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Reynaldo Ileto’s Pasyon and revolution revisited, a critique

Article  in  Sojourn Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia · March 2018

DOI: 10.1355/sj33-1b

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 SOJOURN: Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia Vol. 33, No. 1 (2018), pp. 29–58 DOI: 10.1355/sj33-1b
© 2018 ISEAS – Yusof Ishak Institute ISSN 0217-9520 print / ISSN 1793-2858 electronic

Reynaldo Ileto’s Pasyon and

Revolution Revisited, a Critique

Joseph Scalice

Reynaldo Ileto’s 1979 work Pasyon and Revolution: Popular

Movements in the Philippines, 1840–1910, attempted to reconstruct
the categories of perception of “the masses” by using the religious
performance of the suffering and death of Christ, the pasyon, as
source material. Critical re-examination of his work reveals that the
attempt was deeply flawed. It engaged with the pasyon as a literary
text, ignored the significance of its performance and treated it in an
ahistorical manner. An attentiveness to performance demonstrates that
the pasyon was a cross-class and linguistically specific phenomenon.
This insight dramatically attenuates the argumentative force of Ileto’s
claim to provide an historical understanding of the consciousness of
the masses and their participation in revolution.

Keywords: Reynaldo Ileto, Pasyon and Revolution, the Philippines, historiography, non-
elite perceptions, performance, Philippine literature, Andrés Bonifacio, the Philippine
Revolution.

The publication of Reynaldo Ileto’s Pasyon and Revolution: Popular

Movements in the Philippines, 1840–1910 in 1979 produced a sea
change in Philippine historiography. Ileto’s work shifted the focus
of historical research on the country, and above all on its late-
nineteenth-century revolution against Spanish imperial control, from
the writings and actions of individual members of the elite to the
perceptions and revolutionary participation of the lower classes.
Virtually all subsequent research in Philippine history has been
written in the light of Pasyon and Revolution. Reference to Ileto’s
conclusions is de rigueur in a field of studies whose subject matter

Reproduced from SOJOURN: Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia, Vol. 33, No. 1 (March 2018)
(Singapore: ISEAS – Yusof Ishak Institute, 2018). This version was obtained electronically direct from the publisher
on condition that copyright is not infringed. No part of this publication may be reproduced without the prior
permission of the ISEAS – Yusof Ishak Institute. Individual articles are available at <http://bookshop.iseas.edu.sg>.

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 30 Joseph Scalice

ranges from the pre-colonial structure of the barangay, or village,

to the economic policies of the 1965–86 regime of Ferdinand E.
Marcos. Benedict Anderson expressed the consensus of academic
opinion when he wrote that “Ileto’s masterly Pasyon and Revolution
… is unquestionably the most profound and searching book on late
nineteenth century Philippine history” (Anderson 1998, p. 199n19).
Despite the pre-eminence of Pasyon and Revolution in Philippine
studies, however, no one has comprehensively examined the premises,
source material and conclusions of Ileto’s work. This article aims
to fill that gap.
Through a detailed examination of Pasyon and Revolution, I show
that Ileto’s project of reconstructing the ways in which the lower
classes of the Philippines in the late nineteenth century perceived
the world and their role in it failed to achieve its goal for several
reasons. Ileto never clearly defined what class or classes constituted
his amorphous analytical category, “the masses”. He ignored the
fact that his source material was accessed through performance.
Ileto read his sources as texts, in an elite manner, and reconstructed
categories of perception with no demonstrable relationship to peasant
or working class consciousness.
I further argue that consciousness and perception, even when
carefully reconstructed, cannot in themselves explain dramatic
historical events such as the Philippine Revolution of 1896–98.
To understand the causes of that revolution and to account for the
participation of the lower classes in it, we must give explanatory
primacy to objective historical events and to the changes in the
relations of production in the nineteenth century Philippines. These
changes shaped consciousness and transformed the ways in which
people perceived the world.

Pasyon and Revolution Revisited

Scholars have explained the Philippine Revolution as one inspired
by the ideas acquired by the ilustrados, members of the colony’s
largely Chinese-indio mestizo elite, during their education abroad.

