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Introduction
Documents in
the Spanish military archives, for many decades locked away, now make it
possible to discern more clearly how the Katipunan developed in Manila –
both city and province - prior to launching the revolution in August
1896. Utilising these documents in
conjunction with more familiar sources, this piece focuses in particular on
the thorny, oft-debated issue of the Katipunan’s class composition.
The two
appendices tabulate in turn (i) data on the members of the KKK Supreme
Council and the leading activists at a local level (Table 1); and (ii) the names and
locations of the KKK’s councils and branches (Table 2). Many, perhaps most, of the individuals
listed in the first table have been forgotten by posterity, and it is hoped
the listing might encourage their descendants and families, as well as
historians, to retrieve more of a past now sadly lost.
It is
recognised that numerous errors inevitably lurk in the detail of the tables,
and it is manifest that there are still countless unknowns. Corrections, and the rectification of
omissions, will be very welcome.
The class composition of the
Katipunan in Manila
When the
Katipunan surfaced in 1896 it got called “plebeian”, and the adjective has
stuck like a limpet. In its
original, ancient Roman sense, the term described every citizen who did not
belong to the ruling patrician caste, and it hence embraced merchants,
artisans, farmers and labourers alike.
If that broad, inclusive meaning is intended when the “plebeian”
label is attached to the Katipunan, nobody could quarrel, but most often
something else is meant. Isabelo de
los Reyes, the first writer to describe the brotherhood as “una asociación plebeya”, made it
very plain he had in mind not the generality of the Manila
citizenry, but specifically the “pobres
y ignorantes”.[1] Fifty years later, in what remains the
standard work on the subject, Teodoro Agoncillo made the point even more
emphatically. The Katipunan, he
wrote, drew its members from the unlettered “have-nots”, the “despairing
spirits, the oppressed, the downtrodden”, from the “lowest stratum of
society”.[2] Other historians have contested the
categorical, sweeping character of this portrayal, especially in relation
to the KKK leadership as distinct from the rank and file, but until now the
debate has been constricted by a shortage of reliable information. It has been difficult to assess the
validity of the orthodoxy painted with such forceful brushwork by Isabelo
de los Reyes and Teodoro Agoncillo, as Glenn May remarks, because the
sources on the Katipunan – as it expanded in provinces like Cavite as well
as in Manila - “allow us to identify no more than a hundred or so members”.[3]
As a step
towards rectifying this deficiency, Table 1 lists the names of over 200 men
and women who were active in the Katipunan in the city and province of
Manila, and wherever possible – in 136 cases – indicates their
occupation. Almost all those on the
list held office in one or more of the KKK’s branches (Balangay) or popular
councils (Sangunian Bayan), and to some extent the focus therefore remains
on the leadership rather than the entire membership of the
organisation. Until the beginning of
1896, however, the entire membership barely exceeded 300, and in many
branches the office holders were quite probably almost as numerous as those
who did not hold office. Since at
least half those listed were KKK members prior to 1896, the data presented
here for the city of Manila
(though not the province) covers a not insignificant fraction of the
pre-1896 membership as a whole.
Before trying
to assess what the occupations of the Katipunan activists tell us about
their social position, it is necessary to look very briefly at the overall
structure of employment in the city, which was highly fragmented and
diverse. Only in the tobacco
factories and along the waterfront were large numbers of workers
concentrated in one place. The great
bulk of the workforce was scattered in small workshops, in small shops and
offices, in private homes, in markets and on the streets. In 1903, the only proximate date for
which statistics are available, the working population of the city was
counted as 132,858, and in descending order (and rounded to the nearest
hundred) the largest occupational categories were labourers (22,400),
merchants (12,000), servants (10,500), sailors (9,700), launderers (7,800),
salesmen (7,700), seamstresses (7,100), tobacco workers (6,800), coachmen
(5,600), clerks (4,800), carpenters (4,700) and cooks (3,400). The other categories that included more
than one thousand people were agriculturalists; boatmen; fishermen;
constabulary and police; engineers and firemen; machinists; messengers;
shoemakers; tailors; watchmakers and jewellers; and painters and glaziers.[4]
How, then, does
the occupational profile of the KKK compare and contrast with that of the
working population at large? Table
1, as mentioned, lists the occupations of 136 activists, and the first
point to make is that they do indeed reflect the wider pattern of diversity
and fragmentation. Numerous
occupations only figure once or twice – there is a cook, a postman, a
lottery ticket seller, a pharmacist, two mechanics, two bookkeepers and so
on. There are three barbers, three
tailors and three waterworks employees.
In aggregate, these occupations that figure only once, twice or
three times on the list account for 45 of the total cohort. The remainder – 91 – can be assigned more
readily into definite categories, each segmented by many gradations of rank
and status, but categories nonetheless.
The largest category, by a clear margin, is that of clerks (escribientes), of whom there are 32,
including nine who worked in courts of law.
The second largest category comprises another 21 activists whose
occupations might be described in other times and climes as white collar,
and for which the contemporary Spanish terms were dependiente (employee or, again, clerk) and personero (agent,
representative). Two categories, by
the same token, could definitely be described as blue collar – there are 15
tabaqueros and 11 workers in the
printing trades. And lastly, the
list includes 12 Katipunan members who served in the Spanish army, the
Manila police force (the Guardia Civil Veterana) or the customs and excise
guards (carabineros).
