Letters to the editor: reporting disasters and creating identity in the late nineteenth century Philippines

ABSTRACT

A revolution in how news was reported occurred in the Philippines during the late nineteenth century with the publication of daily newspapers, the establishment of a postal system, and the construction of a telegraph network that allowed correspondents in the provinces to give timely accounts of what was happening in country towns and their hinterlands. Many of these reports graphically described the typhoons, floods, fires, tremors and the like that all too frequently afflicted rural communities. These descriptions mainly took the form of letters written to the editors of Manila-based newspapers, such as El Comercio, Diario de Manila and La Oceania Española. Who were these correspondents, where were they, what were their concerns and what did they have to say? Looking in depth at the newspaper accounts of one year, 1881, a singly uneventful year in terms of ‘big news’, this article provides a snapshot into rural life and its vicissitudes towards the end of the Spanish colonial era. It also explores how reporting the news began to build a collective consciousness of the Philippines as a nation.

KEYWORDS:

• Disasters
• media
• national identity
• Philippines
• South East Asia

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 On the threat and prevalence of Moro raiding, see Warren (1985).

2 On the life and contribution of José Felipe del Pan, see Lino L. Dizon (2009). The first daily newspaper, La Esperanza, appeared in 1847 but suspended publication in 1850 (Retana 1895, 24).

3 Several notable compendiums exist that list all nineteenth-century newspaper publications by year. See Retana (1895) and Artigas y Cuerva (1909).

4 Isabelo de los Reyes was a Filipino politician, writer, journalist and labour activist in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, famous for his ethnography of Ilocano folklore.

5 Known as the Propaganda Movement, these expatriates demanded political reforms, representation in the Spanish Cortes and full Spanish citizenship for Filipinos (Schumacher 1997).

6 Courier service was performed as part of the polo y servicios, the enforced forty days of labour that men rendered to the colonial state. Two badageros were assigned each day and relieved the next morning (Cushner 1971).

7 Trade with the Philippines for some 250 years was regulated by the so-called Manila Galleon, in which a maximum of two ships a year were dispatched to Acapulco (Schurz 1939).

8 Excerpts from letters are translated from the original Spanish by the author.

9 There are numerous studies on the life and literary endeavours of José Rizal. See Coates (1968) and Ocampo (1990).

10 A rare exception is the reporting of the prompt actions of the sister of D. Juan Pareda, owner of the Madrid Inn, in dealing with a fire on Sunday, 14 August (Diario de Manila 17 August 1881b). Two weekly publications aimed at women readers, El Sexo Bello and El Hogar, appeared in the 1890s (Isabel 2017, 14).

11 The 1905 Census estimates the total circulation of newspapers at ‘less than 70,000 copies’, two-thirds of which were published in Spanish (Gannett 1905, 270).

12 On pagdadala or burden sharing, see (Decenteceo 1997, 83–101). Bayanihan is now widely regarded as a hallmark of national identity (Su 2021).