Philippine national hero Jose Rizal's (1861-1896) second novel, El Filibusterismo (1891) was written in Castilian, a language only 1% of the population could read, and published in Ghent. It is read in every school in the Philippines, but in an English translation, or is known by comic book or film versions. Much of its original nuance is simplified. In Spanish dictionaries, one of the definitions of filibustero is that of a pirate, hence a thief. But as one who, we might say in English, "filibusters", s/he is also one who interrupts parliamentary proceedings, smuggling his or her own discourse into those of others. In either case, we can think of the filibustero as an intruder, breaking and entering into where s/he does not properly belong, and doing so by surprise and often in disguise. Small wonder then that by the latter nineteenth century, "filibustero" was also glossed as "subversive," in the sense of a disruptive presence, a figure who by word or deed, suddenly and surreptitiously steals upon the social order.

This essay explores the role of the cell phones and the practice of texting within the context of the civilian backed coup that overthrew President Joseph Estrada in January of 2001 popularly known as “People Power II.” It focuses in particular on a set of political fantasies among the Filipino middle class, including their belief in in the power of communication technologies to transmit messages at a distance and in their ability to possess that power. In the same vein, they had faith in their ability to master their relationship to the masses of people with whom they regularly shared Manila’s crowded streets, utilizing the power of crowds to speak to the state. Communication from this perspective held the messianic promise of refashioning the heterogenous crowd into a people addressing and addressed by the promise of justice. But as we shall see, such telecommunicative notions were predicated on the putative “voicelessness” of the masses. For once heard, the masses called attention to the fragility of bourgeois claims to shape the sending and reception of messages about the proper practice of politics in the nation-state.

This paper examines the origins of nationalism in nineteenth century Philippines through cultural translation practices. Its central thesis is that Filippino nationalism did not originate with the discovery of an indigenous identity by the colonized and his/her subsequent assertion of an essential difference from the colonizer. Rather, its genesis lay in the transmission of messages across social and linguistic borders among diverse people whose identities and identifications were far from settled. The paper traces this process along three fronts: Spanish conversion practices, vernacular plays, and Phillipine nationalist activism.

Due to a shortage of missionaries in the archipelago, Spanish clergy chose to learn the numerous languages of the colonized rather than preaching in their own, and in so doing, made translation into an evangelical instrument. This practice rendered native languages ‘foreign’ in some respects to their local users, and turned conversion into a way of identifying with the uncanny presence of alien messages from alien speakers, from within one’s own speech. Because missionary translation localized Christian discourse while at the same time retaining certain Castilian and Latin words deemed sacred in their original forms, translation also instituted a linguistic hierarchy that made local languages appear to be naturally subordinate to Castilian and Latin.

Castilian words, most of which were unfamiliar to mass audiences, were also used in the domain of vernacular theater or Comedyas. Rafael argues that it was precisely a widespread mass belief in the link between Castillian’s untranslated foreignness and its perceived telecommunicative properties, which accounted for the popularity of vernacular plays. He thus understands Comedyas as performative modes which mobilized Castilian’s potential for communicating in and through different local languages, across geographic and social distances, and through the boundaries of class. Preceded by the drama of Christian conversion, Comedyas were also products of translation themselves, providing venues for domesticating alien places and alien sources of power lying at the basis of colonial-Christian authority. But, unlike Catholic prayers that were directed to God, vernacular plays relied on the recognition of an audience which was yet to consolidate its position as such. The comedya anticipated nationalist attempts to invest a second language with the capacity to recast vernacular languages and local identities into something other that could then be commonly shared.

In forming a Filipino nationalist identity, appealing for the expansion of limits to citizenship and political representation under colonial rule, Ilustrado nationalists also sought to become agents of translation – using Castilian, a language deployed by those in authority. Thus, this paper argues that Filipino nationalism was a practice of translation, understood first as the coming into contact with the foreign and subsequently reformulating it into an element of oneself. This process entailed at least in its formative moments, discovering an alien aspect residing within colonial society and translating it into a basis for a future history.