Most commonly
and typically, therefore, the Katipunan activists were clerks, employees,
agents, tobacco workers, printers and service personnel. They were indubitably proletarians in the
Marxist sense, because they did not own any means of production and had to
sell their labour in order to earn a living. Nevertheless, it is clear that
Isabelo de los Reyes, Teodoro Agoncillo and others were wrong to classify
them as collectively belonging to “the lowest stratum of society”. Their wages or salaries were either
around or above the median for the city in the mid-1890s. Clerks were generally paid about 25 pesos
a month, but those who reached senior positions, as did Roman Basa
(Bonifacio’s predecessor as KKK president) at the Comandancia de Marina,
earned over twice that amount.[5] Dependientes
and personeros would mostly earn
between 15 and 20 pesos monthly, and the wages of skilled workers in the
tobacco and printing industries were in much the same range. Andres Bonifacio was paid 20 pesos a
month for his labours as a bodeguero, and supplemented his income by making
stylish walking canes and paper fans and by employing his talent for
calligraphy.[6]
Lower-paid
occupations, by contrast, are conspicuously absent, or at least
under-represented, in the cohort.
Only one KKK activist in the city is listed as a labourer (jornalero), and yet labourers
comprised one sixth of Manila’s
working population. There is not a
single servant, nor a single sailor, launderer, seamstress or coachman, and
yet these modes of employment each occupied thousands. These were the people who truly had to
scrape by on the most meagre wages, and these were the people, together
with the unfortunates who had no regular means of livelihood, who truly
belonged to “the lowest stratum”.
Women who worked as seamstresses or lavanderas made as little as 20 centavos a day, equivalent to
about 5 pesos a month. Servants,
male as well as female, got between 5 and 10 pesos monthly. Labourers got about 10. Sailors and coachmen were slightly better
off, earning perhaps 12 pesos a month, but even that was less than half the
standard salary of an escribiente.[7]
If many
Katipunan leaders were not “poor” by contemporary standards, neither were
they “ignorant”. Again the
information is highly incomplete, but five KKK activists are known to have
graduated from the University of Santo Tomas, the pinnacle of higher
education in the colony – Pio Valenzuela in medicine; Feliciano Jocson in
pharmacy; Ladislao Diwa and Teodoro Gonzales in law; and Jose Turiano
Santiago as a perito mercantil.
Three others started law courses at the university but did not
finish - Teodoro Plata, Aurelio Tolentino and Emilio Jacinto – and several
of the escribientes had completed
at least two or three years of the segunda
ensenanza at the Colegio de San Juan de Letran, the Ateneo Municipal or
in private schools, and would therefore have been regarded as well educated
by the standards of the day. The
printers would likewise need to have attained a relatively high standard of
literacy.
De los Reyes
and Agoncillo did not have any derogatory intent when writing about the
Katipunan. On the contrary, both men
were intensely patriotic, radical in outlook and broadly sympathetic to the
KKK and its aspirations. Both of
them, too, had the opportunity to talk to leading members of the
organisation. De los Reyes relates
that in writing his account he drew upon his conversations with two of the
KKK’s founders (Ladislao Diwa and Valentin Diaz); with five other sometime
members of the organisation’s Supreme Council and/or its August 1896 “War
Cabinet” (Jose Turiano Santiago, Restituto Javier, Aguedo del Rosario,
Briccio Pantas and Enrique Pacheco); and with a leading member of the
women’s section (Marina Dizon).[8] Decades later, Teodoro Agoncillo
interviewed two surviving members of the Supreme Council – Pio Valenzuela
and Guillermo Masangkay – and also talked with Marina Dizon.[9]
Both
historians, then, saw the Katipunan positively and met some of its key
figures. Why, therefore, should
Isabelo de los Reyes tell his readers that only one Katipunan activist –
the physician Pio Valenzuela – had a “learned profession” (carrera académica), when he spoke
with at least three others who had been to college or university (Diwa,
Pantas and Turiano Santiago) and when he should have known of a few more in
the KKK’s ranks.[10] Why did Teodoro Agoncillo maintain that
within the “supremely plebeian” Katipunan there were “at best two or three
[members who] were small merchants or court clerks”, when he easily could
have counted half a dozen individuals in each of those two categories?[11] Partly, for sure, because they wanted to
argue a case, and were striving for polemical effect. But perhaps the answer also lies partly
in the backgrounds of the two historians.
Both were well to do; both went to university in times when very few
Filipinos could. Although they
challenged the conventions and conservatism of their peers, they were both ilustrados, and they appraised
Philippine society and social status from an elevated ilustrado perspective.
The Katipunan was “una
asociación terrible“, de los Reyes writes, “because it was composed of
plebeian and ignorant people”, people who “say little and perhaps think
little as well”.[12] Agoncillo related in later life how he
had “personally known a few of the original founders and members of the Katipunan,
and found them to be completely in the class of Bonifacio: poor and not so
literate.”[13] Yes, Bonifacio was indeed “poor” by ilustrado standards, but not by the
standards of most Manileños in the 1890s.
“Not so literate”? Bonifacio
was fully literate in Tagalog and read books in Spanish. Again, by what rarefied measure was
Agoncillo judging the KKK president?
The two men who
established the historiographical orthodoxy on the Katipunan, it is thus
clear, found it difficult to delineate the social milieu in which the
brotherhood emerged and grew. De los
Reyes did at least draw a distinction between two strata above the masses,
“el elemento rico del país” and “el elemento medio ó burgués”.
The former, he observes, was conservative and for reasons of
self-interest did not want to disturb the status quo, whilst the latter
sought reforms through peaceful means.
As his phrase “medio ó burgués”
indicates, however, he does not identify any middle element that was not “burgués”. Agoncillo, still more reductively, saw
the society of the time as a simple binary, as being divided between “the
intellectuals and the wealthy” on the one hand and the “pobres y ignorantes” on the
other. Any intermediate strata he
lost in a blind spot. In his Revolt of the Masses, it is true,
Agoncillo does frequently refer to “the middle class”, but the way in which
he defines the term puts his elision beyond doubt. In the late 19th century, he writes, “the
middle class” was constituted by “the intellectuals and the wealthy”.[14] Who he therefore thinks constituted the
“upper class”, he does not tell.
