Felipe Salvador

Felipe Salvador (26 May 1870 at Baliuag, Bulacan – 15 April 1912), also known as Apo Ipe or Ápûng Ipê Salvador, was a Filipino revolutionary who founded the Santa Iglesia (Holy Church), a messianic society also known as the Colorum which had the aim of defeating and overthrowing the colonial government of the United States in the Philippines. Salvador joined the Katipunan in 1896 upon the arrival of the Katipuneros from Balintawak in Baliuag, Bulacan. He founded the Santa Iglesia in 1900 after fleeing to the mountains when Gen. Emilio Aguinaldo was captured by American troops. Salvador and his church gained a significant number of followers in the regions of Bulacan, Pampanga, Pangasinan, Tarlac and Nueva Ecija. He was captured by American forces in 1910. He was tried and sentenced to death, being hanged in 1912, two years after his capture.^[1]

Felipe Salvador and the Santa Iglesia movement are often depicted as part of Filipino history when numerous resistance and millenarian movements broke out across the archipelago, during a period spanning the Filipino struggle for independence culminating in the Philippine Revolution of 1896 against Spanish rule, to the Philippine-American War of 1989-1902 and its aftermath.

Early life

Often described by historians as a quasi-religious rebel leader, Felipe Salvado--also known as Apo Ipe--was born in Baliwag, in Bulacan province on the island of Luzon, on May 26, 1870. He was reportedly the son of a Spanish friar and became at one time a cabeza de barangay in his town, while showing signs of a rebellious character early in life against the Guardia Civil and the parish priest^[2]

Joining the Katipunan

Salvador joined the Katipuneros--members of the Katipunan, the nationalistic, partisan society founded in the Philippines in 1892 to oust the Spanish colonial government--when they arrived in Baliwag from Balintawak. He fought with the Katipunan forces against the US Army in encounters in San Luis, Pampanga, where he was wounded, and subsequently was appointed colonel in 1899 by Emilio Aguinaldo^[3] When Aguinaldo surrendered to the US forces in April 1901, Salvador went to the mountains and began conducting independent guerrilla operations.

Rise of Santa Iglesia

The religious sect he organized, called Santa Iglesia or Holy Church, borrowed much of its organization and terminology from the Catholic Church, although the creed of the Santa Iglesia had strongly anti-Spanish, anti-Catholic overtones.^[4] Assuming the title of pontiff, Salvador gave away or sold crucifixes and rosaries to his followers and officiated at religious rites similar to those of the Catholic Church. He affected long hair and wore clothes associated with Biblical figures, and was reverently regarded by his followers as a prophet. He warned of the coming of a second “great flood” that would destroy all non-believers, and spoke of a rain of gold and jewels for his followers afterwards. He also promised them God would turn their bolo knives into rifles if they fought bravely and were faithful to Santa Iglesia.^[5]

Salvador also promised the barrio people ownership of land when the government was overthrown, and earned their faith and respect. He would enter a town with a group of long-haired and long-robed followers, plant a bamboo cross in the middle of the plaza and launch an eloquent exhortation that would lead many to join his movement.^[6] During those years he gained many adherents among the poor and landless masses of Bulacan, Pampanga, Tarlac, Pangasinan and Nueva Ecija.

Salvador’s headquarters was located on Mount Arayat, and from there he directed the operations of his men. His top lieutenant, Gen. Manuel Garcia--alias Capt. Tui--usually led the raids on the military outposts; during lulls in the fighting, Salvador continued to recruit large numbers of followers. His followers, by one estimate, numbered over 2,000. By May 1906 Salvador was commanding an army of 300 men and 100 rifles.

Telling the story of Salvador in “The Philippines: A Past Revisited”, Constantino said that the people’s support for Salvador was so steadfast that the government found it difficult to obtain information on his movements--not even a promised reward of P2,000 for his capture could elicit any information from the people, and whenever he and his followers raided military detachments, a large number of peasants would voluntarily supply them fighting men. In 1902 the Philippine Constabulary captured him in Pampanga and the courts convicted him of sedition but he managed to escape from prison and returned to Central Luzon.^[7]

Capture and death

In July 1906 Capt. Tui was killed in an encounter in Hagonoy, which greatly demoralized the Santa Iglesia fighting forces.

Salvador continued to evade capture for four years, moving from place to place protected by people who continued to believe in him. He was finally captured on July 24, 1910, in San Luis in a remote barrio in the Candaba Swamp, and was prosecuted and sentenced to death on April 15, 1912, in Manila. Newspaper reports of the time described his composure upon his execution, counselling his followers not to grieve.