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 Reynaldo Ileto’s Pasyon and Revolution Revisited, a Critique 31

These ideas led to the spread of freemasonry in the Philippines and,

in turn, gave revolutionary inspiration to a lower-middle-class clerk,
Andrés Bonifacio. Bonifacio founded the Katipunan, a separatist
secret society, and thus launched the revolution against Spain.
Control of the revolution eventually passed to Emilio Aguinaldo, who
had Bonifacio tried and executed. Traditional scholarship saw the
succession in revolutionary leadership from Bonifacio to Aguinaldo
as either regrettable but necessary, or as the usurpation of the reins
of the revolution on the part of the upper classes.1
In Pasyon and Revolution, Ileto studied the ideas and events of
the revolution in a different manner, by examining the history of
Tagalog lower-class movements from 1840 to 1910. This was a time
punctuated by both millenarian peasant uprisings and revolutions
against Spain and then the United States. Earlier scholars had
treated these peasant uprisings as separate, local events, with no
serious connection to the Katipunan or to the Philippine Revolution.
Ileto argued that, by looking at these events as they would have
been perceived by the masses,2 we could see that the seemingly
unconnected and irrational uprisings of the peasantry formed a
coherent whole, seamlessly interwoven with the Philippine Revolution.
To demonstrate this connection, Ileto needed to recreate the ways
in which the masses perceived the world. He asked, “the physical
involvement of the masses in the revolution was pretty clear, but
how did they actually perceive, in terms of their own experience,
the ideas of nationalism and revolution brought from the West by
the ilustrados?” (Ileto 1979, p. 4)
What was needed, according to Ileto, were “alternative, valid
meanings” (ibid. p. 7) for concepts like nationalism, independence
and revolution — meanings that would have been intelligible to
the masses and corresponded to their understanding of the world.
In the absence of attention to these meanings and of a grasp of
that understanding, peasant movements were condemned to appear
irrational and backwards.
To locate these alternative meanings, Ileto looked for new sources
and read old sources in new ways. He reread the documents produced

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 32 Joseph Scalice

by the revolution with an eye to peasant and lower-class categories

of perception, asking the reader to imagine how the masses would
have understood these texts. Through a close study of awit, Tagalog
verse, and of the pasyon, the sung version of the passion and death of
Jesus Christ, Pasyon and Revolution aimed to “arrive at the Tagalog
masses’ perceptions of events”. To do so, Ileto argued, “we have to
utilize their documents in ways that extend beyond the search for
‘cold facts’ ” (ibid., p. 10).
The pasyon libretto that Ileto examined, the Pasyon Pilapil, was
first published in Tagalog in 1814. It is stylistically the roughest
of the three available versions of the pasyon in that language; it
was also the most popular. If the Catholic Church composed the
pasyon with the intention of inculcating submission and passivity
into the colonized populace (Tiongson 1975, p. 195), Ileto argued
that it nevertheless contained passages that allowed members of that
populace to identify their suffering with that of Christ. “Whether the
pasyon encouraged subservience or defiance, resignation or hope,
will always be open to argument. The fact is that its meanings are
not fixed, but rather depended on social context. Thus a historical
approach is necessary” (Ileto 1979, p. 18).
Ileto argued that the pasyon gave the masses an idiom for
articulating an understanding of the world; it did not provide them
with an ideology or a coherent picture of society. This idiom
comprised powerful units of meaning for the masses, located at
the intersection of their experience of reality and their participation
in the pabasa, the sung performance of the pasyon. These units of
meaning informed their interaction with and participation in society.
Ileto’s study of the pasyon identified several of these basic units
of meaning. The pasyon conveyed “an image of universal history”
(ibid., p. 14) structured as paradise, fall, redemption, and judgment.
A section of the pasyon narrated Jesus’s separation from his mother
in response to a call “from above”. This separation from family
“probed the limit of prevailing social values and relationships”
(ibid., p.  14) and “paved the way” for people “joining a rebel
leader who was often a religious figure himself” (ibid., p.  15).

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 Reynaldo Ileto’s Pasyon and Revolution Revisited, a Critique 33

Finally, it made clear that Jesus called his followers from the
“lowly, common people” (ibid., p. 16), and was persecuted by the
wealthy and the powerful.
The narrative of peasant uprisings began in a chapter of Pasyon
and Revolution entitled “Light and Brotherhood” (ibid., pp. 29–74)
that told the story of the Cofradía de San José, a religious sodality
founded by Apolinario de la Cruz, a charismatic peasant leader
known as Hermano Pule, in Tayabas province. Stung by the Spanish
religious orders’ rejection of his application for the recognition
of his confraternity, de la Cruz responded by banning non-indio3
membership in the organization in 1841. Alarmed, the authorities
moved to shut down the meetings of the Cofradía, sending soldiers
to break it up. On the slopes of Mount San Cristobal, the members
of the confraternity battled the soldiers for ten days. Some 300–500
members of the sodality were killed and another 300–400 arrested.
Ileto was particularly interested in the perceptions and
consciousness of members of the Cofradía. To reconstruct the
mentality of the group, he read through the hymns and prayers of
the sodality and the letters that Apolinario de la Cruz addressed to
its members. A constellation of Tagalog words formed out of this
examination, words that Ileto claimed were in keeping with pasyon
idiom: liwanag, radiant light which brings wisdom or insight; awa,
or pity, which evokes a response of damay, fellow feeling, and
which has the added significance of participation in another’s work;
layaw, for love, pampering, the satisfaction of necessities; and loób,
for the interior of a thing, a person’s will and emotions. Pasyon and
Revolution drew a distinction between historical time, the tangible
events affecting the lives of the masses, and pasyon time, the deeper,
invisible structure to history in which suffering, death, and redemption
give everyday struggles a profound significance. Ileto claimed that
the revolt of the Cofradía was an attempt to synchronize historical
time with pasyon time; it was the irruption of the “pasyon world”
into the “everyday world” (ibid., p. 54).
Pasyon and Revolution neatly summarized the connection between
the Cofradía de San José and later events.