The Katipunan and Masonry
This failure to
distinguish an “elemento medio”
that was not burgués, or that was
not constituted by “the intellectuals and the wealthy”, leads de los Reyes
and Agoncillo to misrepresent not only the nature of the Katipunan itself,
but also its relationship to Masonry and the Liga Filipina. In the months before the Katipunan was
formed, it may be recalled, the patriotic and progressive campaign had found
a semblance of organisational structure in the Masonic lodges, the first of
which, Nilad, was inaugurated in January 1892. Six months later, on July 3, 1892, Jose
Rizal used the embryonic Masonic network as a base on which to establish
the Liga Filipina.
The Katipunan
was founded, Agoncillo’s classic account tells, on the night of July 7,
1892, immediately after news had spread that Jose Rizal was to be deported
to Dapitan and his writings banned.
The founders included Andres Bonifacio, Deodato Arellano, Valentin
Diaz, Teodoro Plata, Ladislao Diwa and Jose Dizon.[15] Agoncillo mentions that Bonifacio was a
Mason, but neglects to observe that all the others were too, and that all
except Arellano probably belonged to the same Masonic triangle (later a lodge),
Taliba.[16] And the reason for this omission, one can
only suspect, is that such an observation would throw into relief the
inadequacy of the simplistic class analysis that Agoncillo presents. For the Masons of the time, he relates,
were “intellectuals and middle-class Filipinos, [who] were rather careful
in their demands for liberty.”[17] The fact that the men he names as the
founders of the “lower class” Katipunan were all Masons is thus mightily
awkward, and he chooses the easy solution of leaving it unsaid.
Including the
six already mentioned, a total of twenty-two men listed in Table 1 are
recorded as being Masons, and many more could be added if the table were to
be expanded to include KKK members who did not hold office in the local sections. At least twelve members of Walana Lodge,
for instance, are known to have joined the Katipunan, and eleven members of
Taliba. Spanish intelligence agents
believed that two other lodges, Modestia and Dalisay, also counted many
Katipuneros amongst their members.
And at least six women who were active in the Katipunan, including
two of the most prominent members of the women’s section – Josefa Rizal and
Marina Dizon – were active as well in Semilla, the women’s “Lodge of
Adoption” that was linked to the all-male Masonic lodges.
It is
indisputably correct, though, to identify the lodges as essentially “middle
class” in their appeal and composition.
“Masonry is not in need of the well to do,” stipulated the Masonic
rules of the time, “but it does not admit one who does not have a
profession, an art, a trade or an income that will enable him to support
his family and, in addition, to help defray the expenses of Masonry and
assist the needy.”[18] The needy themselves could not afford to
join the lodges. Upon admission to
the craft, members had to pay an initial “recepción” fee of seven pesos – the equivalent for a low-paid
worker to more than a month’s wages – and thereafter to pay a monthly
subscription of forty centavos.[19] Members were also sometimes asked to make
a regular monthly contribution – in 1894 this was set at fifty centavos –
to support the propaganda campaign in Spain.[20] And yet many Katipunan activists did
manage to bear this financial burden.
They must also have had at least a reasonable facility in a language
that the “pobres y ignorantes”
could not speak, for the business and rituals of the lodges were conducted
in Spanish.
The Katipunan and the Liga
Filipina
Rightly
portraying Masonry as embodying “middle class” aspirations, in sum, whilst
at the same time mistakenly portraying the Katipunan as emanating from “the
lowest stratum”, leads de los Reyes and Agoncillo to minimise the overlap
between the memberships of the Katipunan and the Masonic lodges. The Masonic lodges, as just noted,
furnished the initial base for the Liga Filipina, and at the price of being
repetitive and belabouring the point, it is consequently possible to
identify a very similar overlap between the memberships of the Katipunan
and the Liga Filipina. Twenty-four
of the Katipunan activists listed in Table 1 are shown to have been members
of the Liga Filipina, among them 13 of the 28 known members of the KKK
Supreme Council – Andres Bonifacio,
Roman Basa, Deodato Arellano, Jose Turiano Santiago, Briccio Pantas,
Teodoro Plata, Ladislao Diwa, Valentin Diaz, Ildefonso Laurel, Tomas
Remigio, Tranquilino Torres, Jose Trinidad and Teodoro Vedua. Since the information is patchy, there
may in reality have been several more.
Again, the fact
that so many activists in the “middle class” Liga also joined the ranks of
the Katipunan signals a contradiction within the accounts of de los Reyes
and Agoncillo that they fail to confront.
De los Reyes relates that the bourgeois members of the Liga believed
clandestine plotting and political leadership should be the prerogatives of
their class alone. He also reports,
however, that Bonifacio belonged to the Liga Filipina, and that the men he
recruited to constitute the first Supreme Council of the Katipunan came
from the Liga too, specifically from the Liga council in the district of
Trozo over which Bonifacio presided.[21]
In Agoncillo’s
rendition the internal contradiction is still starker. At the conclusion of Revolt, echoing and embellishing de los Reyes, he condemns the
“intellectuals and the wealthy” for arrogantly believing “that they alone
could change the colour of the landscape” and for setting up “a sort of
caste system from which the “commoners” were contemptuously excluded. Hence the Liga Filipina.”[22] In diametric contrast, he maintains,
“none” of the charter members of the Katipunan “were of the middle class”.[23] But elsewhere in the book, with blithe
inconsistency, he too tells his readers that the Katipunan was founded by
Liga members.[24] How these “plebeians” or “commoners” had
managed to penetrate the Liga’s wall of contemptuous exclusion, he does not
tell.