Salvador's regarded him as divine or semi-divine. Even after his death a cult of Apo Ipe emerged and remained way into the 1920s, and millenarian leaders in Tarlac could still attract many followers by claiming they had eaten or talked with Felipe Salvador.

Revolt in the Philippines – evolving and contesting nationalist historiographies

In tracing the writings of Felipe Salvador and rise and fall of the Santa Iglesia movement, we inevitably embark on an exploration of the historiographical representations of the country’s past since independence. At the crux of this historiographical discourse is very much the interpretation and representation of revolts and uprisings in the Philippines since the 17th century under Spanish and subsequently American colonial rule. These events are often depicted as manifestations of Filipino nationalism and the desire for independence, culminating in the Revolution of 1896 that many see as the foundational pivot event in Filipino national history.

The past seven decades have seen the development and coexistence of competing schools of nationalist historiography in the Philippines. Ileto refers this writing and rewriting “the politics of history”.^[8] Nationalist historiography can be defined as “a set of ideas and practices adopted by historians in their efforts to write history, with the result, intended or not, of recognizing or justifying the existence of a nation-state, as well as of defining and maintaining an identity deemed fitting for such a collectivity”.^[9]

Early history writing during American colonial period

In the first three decades of the 20th century during the period of American colonialism, members of the Propaganda reform movement such as Pedro Paterno, Trinidad Pardo de Tavera and Rafael Palma produced works that represent the earliest articulations of the nationalist interpretation of Filipino history, which reveal as much about their perspectives in imagining “the nation” as the nation itself.

Resil B Morajes calls their writing of synoptic histories a “narrativization of a nation”.^[10] Consciously positioned against the tradition of Spanish colonial histories, they aim at constructing a “Filipino” history that foregrounds the Filipino people instead of the colonists. Their historical narratives construct an integral past for the nation, from its pre-Hispanic culture and society to the experience of colonialism when the “national spirit” was first formed and grew stronger by its power of resistance. The Revolution is a symbol of the people’s will to nationhood in resistance against Spanish misrule, a precursor to the present American colonialism with elite participation before the nation reaches autonomy, albeit US-engineered and mediated. According to Morajes, they construct a “linear, evolutionary narrative of hope, turned toward a future in which the nation will take its rightful place in the world”. These writers, Morajes asserts, overstress the unity of precolonial culture, reduce much of the Spanish colonial period into a tragedy of friar misrule, assign to the elite the leading role in the creation of nationhood, and assume a benign view of US rule as a way to social emancipation and political freedom.

Post-independence: competing nationalist historiographical representations of revolts and Felipe Salvador

Post-independence nationalist historiographies, both conservative right-wing leaning or leftist alike, seem to follow a similar linear evolutionary meta-narrative of nationalism and revolution. Eufronip Alip’s Philippines History (1967), a textbook for public school education, states at the outset the purpose of history is to “teach nationalism”, to enable people to “love their country, with determination and dignity…Common experiences and traditions, common struggles and sufferings, develop a unity of interests and a deep attachment to one’s native land”.^[11] Using three sources of materials – oral traditions, relics and written records by Spanish missionaries and royal officials as well as accounts by other foreign writers, Alip replays this linear causal historiographical construction of the struggle for independence, manifested in three centuries of revolts, from the tribal and regional uprisings of 16th to 18th century, to the political and religious struggles in the 19th century, calling them “acts of Filipino heroism”. Alip’s historical narrative asserts the conventional view that unlike the disunified revolts of past centuries, the uprisings of the 19th century became much more widespread and culminated in the Revolution of 1896 that reverberated across “the entire Archipelago” and the emergence of a “consciousness of unity and homogeneity”.

The cold war, the Vietnam war and the opposition to it, the French student revolt, the Chinese cultural revolution, corruption in the Marcos regime and the student movement in the 1960s, are among the many factors behind the growth of more radical nationalism and more radical nationalist historiography. Despite their controversial tone and the perceived leftist bent, Teodoro Agoncillo’s History of the Filipino People (1956) and Renato Constantino’s The Philippines: A Past Revisited (1975) follow the same distinctly nationalist point of view in the genre of nationalist historiography, and the same linear narrative framework, and meta-narratives of situating Philippines history in the Euro-US-centric history of colonialism.

