Breaking the national narrative

A FEW days ago, my friend, Ambeth Ocampo, published an article in which he quoted large excerpts from an account written by Miguel López de Legazpi, the captain who led the establishment of the Spanish intruders in the Philippine archipelago. Legazpi's judgments about the natives were mostly negative; he said they were undisciplined, corrupt, messy and so on. The history professor of Ateneo ended his article with a very painful statement, which enraged many of his thousands of followers: "Filipinos have not changed much in the last 450 years. The real challenge of history is breaking the cycle, so the present will stop reading like the past."

To my surprise, many readers began to lecture Ocampo as if he had no knowledge of other sources. They understood that the testimony of a colonizer was neither legit nor reliable: he must have been biased. To support contrary claims, the most cited one was Chapter 8 of the famous book by Antonio de Morga, with the many footnotes by José Rizal, in which he spoke highly of the natives. I understood then that the testimony of a colonizer is valid if they spoke positively of pre-hispanic Filipinos and must be discarded if their writings portrayed the natives negatively.