Amidst the
illogicality, Agoncillo’s discussion of the Liga does nonetheless contain a
kernel of truth. He is wrong to talk
of a caste system, wrong to assert that commoners were excluded. But it is valid to say in broad terms
that within the Liga a schism developed between the wealthier members and
the less wealthy, and that those who joined the Katipunan fell into the
latter bracket. Of the 24
Katipuneros shown in Table 1 to have been sometime Ligueros, no fewer than
13 can be categorised as escribientes;
five as blue-collar workers (two warehousemen, a tabaquero, a barber and a cook); two as professionals (both
bookkeepers); one as a personero;
one as a customs official; and one as an artisan. The occupation of the other is not
known. However, if for comparative
purposes a list is made of the Ligueros who did not join the Katipunan (and
hence do not figure in Table 1) a strikingly different picture emerges. Among the thirty-seven such individuals
whose occupations are known, there are just five escribientes and not one blue-collar worker. Six, contrarily, are businessmen (comercios), five are manufacturers (industriales) and three are property
owners (propietarios) – all
categories that are completely unrepresented in the list of Ligueros who
did join the Katipunan. No fewer
than eleven are professionals (five lawyers, two physicians, a teacher, a
notary, a dentist and a bookkeeper), and the remainder comprise two
contractors, two employees, a silversmith, an infantry officer and a
student.[25]
The disparity
between these two groups – the Ligueros who joined the KKK and those who
did not – is too wide to have been a matter of chance. Whilst the Liga won
adherents from right across the intermediate social strata, the Katipunan’s
founders belonged solidly to the “lower-middle” and “middle-middle” strata;
virtually none came from the “upper middle” layer. And sometimes the tensions within the
Liga were undoubtedly interpreted by the protagonists in what might loosely
be seen as class terms. Some of the
Katipuneros detected and resented a deep-seated elitism amongst the industriales, propietarios and abogados
who belonged to the Liga.[26] These wealthy men, it was felt, disdained
ordinary people, failed to understand their grievances, and feared that any
revolution “from below” would lead either to dictatorship or chaos. The founders of the Katipunan, not so
remote from the ordinary people, had fewer assets and privileges to worry
about losing. They had greater
confidence in the masses, and therefore had fewer reservations about
seeking separation from Spain
immediately rather than at some indefinite date in the future when the “pobres y ignorantes” would have
acquired sufficient education and civic sense to be “ready” for independent
nationhood. And linguistically they
had the ability to engage more directly with the masses, to adopt Tagalog
as the language of patriotic resistance in place of the Spanish that
prevailed in the Masonic lodges and the Liga Filipina.
The Katipunan and the principalia
The founders of
the Katipunan became disenchanted with the Liga because it failed to give
effective, militant direction to the patriotic campaign. They saw the Liga’s energies being
dissipated, reports de los Reyes, in the continual bickering of its “ilustrado” members, who seemed to be
inflamed less by “verdadero
patriotismo” than “egoismo pueril”. In consequence, Bonifacio and his
confrères had concluded that “where there are learned men [doctos] everything is brought to
naught by discussions”. For this
reason, the KKK’s founders did not want to allow ilustrados to join the organisation unless they were prepared
to curb their bombast, do what they were told, and work hard.[27] This seems a very plausible
representation of the position the Katipuneros would take. Agoncillo, though, seriously distorts
their standpoint by suggesting that they did not wish to admit the wealthy
and the learned under any condition.
He implies, in other words, that the Katipunan adopted a “lower
class” exclusiveness that mirrored what he calls the “middle class”,
caste-like exclusiveness of the Liga.[28] This was just not so. The Katipunan welcomed recruits from any
background so long as they were of sound character (tunay na loob), were
committed to the cause of freedom, and were prepared to abide by its
decisions and internal discipline.
The Katipunan,
its founders envisaged, would before long govern the entire archipelago, expanding
to all areas and embracing all classes.
Conscious that the elite and substantial sections of the middle
class were frightened by the prospect of revolution and separation from Spain,
the Katipunan responded not by shutting them out but by seeking to win them
over. Jose Dizon and Pio Valenzuela,
KKK activists who themselves came from well-to-do backgrounds, were
assigned specifically to contact “personas
de posición oficial y de distinción de los pueblos”, and by mid-1896,
Valenzuela later recalled, there were about a hundred middle class members
in Manila and the provinces.[29] The majority of Katipuneros, observed
Domingo Franco, the former president of the Liga Filipina, came from “la plebe ó pueblo bajo”, but their
leaders were “people of a certain status, or who held or had previously
held municipal positions [personas de
cierta representación ó que han ejercido ó ejercen cargos municipales].”[30]
By actively
seeking middle class recruits in the provinces, the city-based Katipuneros
themselves sowed the seed of the subsequent ascendancy of rural-based
leaders in the revolutionary movement.
Writing in the 1970s, the inimitable Nick Joaquin gently mocked
Marxist historians for wrangling about exactly when the “proletarian
uprising” of August 1896 had been “captured” by the bourgeoisie. At first, he noted, it was said that the
capture was effected at the Malolos Congress in late 1898, but then the
date was brought forward and it was said to have taken place at the Tejeros
Convention in March 1897. Some
future egghead theorist, Joaquin predicted, would advance the date still
further and declare that the capture was accomplished right in Balintawak,
at the moment the revolution was launched.[31]
It is tempting
to claim that this present piece has fulfilled Joaquin’s prophecy, and even
gone further back, finding “el
elemento medio” in the Katipunan from the very outset. But in the city, as we have noted, the
majority of the middle-class Katipuneros were not “bourgeois” in the
Marxist sense. Class relations in
the countryside, though, were very different. There, a much larger proportion of the
middle class could legitimately be called “bourgeois” because they owned
land, employed wage labourers, or both.
Many of the principales, the
municipal office holders whose support was specifically solicited by
Katipunan leaders like Jose Dizon and Pio Valenzuela, fell into this
category themselves.