Written in 1947 in the aftermath of the Japanese occupation and independence, History of the Filipino People is an interpretation of the post-war present through an exploration of themes of past, amidst the general heated controversies over national heroes in the 1940s. Agoncillo concludes that the Philippine Revolution was the culmination of the nationalistic movement and aspirations of the Filipino people through a history of exploitation and betrayal by the propertied class, the rise of plebeian leader Andres Bonifacio and the revolt of the masses against Spain.^[12]

In a similar vein, Constantino sees the history of the Filipino as primarily the history of their struggles against colonial oppression.” He centers his historical narrative on the idea of the development of a “national consciousness” among Filipino people whose consciousness has been molded through centuries of colonial control through the instruments of religion, education and other cultural institutions. Constantino argues that the “beginnings of a counter-consciousness nevertheless began to emerge”, and the “revolutionary instinct of the people manifested itself in a series of actions which…..were in reality assertions and dialectal progressions of the consciousness that was emerging”.^[13] He believes that “this counter-consciousness manifested itself in various forms of resistance only to recede at each instance into the matrix of colonial consciousness because of unripe conditions and other factors, but which nevertheless became part of mass memory and therefore part of the Filipino tradition of struggle”. For Constantino, this struggle also takes on the dimension of a class struggle and class conflict, between the “masses” and the “elites”, the “have-nots” and the “haves”, with the former’s anti-colonial aspiration for independence repeatedly betrayed by elite’s collaboration with the colonizers.

He situates Felipe Salvador and Santa Iglesia in the type of “nativistic revival” resistance movements that took on quasi-religious character, whose leaders of the colonial governments of both Spain and the US brand as “bandits or madmen”, but had many faithful adherents among the poor and landless masses across different provinces. For Constantino, even though these groups “did not have clear political programs, they were all fighting for independence. Because of their largely peasant following, the demand for land became an integral part of their fight for freedom.”

Response from conservative historians

The dynamics of Agoncillo and Constantino and their critics present interesting historiographical points of view around interpretations of the uprisings. Both Agoncillo and Constantino’s pitching the masses as the main driver of nationalist movements against the elites drew strong reaction from other academics. In his critique of Agoncillo’s Revolt of the Masses in 1956, conservative historian Nicholas Zafra, echoing the likes of Alip, reaffirms the civilizing role Spanish colonialism plays in preparing the nation of the linear path towards nationalism and independence. He launches a vigorous defence of the Christianity, the education system and the government agencies established by the Spanish, that they “contributed in no small degree to the development of Philippine nationalism”. His critique of Constantino’s essentializing different diverse players in Philippine history to a dichotomous and static paradigm of “masses” and “elites” would be echoed by other academics from different historiographic viewpoints.^[14]

The revisionist’s view

Glenn May in A Past Recovered (1987) presents a scalding review of Constantino's A Past Revisited, deliberately intending to be revisionist and provocative in nature. He argues that Constantino and some of the other nationalist historians offer an unbalanced, unreliable and propagandist treatment of the Philippines Revolution, the Philippine-American War and the American colonial period.^[15] In particular he criticizes Constantino for distorting the role of both the elites and the masses in the revolution, and that the latter’s conclusions are not based on historical evidence. Echoing Zafra’s earlier arguments, May’s central counter-argument is that resistance to the Americans was fueled not by the Filipino masses but by the elites. He puts forward the possibility that peasant participation (in the Philippine Revolution) was primarily the result of patron-client ties, i.e. clients were asked to join by their landlords or by other prominent to whom they were indebted. May concludes that “on the basis of the research done to date, we might be equally justified in characterizing that revolution as “the revolt of the elites”.

Another point May makes underlies some of the revisionist historiographical approaches to Philippine history – the refutation of the existence of a nationwide common commitment to independence with a shared sense of a Filipino nation. He argues that most Filipinos of this period, including provincial elites, had a largely provincial orientation and that there were striking economic, social and ethnic differences between the various provinces. He asserts that with more research done on the Philippines-American war, the picture that will emerge is a variegated one, in contrast to the monochromatic one that he argues Agoncillo and Constantino present, “with a host of local variables – ethnicity, social structure, economic conditions, the ability of American commanders in the region and so on, in determining the nature of the region’s response to the Americans”. Notwithstanding, the rather tale-telling colonial perspective in this last statement – an American academic perspective on Philippine history as being defined by its “response to the colonizers”, a new alternative stream of historiography of Philippines – a historiographic “third way” - did emerge studying these “local variables”.

