normal School,” box 10, George William and Helen Pruitt Beattie Papers, Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino.Licuanan, Virginia Benitez, Paz Marquez Benitez: One Woman's Life, Letters, and Writings (Quezon City, 1995), 152Google Scholar.
30 Bourdieu, Pierre, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, trans. Nice, Richard (Cambridge, MA, 1984), 260–317, 466–67.Google Scholar
31 , Licuanan, Paz Marquez Benitez, 5–6, 57–60.Google ScholarPaz's father Gregorio attended school at the Ateneo de Manila at the same time as Filipino nationalist José Rizal. Her mother Maria Jurado attended the Escuela Municipal with two of Rizal's sisters. Maria Jurado outlived her husband by twenty-two years. At eighty-two, Maria Jurado was honored by the Philippine government as one of three outstanding mothers of that year. At age eighty-three, she suffered a stroke but lived another ten years, apparently becoming a more open personality as she aged.
32 Ordonez, Elmer A., “From Paz M. Benitez to Virginia Moreno,” Manila Times, Dec. 5, 2004.Google ScholarMarquez Benitez wrote an uncertain number of stories; six have been named, but the author has not located all of them. Only two of her stories were included in Philippine anthologies, and none in anthologies printed in the United States. Possibly, some were lost during World War II. Kathryn Wallen, reference librarian for vernacular literature from Insular South East Asia at the Library of Congress, wrote that Marquez Benitez's “work remains elusive.” Kathryn Wellen to Judith R. Raftery, Nov. 29, 2005, in author's possession.Yabes, Leopold Y., “Pioneering in the Filipino Short Story in English (1925–1940)” in Aspects of Philippine Literature, ed. Hufana, Alejandrino G. (Quezon City, 1966–1967), 118–34, quote 119Google Scholar.
33 Manlapaz, Zapanta, Our Literary Matriarchs, 8.Google ScholarBarlow, Tani E. et al., “The Modern Girl around the World: A Research Agenda and Preliminary Findings,” Gender and History 14 (Aug. 2005): 245–94Google Scholar.
34 , Licuanan, Paz Marquez Benitez, 21.Google ScholarLinn, Brian McAllister, The Philippine War, 1899–1902 (Lawrence, KS, 2000), 289–90Google Scholar.
35 Rafael, Vincente, White Love and Other Events in Filipino History (Durham, NC, 2000), 63–65.Google ScholarHelen Taft, wife of the first Philippine governor-general, wrote, “White women are still a novelty…we created a sensation” (64).
36 , Licuanan, Paz Marquez Benitez, 20–23.Google Scholar
37 Ibid., 24–25.
38 Ibid., 25–26. William Cameron Forbes journal, vol. 3, William Cameron Forbes Papers, Library of Congress.
39 Renacimiento Filipino, Mar. 21, 1912, quoted in Licuanan, Paz Marquez Benitez, 152.
40 , Licuanan, Paz Marquez Benitez, 6, 26.Google ScholarManlapaz, Zapanta, Our Literary Matriarchs, 7.Google ScholarForbes journal, vol. 3, 443n140, Forbes Papers. High-bridged noses appear regularly in remarks upon women's appearance in colonial-era Philippines; see, for example,Onorato, Michael P., Jock Netzorg: Manila Memories (Laguna Beach, n.d.) 7–8.Google ScholarHenry H. Balch personal name file, entry 21, box 40, RG 350, National Archives.
41 Benitez, Paz Marquez, “Brevities,” Philippine Journal of Education 31 (Oct. 1952): 260.Google Scholar
42 , Licuanan, Paz Marquez Benitez, 27, 37–39.Google ScholarFrancisco's father, Gregorio Marquez went to the Ateneo de Manila; he was not a Spanish mestizo and, therefore, ineligible to attend Colegio de San Juan de Letran. Francisco's mother, Soledad Francia, died when he and his five siblings were young; Francisco was six. She is remembered by her portrait, “The Lady at the Piano,” by Filipino artist Antonio Malantic. The November 1952 issue of Philippine Journal of Education featured Soledad Francia's famous portrait reproduced in vivid color. “The Lady at the Piano” survived World War II and the bombing, referred to as the “Liberation,” of Manila. It is part of the Locsin collection of nineteenth-century paintings.Kalaw-Ledesma, Purita, “Man of Integrity,” Philippine Journal of Education 31 (Nov. 1952): 267, 293Google Scholar.