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 34 Joseph Scalice

The events that culminated in the bloody revolt of 1841 was

[sic] not simply a blind reaction to oppressive forces in colonial
society; it was a conscious act of realizing certain possibilities
of existence that the members were made conscious of through
reflection upon certain mysteries and signs. Furthermore, since
what we are talking about is part of the world view of a class
of people with a more or less common religious experience, the
connection between the events of 1840–1841 and later upheavals
in the Tagalog region can be posited. (ibid., p. 30)

This paragraph includes two explicit assumptions underlying the

argument for continuity between Hermano Pule’s uprising and
subsequent revolts in the Tagalog region, including that of the
Katipunan. The first is that the uprising of 1841 emerged from “the
world view of a class of people”. The second is that members of
this class had a “more or less common religious experience”. Ileto
continued,
certain common features of these upheavals, or the way these
events were perceived, indicate that connections do exist. These
lie perhaps, not in a certain chain of events, but in the common
features through time of a consciousness that constantly seeks to
define the world in its own terms. (ibid., p. 31)

The continuity in the history of revolts is thus the result of continuity

in consciousness. Whose consciousness? The consciousness of a class.
Pasyon and Revolution argued that a continuity of class consciousness
was the basis of the continuity of the uprisings from 1840 to 1910.
But the consciousness of which class? This is a question to which
I shall return.
The next chapter of Ileto’s book, entitled “Tradition and Revolt:
The Katipunan” (ibid., pp. 75–114), carried the narrative forward fifty
years to the period in which the Katipunan was founded, moving from
1841 to an event that occurred in 1897, also in Tayabas. Wearing
anting-anting amulets to ward off bullets, the remnants of Hermano
Pule’s Cofradía, now known as the Colorum Society, were led by
Sebastian Caneo into the provincial capital in a large procession.
Their intention was to throw pieces of rope at the guardia civil, who,

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 Reynaldo Ileto’s Pasyon and Revolution Revisited, a Critique 35

they believed, would be magically tied up. The guardia civil opened
fire on the procession, killing many of its members. The rest fled.
This story, rather than the classic narrative of Western ideas and
ilustrado agitation for reform, forms the background of the account
of the Katipunan uprising in Pasyon and Revolution. Ileto stated,
“the fact that a self-educated, lower-middle-class clerk in the Manila
quarter of Tondo named Andres Bonifacio founded the Katipunan in
1892, is excessively attributed to the influence of ilustrados like Del
Pilar and Rizal” (ibid., p. 79). What we should instead look for was
“a way of reconstructing the masses’ perceptions of the Katipunan
and their role in it” (ibid., p. 81). In order to do so, we needed to
“cease for the moment to regard the Katipunan as a radically unique
phenomenon or as the mere creation of individuals like Bonifacio
and Jacinto” (ibid).
Ileto examined the manifestos published by Bonifacio, Emilio
Jacinto and Pio Valenzuela, two fellow leaders of the Katipunan, in
March 1896 in the sole edition of the Katipunan circular Kalayaan.
A thousand copies circulated among readers in Manila and in
Bulacan and Cavite provinces. Between March and the discovery
of the Katipunan by Spanish officials in August, its membership
grew from 300 to 20,000 or 30,000 people. Ileto claimed that the
form and language of Bonifacio’s main article in Kalayaan, “Ang
dapat mabatid ng mga Tagalog” (What the Tagalogs should know),
were more important than its content for understanding its impact.
Bonifacio, he argued, communicated in his article by using “the
pasyon form” (ibid., p. 83).
Ileto also examined the initiation rituals of the Katipunan.
“Outwardly, they appear to be Masonic. But if they were truly so”,
Ileto asked rhetorically, “could unlettered peasants have embraced the
Katipunan as truly their own?” (ibid., p. 91). Pasyon and Revolution
attempted to demonstrate that both Bonifacio’s article in Kalayaan
and the initiation rituals of the Katipunan embodied ideas of paradise,
fall and redemption — expressed as pre-colonial prosperity, the
advent of the Spaniards, and restoration through kalayaan. Ileto
studied the etymology of this last word, which was of such central