Reynaldo Ileto in Reflections on historiography of Southeast Asia and the Philippines and the “golden age” of Southeast Asian Studies, affirms that for historians who reject both Euro-centric colonial historiography and Asia-centric nationalist discourse, “it is possible to write an autonomous history of Southeast Asia if we focus on the social history of the region: that, to avoid being Europe-centric or Asia-centric, one must look beyond the colonial encounter, examine the underlying social structure, and detail the social changes of the people, other than the domestic elite, who make up the bulk of the population”.^[16]

Social history’s perspectives on revolt and Salvador

Paraphrasing Alfred McCoy, Ileto said that 1970 represents the dividing line between “the old and the new historical scholarship” on the Philippines.^[17] One such scholarship is John Larkin’s The Pampangans Colonial Society in a Philippine Province (1972), where he analyzes the province of Pampangan over the period 1561 to 1921. Larkin argues that the singular concern of historiography only of the highest level of national government and politics, foreign relations and commerce, the colonial administration, tends to distort the history of the archipelago as a whole. He said that until we have a more complete understanding of the many units of the Philippine complex, we will be unable to discern the broader turns and evolution of the whole society. Moreover, he cautions historians against treating rural society as a monolithic structure, that by neglecting to account for the diversity of rural society, they have failed to assess meaningfully the impact of colonialism and the revolution on the country as a whole.

In his analysis of the Pampangans response to the Revolution of 1896, Larkin concludes that they react to different phases of the revolution according to their self-interest and need for survival, and this somewhat refutes the claims of nationalist historians that the revolution was an archipelago wide reaction to colonialism. Moreover, he affirms the patron-client ties between the provincial elite and the peasants, that the peasants neither rebelled against their caciques nor took action independent of them, and external pressures could not shake the stable relationship between tenant and landlord developed over three hundred years.

Specifically on Salvador and the Santa Iglesia, Larkin analyzes it based on this patron-client relationship. From Larkin’s perspective, the significance of Salvador in Pampangan was not his relationship with the revolutionary past, and he takes the view that Salvador “had little concern either for the politics of independence or for the politicians who hovered around the issue. Rather he spoke to the politically disfranchised about religious and social matters out of keeping with nationalist intentions”. Larkin does not believe Salvador or Santa Iglesia in any way altered the structure of Pampangan society, “his adherents never challenged the establishment by force of arms and did not seek separate utopian communities. Always a minority in Pampangan, they remained passive and anonymous under the rule of the traditional order”.

In his representation of the potentially diverse response in Pampanga to the call for nationalism and revolution, Larkin raises an interesting discussion about the different historiographic representations of the extent to which the whole nation was involved in the revolution. These two viewpoints raise some serious questions in Philippine historiography that lie at the core of the debate about Philippines nationhood—the national unity and solidarity view presented by Filipino historians vs the American historians’ presentation of all these uprisings as disunified disparate events, the revolution as a local uprising, and the revolt leaders as bandits, lunatics that justify American intervention.

In another scholarship of social history - Popular Uprisings in the Philippines (1976), David Sturtevant argues that rural rebellions in the Philippines sprang not from political or economic conditions, both of which he calls a one-dimensional analytical model, but from profound tensions in Philippine culture.^[18] Applying the perspectives and methods of social history and proposing an alternate focus for analyzing the problem, Sturtevant analyzes agrarian uprisings and protests between 1840 and 1940, including Felipe Salvador and Santa Igelsia. He argues that the common thread linking these is not economic issues but a religious and supernatural element, that “the repetition of otherworldly patterns in widely separated regions of the archipelago indicated the existence of highly developed millennial themes in peasant society”. He further believes that this points to the existence of “serious cultural tensions in the Philippines that grew from a complex clash between customary and modern tendencies, the byproducts of stress between “little and great traditions”. The forced conversion of the local population to Catholicism and denial of traditional deities exerted profound pressures, with some of the rural peasantry responding by developing covert means to satisfy spiritual longings, and some of these revivalist and syncretic undercurrents persisted, sometimes manifesting themselves in mystery-permeated violence.

Getting to the sources

All the animated academic debate on Philippines historiography invokes the perennial question of how to do "nationalist" history, how to establish a "people's" perspective, given the fact that the major documents involved in Philippine history are the records not of the Filipino people, but of the foreign colonizer? In the writings discussed above, from Constantino, Larkin, to Sturtevant, while they come to different conclusions about such revolts in the Philippines, all the sources they used are primarily colonial documents from Spanish or American authorities, ranging from various US Reports of the Philippines Commission, Constabulary reports or American colonial historians’ discourses on the Philippines. In the chapters discussing collaboration and resistance, Constantino himself said that “although most of the material extant comes from what might deem as 'hostile' sources, it is still possible to glean from accounts of the tactics of the guerrillas and also of the American-directed Constabulary just what the people’s attitudes to the resistance forces were”.