It is common
knowledge that in 1896 principales
came to head many KKK sections in the provinces surrounding Manila, and that when the main locus of the revolution
shifted to Cavite
the principalia faction led by
Emilio Aguinaldo took control of the movement and had Bonifacio
executed. The case advanced here
does not seek to deny or minimise the significance of the changes in
revolutionary leadership and direction that took place both at Tejeros, or
later at Malolos. Much less studied,
barely even remarked, however, is the prominence of principales in the Katipunan within the province of Manila. The debate at which Nick Joaquin poked
fun, in other words, could have more life in it yet.
In the KKK
sections based in the city itself, only two activists are known to have
held municipal positions - Julian Nepomuceno was at some time teniente tercero of the gremio de mestizos in the district
of Santa Cruz, and Valentin Diaz, before moving to the capital, had
reportedly held office in the town of Tayug, Pangasinan. In the province
of Manila, however, principales
are recorded as being active in the local KKK branches in virtually every
town for which information is available, including Caloocan,
Mandaluyong and Pasig,
the three towns where support for the organisation was strongest.
In Caloocan,
where Bonifacio’s father-in-law had once been the capitan municipal, the KKK council was headed in 1896 by the
then incumbent of that post, Silverio Baltazar, and according to local
histories the very first fatality of the revolt was a cabeza de barangay in barrio Dulong Kalzada, Simplicio
Acabo. Among the leading activists
of the Mandaluyong-based Makabuhay council were Sinforoso San Pedro, who is
said to have been a capitan municipal
pasado[32];
Romualdo Vivencio, whose appellation “Kapitan Maldo” suggests he might also
have held the office; and Buenaventura Domingo, who was a teniente mayor (chief deputy to the
capitan) in the town. In Pasig, the secretary
of the Nagbangon council, Francisco de la Paz, was a past teniente mayor, and Valentin Cruz,
the president of the Santolan branch, had been a cabeza de barangay. Principales active elsewhere in the
province included Ramon Bernardo, a past capitan municipal in Pandacan who was the KKK pangulo in the
town and later became a general in the revolutionary army; “Kapitan” Tomas
Montillano, who was the KKK pangulo in Muntinlupa; Apolonio Samson, a teniente who headed the branch in
Novaliches; and Pio del Pilar, a teniente
who was the secretary of a branch in Makati.
It is possible
that this list could be greatly extended.
Isagani Medina, a historian who looked at the Sediciones y rebeliones files in the Philippine National
Archives, states that in no fewer than nine towns in the province of Manila
- Makati, Malibay, Mandaluyong, Marikina, Navotas, Novaliches, Paranaque,
San Mateo and Taguig – men who acted as Katipunan “special agents”
subsequently served as municipal presidents in the early years of the
American occupation.[33] Even assuming Medina’s sources are not secret service
fictions, of course, not all these individuals would necessarily have held
office before the revolution, but given the continuity of municipal
leadership between one imperial dispensation and the next it is likely that
most did belong to principalia
families.
Had the
Katipunan confined its appeals and recruiting efforts to the “lower classes”,
to state the obvious, it would not have admitted so many principales, and they would not wish
to have joined. It is also
noteworthy that the organisation’s fervent desire to mobilize all classes –
the entire bayan – culminated after August 1896 in the appointment to
senior positions in the revolutionary movement of “middle class” men who
had never joined the Katipunan. To
direct the high council (Mataas na Sangunian) in the region to the north
and east of the capital, to cite the most striking example, Bonifacio
appointed as president Isidoro Francisco, a leather manufacturer who had
once belonged to the council of the Liga Filipina; and as secretary he
appointed Julio Nakpil, a piano teacher from a wealthy background who had
also been an active member of the Liga.[34]
But by this
time the Katipunan no longer existed in its original form. It had suddenly ceased to be a
close-knit, clandestine brotherhood and had become, in some areas, the de
facto government. Bonifacio himself
ceased using the title “President of the Katipunan” and instead signed his
proclamations and letters “President of the Sovereign People” (Pangulo ng
Haring Bayan).
Subsequently,
the revolution became much more heterogeneous and complex, its leadership
and direction varying greatly in different regions and at different
times. All that lies way beyond the
scope of these notes. Here the focus
has been on the “original” or “tunay na” Katipunan as it was born and
developed in Manila, a city and province which outside the conventos of
Intramuros was dynamic, cosmopolitan and rapidly modernizing. The early Katipuneros, to make one final
point, be they college-educated professionals like Deodato Arellano and
Jose Turiano Santiago; clerks like Roman Basa and Teodoro Plata; or manual
workers like Aguedo del Rosario and Domingo Moriones, lived in a milieu
that pulsated with liberal ideas and aspirations to progress. They were emphatically not
tradition-bound, or backward looking, or still wedded in any deep sense to
the “dark underside” of Tagalog folk beliefs and superstitions.
Remembering the Katipuneros
Leaving behind
the academic arguments, it would be gratifying to think that the listing in
Table 1 might contribute in a small way to restoring the Katipuneros to the
historical record. The late
nineteenth century, it is true, is the most studied and commemorated period
in Philippine history. But whilst
the major episodes and personalities of that era have their place in school
and college texts and in the collective consciousness, the Katipunan and
its activists have been remembered only in very partial and selective
way. Bonifacio, of course, is
celebrated as a hero second only to Rizal; Emilio Jacinto is accorded the
sobriquet “The Brains of the Katipunan”; and Pio Valenzuela’s hometown of
Polo in Bulacan was renamed after him, and has become a city. Macario Sakay has a special place in the
national pantheon because he continued the fight for kalayaan longer than
anybody, and was sent by the Americans to the gallows.