43 Sutherland, William Alexander, Not by Might: The Epic of the Philippines (Las Cruces, NM, 1953), 17–42.Google ScholarThe vast majority of pensionados were male. The program began informally as early as 1900. See Oakland Tribune, July 27, 1900, and Rochester Union Advertiser, July 30, 1900. The Springfield Republican, July 29, 1900, suggested that young Filipinos be educated in southern race relations. Bernard Moses diary, vol, 6, Sept. 26, 1901; also “Clippings,” “Philippines;” Jul.–Aug. 1900, carton 2, Bernard Moses Papers, C-B 994, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.
44 “Filipino Students in the United States,” excerpt from the “Census of the Philippine Islands, 1903” in Bearers of Benevolence: The Thomasites and Public Education in the Philippines, ed. Racelis, Mary and Ick, Judy Celine (Pasig City, Philippines, 2001), 232–33.Google Scholar
45 , Licuanan, Paz Marquez Benitez, 27.Google ScholarOgren, Christine A., The American State Normal School: “An Instrument of Great Good” (New York, 2005), 217CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
46 , Licuanan, Paz Marquez Benitez, 28Google Scholar; One, Luisito Yangco, son of one of the Philippines' first business tycoons, spent $150, equivalent to over $15,000 in 1995, on a night out on the town for three of his friends.
47 Ibid., 34–36.Karnow, Stanley, In Our Image: America's Empire in the Philippines (New York, 1989), 246Google Scholar.
48 , Licuanan, Paz Marquez Benitez, 37, 41, 43.Google Scholar
49 Ibid.
50 Manlapaz, Edna Zapanta, Filipino Women Writers in English: Their Story: 1905–2000 (Quezon City, 2003), 21.Google Scholar
51 Ibid., 6–8 (quotes), 59.
52 Benitez, Paz Marquez, “Brevities,” Philippine Journal of Education 33 (Feb. 1955): 525.Google Scholar
53 There are eighty-seven indigenous dialects in the Philippines, but 86 percent of the population belongs to eight linguistic groups; all are part of the Malay-Polynesian family. Tagalog is one of the largest; its center in and around Manila makes it most prominent.Guillermo, Artemio R. and Win, May Kyi, Historical Dictionary of the Philippines, 2nd ed. (Lanham, MD, 2005), 3.Google ScholarGana, Rosario Bella, “Wikang Pilipino (The Philippine Language),” Philippine Journal of Education 33 (Feb. 1955): 560.Google Scholar“Editorials: Developing the National Language,” Philippine Journal of Education 33 (Apr. 1955): 651.Google ScholarCeledonio Salvador to Frank I. Crone, Aug. 5, 1948, Frank I. Crone Papers, Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington. Salvador had served as superintendent of education prior to the Japanese occupation and kept Crone abreast of conditions. This 1948 letter noted that a senator from Cebu introduced a bill to include the Cebu dialect, along with English and Tagalog, in the classrooms.
54 In this column, Marquez Benitez elaborated:
If we were daring enough, far-sighted enough, to plan ahead one hundred years, we could take the first step by introducing the National Language as the language of instruction in all but the elementary schools.…One hundred years should solve most of our language problems. By then all the bickering and jealousies should have died down. Every one will speak the national language…much enriched and so modified and evolved that it will bear only a slight resemblance to Tagalog. But by 2055, English may have become the International Language!
Benitez, Paz Marquez, “Brevities,” Philippine Journal of Education 33 (Mar. 1955): 664Google Scholar.
55 , Rafael, White Love, 9, 162–203.Google ScholarRafael notes that, a hundred years after English was introduced, it continues to be the language most used by the upper classes, and the lingua franca has become “Taglish,” a form of Tagalog and English. Class and race, since most wealthy Filipinos are mestizos, divides the country. He writes: “The Philippines does not have a national language…it has a history of state and elite attempts to institute a national language based on Tagalog in the face of the persistence of a linguistic hierarchy where the last colonial language, English, continues to be hegemonic.”