Focusing on these sources and the perspectives they construct on Philippines’ history, Corpuz points out that the colonial authorities scanty reports on such movements like Salvador’s “stressed what was exotic and often bizarre, urging us to see the people involved as sociological curiosities”. The source materials very often constrain our historiographical perspective. Corpus rightly says that “it is not easy now to get away from the images created by the reports: rural sects and their leaders with long hair claiming to be prophets and assuming titles of ‘Pope’, and followers said to be no more than superstitious and ignorant members of fanatical religious movements”.^[19]

The issue of historical sources and the limits on perspectives has become a much more pressing concern. Attempts have been made to “free” Philippines historiography from the framework of colonial discourses by re-examining primary historical sources.

The Pasyon of Felipe Salvador – history “from below”

Ileto’s Payson and Revolution (1979) is the first such attempt to produce a study of revolts and revolution of the Philippines “from below”, exploring the autonomous agency of the Tagalog peasant movements, and an alternative perspective away from the colonial binary narrative framework that paints peasants as passive victims in order to present a singular rationale of nationalism and liberation.^[20]

Rather than falling back to the usual linear causal discourse of the pasyon leading to mass support and participation in the revolution, Ileto discusses the pasyon as a Filipino folk epic embodying different levels of meaning. The Pasyon about the gospel of Jesus Christ that became the Payson Pilpail of the Philippines was not merely a direct translation but contained numerous syncretic accretions and alterations based on indigenous folk sensibilities. Using the pasyon and a range of atypical sources – folk songs, prayers, manifestos, poems all written in Tagalog, Ileto explores what revolution and resistance meant to the Filipino mass base before the revolution becomes interpreted in nationalistic terms and according to ideological framework of the educated elite during the period of study 1850-1910.^[21]

In the chapter on Felipe Salvador, Ileto does not only rely on colonial sources but incorporates local Filipino writings of the time, and more importantly, using Salvador’s own affidavit “Narrative of the Feelings and Supplications of the Accused Major Felipe Salvador” of 1899 as well as local language newspaper reports of his execution and his own words.

Ileto’s seems to be the first and only historiographical account of Salvador and Santa Iglesia that incorporates Salvador’s own voice and agency. Instead of subjected to being described, constructed and reconstructed from within the limits of how he was presented in the police constabulary and Philippine Reports, here Ileto gives Salvador his own voice, articulating his own subaltern motivations, desires and fears.

Ileto discovers aspects of Salvador and Santa Iglesia that other analyses have not been able to explore. Instead of the usual representation of Salvador as a wild and semi-civilized bandit leader and his followers as Larkin describes "a group of superstitious minority that remained passive and anonymous", Salvador’s Affidavit firstly shatters the conventional unity within the republic and its army. Instead of being the aggressors they are normally depicted as, Salvador speaks of how Santa Iglesia suffered rampant abuse and harassment from both army officers of the Republic, the municipal officials and the Kapampangan elites. Ileto argues that it is actually the elites’ competition with Santa Iglesia for the hold over the peasantry that compels them to relegate Salvador and Santa Iglesia to the phenomenon of banditry. While most historiographical writings on Salvador will present him as engaging repeated attacks on military posts, in his own Affidavit, Ileto finds a remarkable absence of any mention of raids and skirmishes according to his own account. Moreover, while the constabulary sources from 1907 to 1909 had no mention of Santa Iglesia and led most scholars to believe that there was a gap of activities, in fact according to Salvador’s own narrative, he was constantly on the move, punctuated by human encounters and attracting followers along the way.

The response to Ileto’s methodology seems to remain divided. While some take exception to the use of literary texts particularly the pasyon, some like John N. Schumacher affirms that Ileto has “made a valuable contribution to the methodology of Philippine historiography, which is capable of illuminating whole layers or the history of our people 'from bellow' in a way that has scarcely yet been thought of. What is needed is further refinement of the method, and establishment of controls as to the extent of its application".^[22] He made the interesting point that ”it is possible to re-read many pf the movements studied by Sturtevant” including the Iglesia, in the light of the methodology used by Ileto and to gain much new insight into them”. Another scholar Ooi Kee Beng echoes this point when he argues that the value of the book comes from this difficult narrative balance Ileto takes upon himself. Ooi asserts that by basing his findings on perceptions and a phenomenological approach, suggestive interpretations are achieved and a believable narrative about the psychological life and the poetic ethos of the masses is impressively presented. But he also cautions that “what Ileto does is to introduce the educated reader to the dynamics of a world which by definition lies outside the narrow rationality of the discourse being carried out between the author and his audience”.^[21]

References