A few more of
the Manila activists are commemorated
locally in the names of streets, plazas and schools, but even history buffs
are hard pressed to name more than a handful. Glenn May, for example, who was mentioned
earlier as lamenting how little we know about the Katipuneros, illustrates
the point very well himself by referring somewhat discourteously to one of
the leading KKK activists in Mandaluyong as “someone called Sinforoso San
Pedro”.[35]
Still more
telling are some notes on “The Thirteen Martyrs of Bagumbayan” written
recently by Ambeth Ocampo, the Chairman of the National Historical
Institute, in his long-running “Looking Back” newspaper column. The “Thirteen Martyrs” were a group who
were shot - “pasados por las armas”,
to use the Spaniards’ phrase - on January 11, 1897, and they included at
least six KKK activists. Ocampo
attempts to write a few lines on each.
About the president of the important Tondo-based Katotohanan branch
of the Katipunan, however, he is able to note merely that “Braulio Rivera
(1867-1897) was a member of the Katipunan”.
And about another of the martyrs, he expresses his regret that
“Eustacio Manalac is the person we know so little about. Nobody has even done basic research to
even find out his date of birth and simple biographical data like marital
status, children, occupation, etc. All we are told is that he was a Mason
and was rounded up as a suspected Katipunero when the Katipunan was exposed
in August 1896.”[36]
The reason why
people know nothing about Eustacio Manalac is that the martyr was in
reality Faustino Manalac (or Manalak), a sometime member of the KKK Supreme
Council. It is tempting to jest
sarcastically that a good starting point for the basic research Ocampo
rightly says is required would be to get the poor man’s name right. But the mistake did not originate with
Ocampo; he merely inherited it. The
same slip appears in several other sources, even some that are normally
reliable.[37] And yet in lists of the “The Thirteen Martyrs
of Bagumbayan” published in the early twentieth century, Faustino Manalac
is named correctly.[38] At that time many patriotic associations,
labour unions and mutual benefit societies counted Katipuneros among their
members and still honoured the memories of the fallen. Almanacs recorded the anniversaries of
the 1896 and 1897 executions at Bagumbayan and at least one – the calendario of the Iglesia Filipina
Independiente - accorded each of the martyrs his own day, in the manner of
saints.[39] By the 1930s, though, the lesser-known
martyrs had started to fade from view.
This was partly
because the revolutionary generation had begun to pass away, but that does
not seem to be the sole explanation.
In a stimulating discussion about popular remembrance of the
revolutionary period, Reynaldo Ileto draws a contrast between the
revolution against Spain,
which he says remains “deeply etched in the collective memory” and the
subsequent war against the United
States, which is “largely forgotten”.[40] During the early twentieth century, for
obvious reasons, the new American dispensation obliterated the war of
1899-1902 from official history in a far more glaring and systematic manner
than the revolution of 1896-7, which it was happy to allow had been more or
less justified. But this dichotomous
stance distorted the whole picture, because the second phase of resistance
against foreign rule could not be arbitrarily separated from the
first. Many patriots fought in
both. The degree to which an
individual’s participation in that resistance made him or her a “hero” was
thus compromised in some minds, and perhaps lessened. Many prominent veterans were still
addressed with their military ranks
- General Aguinaldo and General Sandiko, for example - but the
details of their exploits rarely got publicly recounted, and hardly any
published their memoirs. One of the
few who did, General Jose Alejandrino, eloquently expressed his bitterness
at the way the younger generation showed no respect for “the ones who wrote
with their blood the most brilliant pages in our history”, heroes who by
the 1930s had been fated to become “a miserable legion of forgotten, old
and now broken-down decrepits”. The
generation that had come to maturity under American rule, Alejandrino
grieved, had not “had the opportunity to read books other than those
written by foreigners who do not sympathise either with our race or our
aspirations.”[41]
In a political
and cultural climate that had changed profoundly since their prime, the
revolutionaries were too often seen as relics; their voices were unheeded
and their valour disregarded, or worse still challenged and belittled. Some, like Alejandrino, protested loudly,
but others apparently became resigned to the younger generation’s
disinterest and disrespect, and became reticent, even silent, about their
pasts. This self-imposed reserve is
illustrated, perhaps, in the brief biographical notes on four surviving
leaders of the Katipunan printed in Miguel Cornejo’s weighty Commonwealth Encyclopaedia,
published in 1939. The entries
record that Teodoro Gonzales had been among the signatories of the 1898
Malolos Constitution and that in later life he had been the registrar of
deeds for the province of Rizal; that Sinforoso San Pedro had served as
provincial treasurer in Antique; that Jose Turiano Santiago had been a
member of the Manila municipal board between 1922 and 1925; and that Pio
Valenzuela had been the Governor of Bulacan. Not one of the entries
mentions the Katipunan at all. [42]
Now, after more
than a hundred years of deepening amnesia, the fascinating minutiae of
revolutionary lives and times have largely been lost forever. The information needed to fill the bulk
of the innumerable gaps in the biographical data tabulated here cannot now
be retrieved. But surely it is still
worthwhile to attempt to find out more about those who “wrote with their
blood the most brilliant pages” in Philippine history. Sixteen of the Katipuneros listed here
paid the ultimate price for their patriotism in front of firing squads at
Bagumbayan: Roman Basa, Apolonio de
la Cruz, Eugenio de los Reyes, Jose Dizon, Doroteo Dominguez, Rafael
Gutierrez, Valentin Lagasca, Faustino Manalak, Geronimo Medina y Cristobal,
Vicente Molina, Benedicto Nijaga, Teodoro Plata, Hermenegildo Reyes, Braulio
Rivera, Marcelo Santos and Jose Trinidad.
Others died in battle, and Macario Sakay on the scaffold a decade
later. They, and all the kapatid of
the Katipunan, should belatedly be accorded the recognition and honour they
are due.
Notes on the Appendices
Table 1 – Katipunan activists in Manila, 1892-96
Table 1 lists
over 200 KKK activists by name and another 40 or so by alias, ordered
according to whether they were members of (i) the Kataastaasang Sangunian
(Supreme Council); (ii) the Sangunian Bayan (Sb., Popular Council),
Balangay (By., Branch) or women’s section in Manila and the suburbs; and
(iii) the Sb. and By. in the province
of Manila. Within each section the activists are
ranked more or less according to seniority, the Pangulo (presidents) being
placed first, Kalihim (secretaries) second and Tagausig (fiscals) third,
though some Tagausig might have disputed this order of precedence. Most sections elected a president,
secretary, fiscal and treasurer, but other offices varied in number and
nomenclature between sections. On
the Supreme Council those designated as Kasanguni (councillors) held
specific posts with that title, but in some of the Sangunian Bayan and
Balangay the term may have been used to refer to any council or branch
member.
The first
column lists the activist’s name, their Katipunan alias, and the position
they held within their section. For
the members of the Supreme Council, birth and death dates have also been
given where known. The second column
lists the activist’s occupation in 1896, previous occupations and (in a few
cases) the positions they held within the structure of local
government. The third column lists
their place(s) of residence and their known inter-relationships and
connections with other leading KKK members.
The fourth and final column summarises whatever information is
available about attendance at college and university; membership in Masonic
lodges and/or the Liga Filipina; reprisals suffered - imprisonment, deportation
or execution in reprisal for revolutionary activity; and involvement in
later attempts to reignite the Katipunan flame.
The constant
refrain here is “where known”. If an
activist is not shown, say, as being related to someone else in the Katipunan,
it could either mean that they were not, or just that no information is
available. Another obvious point to
make is that the table covers a period of four years, from mid-1892 until
mid-1896. It does not represent the
KKK at any fixed point in time.
Katipuneros, like everyone else, switched jobs, moved house and so
on, and the organisation itself was in constant flux. New members joined, others left; new
sections were formed; others dissolved.
Internal elections were held and offices changed hands. In many instances two or three
individuals are listed as occupying the same position, occasionally
reflecting a discrepancy between different accounts but more often simply
indicating changes from one year or even month to another.
From the detail
of the table emerges a sketchy impression of the various ways in which the
activists became acquainted with one another - the linkages that gave a KKK
section its initial nucleus and cohesion.
Several of the early members, as we have seen, had already participated
together in the patriotic campaign as members of the Masonic lodges and the
Liga Filipina. Others, as is well
known, were related to one another by blood, marriage or sponsorship ties. In many cases, they were simply friends
or neighbours, and the table highlights little clusters of KKK activists
concentrated in particular localities – along Calle Dulumbayan in Santa
Cruz, for example, or Calle Sande in Tondo.
But it is also interesting to note that in many cases the initial
link or bond was forged in the workplace.
That the organisation had several members in the print shop of the Diario de Manila is mentioned in
many histories, because this was where the member who betrayed the KKK in
August 1896 was employed, and where the Spanish authorities then discovered
receipts and other incriminating documents that led to many arrests. The table indicates that workplace
friendships and solidarities also helped gain the organisation recruits at
the El Oriente tobacco factory in Quiapo, in the waterworks company and in
Government offices like the Intendencia (the treasury) and the Inspectorate
of Mines.
Tantalising
glimpses of the way in which the activists perceived themselves and their
revolutionary moment are offered by some of the aliases (pamagat) they
adopted, not just within the Katipunan itself but also in the Masonic
lodges and the Liga Filipina. It
should be noted that although Macario Sakay is often said to have used the
name “Dapitan” (Rizal’s place of exile), his original Katipunan alias was
“Pakulin” (“Boiling”). Pio
Valenzuela’s alias within the Katipunan, similarly, was “Dimas Ayaran”
(“Untouchable”), not as is often related “Madlangaway” (“Public affray”),
which was just the nom-de-plume he took when writing for Kalayaan, the Katipunan paper. It is intriguing that the alias taken
within the Liga Filipina by Ildefonso Laurel was “Ravachol”, the name of a
half-Dutch, half Alsatian agitator who in 1892 was convicted of exploding a
series of bombs in Paris. Ravachol went to the guillotine in July
1892 shouting “Vive l‘Anarchie!” and became an instant anarchist hero in
both France and Spain.[43] Bonifacio’s chosen alias in the Liga was
“Sandakan”, presumably after the town in British North Borneo where Jose
Rizal wanted to establish a Filipino colony, a haven where the “exiled and
persecuted” might be “free, independent and happy”.[44]
Table 2 - Councils and branches of the Katipunan
in Manila,
1892-96
In order to
minimise the risk of detection, veterans later recalled, the KKK was
initially built as a network of three-person “triangles”, with activists
each having a duty to enlist two new adherents from among people they knew
sufficiently well to trust. The rate
of growth achieved by this method was very slow, however, and by 1894 the
organisation was beginning to build the two-tier structure of councils and
branches - Sangunian Bayan (Sb.) and Balangay (By.) - that it was to retain
until the revolution. A few
successful Balangay expanded to become Sangunian Bayan with affiliated
Balangay of their own, and sections that did not thrive, both Sb. and By.,
were dissolved. The months
immediately prior to August 1896, in particular, were a time not only of
rapid growth for the Katipunan, but also of internal tension and flux.
Table 2 lists
the names of all known Sb. and By. according to district (for Manila and its suburbs) and town (for the province of Manila), and where possible
specifies the dates they were formed.
The names of the councils and branches are embodied also in Table 1,
but here the overall structure is set out more clearly, unencumbered by
other detail. The geographical
classification should not be interpreted too rigidly. The sphere of operation of some Sangunian
Bayan – Sb. Dimahipo in Malabon, for example – was more or less coterminous
with the boundaries of a municipality, but in others it was not. In the city, for instance, Sb.
Katagalugan was rooted in Tondo, but at one time it had an affiliated
Balangay in the neighbouring district of Santa Cruz and another beyond the
suburbs in the town of Caloocan. In the province
of Manila, similarly, activists
within Sb. Makabuhay, which was principally based in Mandaluyong, also
sought recruits in the neighbouring province of Morong
and as far afield as Bulacan.
A note on sources
In 1896 the
Spanish authorities seized cartloads of Katipunan documents. Today, nobody knows how many of these
have survived, or where they may be found.
The documents thus far catalogued in the Archivo General Militar de
Madrid represent only a small fraction of the initial haul – they fill less
than two box files – but they are hugely important. Among them are letters written by
Bonifacio and Jacinto, drafts of articles for the Katipunan newspaper,
Kalayaan, and records of the Supreme Council. When these and other documents fell into
Spanish hands, the intelligence officers of the Guardia Civil immediately
sifted through them for evidence against the instigators of the rebellion,
and then set about pursuing the leads they offered. Later, probably some time in 1897, the
information gathered by the Spanish secretas
was summarised in tabular form in a handwritten document headed “Relación
de todos los individuos que figueran en el legajo de documentos del
Katipunan, perteneciente a Andres Bonifacio con los nombres propios,
simbólicos y en clave”[45]
It is this
“Relación” that is the main source of the fresh information on the
identities, aliases, occupations and places of residence of KKK activists
that is presented here in Table 1.
It is recognised that intelligence reports as a generality must be
regarded with extreme suspicion, but in this instance the “Relación”, as
its full title states, is grounded in large measure on the captured
Katipunan documents, and wherever its content can be checked against other
sources it holds good. Valuable as
this source is, though, it inevitably contains many gaps; its inventory of
the KKK leadership is far fuller for 1896 than for previous years, and its
coverage of Tondo, Santa Cruz and the other arrabales of Manila is far fuller than that of the
province beyond.
In order that
at least some of the lacunae are filled, the table also incorporates data
from other sources, wherever possible from sources whose authors consulted
original Katipunan documents and/or spoke to prominent KKK members.[46] Even the best sources, needless to say,
are fallible. Whilst they have been
checked against each other as far as possible, some of their fallacies will
ineluctably have found their way into the tables presented here. Other mistakes will be mine, and it is
only for those that I accept the blame!
A separate
caution needs to be sounded about the listing of the members of the Supreme
Council. The original KKK documents
in the Madrid military archives identify the Supreme Council’s membership
in full only at a single juncture, when votes held on the night of December
24/25, 1895 resulted in the re-election of Andres Bonifacio as president;
the re-election of Vicente Molina as treasurer; the election of Emilio
Jacinto and Pio Valenzuela respectively as secretary and fiscal; and the
election of Francisco Carreon, Aguedo del Rosario, Balbino Florentino,
Hermenegildo Reyes, Jose Trinidad and Pantaleon Torres as the six Kasanguni
or councillors. Most of those
elected formally swore their oaths of office on New Year’s Day. The original documents also establish that
two other activists – Gregorio Coronel and Enrique Pacheco – were elevated to
the Supreme Council in about March 1896.
But for all other times in the Katipunan’s history, reconstruction
of the Supreme Council’s membership depends on the recollections of
veterans, which Soledad Borromeo-Buehler has conveniently summarised and shown
as having discrepancies that cannot be reconciled.[47] The approach adopted in Table 1 is
liberal and inclusive – all those recalled by one or more of the veterans
as having been sometime members of the Supreme Council are included in the
Supreme Council section of the table.
This probably means that a few non-members have crept in, but
perhaps that is preferable to the alternative - a more stringent approach
that would mistakenly leave a few actual members out. There is little doubt, in any case, that
the activists included as a result of faulty memories would at least have
been close to the Supreme Council, its discussions and its initiatives.
Information on
the women’s section of the KKK is very scarce, and also conflicting. Agoncillo, for example, relates that
Josefa Rizal was its president, whilst other historians say Marina
Dizon. Gregorio Zaide opted for the
latter in his 1939 History of the
Katipunan, but later changed his mind and accepted Pio Valenzuela’s
recollection that the women members did not elect any officers. No primary documents have yet been
located that resolve this issue, and office-holders have therefore not been
identified here. Most sources are
agreed, however, that aside from Rizal and Dizon the section’s most active
members were Gregoria de Jesus, Simeona de Remigio and Benita Rodriguez.[48]
Glossary
Offices (Katungkulan) in the Katipunan
Pangulo President
Kalihim Secretary
Tagausig Fiscal
Tagaingat-yaman Treasurer
Pangalawang Pangulo Vice-President
Pangalawang Kalihim Second
Secretary
Kasanguni Councillor
Mabalasig Terrible
Taliba Guard
Maniningil Collector
Tagapamahala ng
‘Basahan ng
Bayan’ Custodian of the
People’s Library
Tagapangasiwa Administrator
Tagatulong sa Pagsulat Assistant
Clerk
Manunulat Writer,
Recorder
Tagalaan Warden,
Keeper
Tagalibot Patroller
Organisations
Cuerpo
de Comprimasarios: Group of patriotic Filipinos who between
1893 and 1895 made regular financial contributions to support the propagandistas in Spain, specifically Marcelo H.
del Pilar and the journal La
Solidaridad.
Binhing
Payapa: Patriotic
secret society formed in 1894 or 1895 following disagreements within the
Katipunan. Some of its leading
members nevertheless joined forces with the Katipunan following the
outbreak of the revolution.
Partido
Nacionalista: Formed by
Katipunan veterans and young militants within the nascent labour movement
in August 1901, but immediately pronounced seditious and banned by the
American Governor General, William Howard Taft. Not to be confused with the party of the
same name that was formed with American permission in 1907.
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