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 36 Joseph Scalice

importance to the Katipunan that its leadership made it the title of

the organization’s circular. He found that it signified “satisfaction
of needs”, and not simply autonomy (ibid., pp. 107–8).4
Pasyon and Revolution moved from the study of initiation rituals
to an overlooked episode in the building of the Katipunan: the
sojourn of Bonifacio and eight other leaders during Holy Week of
1895 on “Mount Tapusi” in preparation for the uprising.5 There, in
the legendary cave of the folk hero Bernardo Carpio, they wrote
on the wall, “Long live Philippine independence!” This journey,
Pasyon and Revolution stated, had “two levels of meaning. On one
hand, it was purely military, a search for a haven. On the other,
it was a gesture of identifying with the folk hero entombed in the
mountain” (ibid., p. 102).
The chapter concluded with the power struggle between Bonifacio
and Aguinaldo that came about when Bonifacio travelled to
Cavite province and culminated in his execution on 10 May 1897.
Ileto argued that, in both his writings and his actions, Bonifacio
demonstrated “his familiarity with popular perceptions of change.
Folk poetry and drama undoubtedly provided him with basic insights
into the ‘folk mind.’ Between him and Apolinario de la Cruz in
fact exists a strong affinity.” These insights led Bonifacio to his
“preoccupation with ‘sacred ideals’ and moral transformation”, and it
was this preoccupation that in turn led to his downfall (ibid., p. 109).
In its later chapters, Pasyon and Revolution examined the use
of the language of the Katipunan in the radicalism of the masses
during the republican phase of the Philippine Revolution, in the
Philippine American War of 1899–1902, under Macario Sakay’s
revived Katipunan in 1902–6, and in the Santa Iglesia of Felipe
Salvador in 1899–1906. He argued that the masses continued to
conceive of the revolution, and their role in it, in the same pasyon
idiom that he had located in the early documents of the Katipunan
under Bonifacio. “This phenomenon can be understood if we view
Bonifacio’s Katipunan as the embodiment of a revolutionary style,
a sort of language which enabled the ordinary Indio to relate his
personal experience with the ‘national’ ” (ibid., p. 113).

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 Reynaldo Ileto’s Pasyon and Revolution Revisited, a Critique 37

Ileto neatly summarized his argument as follows.

The continuity in form between the Cofradía in 1841, the
Katipunan revolt of 1896, the Santa Iglesia and other movements
we have examined can be traced to the persistence of the pasyon
in shaping the perceptions of particularly the poor and uneducated
segments of the populace. Through the text and associated
rituals, people were made aware of a pattern of universal history.
They also became aware of ideal forms of behavior and social
relationships, and a way to attain these through suffering, death,
and rebirth. (ibid., p. 254)

The pasyon gave the masses a conceptualization of “a pattern of

universal history” — the pattern of paradise, fall and redemption. It
also gave them a shared understanding of “ideal forms of behavior”
— damay, awa and so on. Its idiom enabled the masses to understand
the world, the revolution and their participation in them.

Problematic Class Categories

The historical continuity that Pasyon and Revolution found in Tagalog
popular movements from 1840 to 1910 was a continuity of class
consciousness. Before we examine in detail the sources that Ileto
used to reconstruct this class consciousness, we must first ask what
class or classes made up the “masses”, the “underside of Philippine
history” (Ileto 1982).
Relationships among social classes changed dramatically in the
nineteenth-century Philippines. The galleon trade between Manila
and Acapulco ended in 1815. The Philippines’ status as a colonial
backwater, no more than an entrepôt hub in trade with China,
gradually ended as well. The introduction of foreign, largely British,
capital, between the first and the second half of the nineteenth century
overthrew pre-capitalist relations of production. What class relations
had prevailed in 1841 Tayabas during the Hermano Pule uprising
would have borne little resemblance to those of the Katipunan’s
Tondo fifty years later.
By the 1880s and 1890s, Philippine society was awash in class
contradictions. Small landholders, tenant farmers, share-croppers,

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 38 Joseph Scalice

landless agricultural wage workers, an urban proletariat, clerks

and professional wage workers comprised various sections of the
oppressed classes in society. All of these were grouped together
under indefinite rubrics in Ileto’s account. Pasyon and Revolution
lumped these classes together as “the masses” (p. 5), those “from
below” (p. 8), “unlettered peasants” (p. 114), the “illiterate tao” or
folk (p. 26). They collectively shared the “popular mind” (pp. 14,
131) and the “folk mind” (pp. 25, 135). They occasionally appeared
in the book as indios who shared “the Filipino mind” (p. 16); they
are, quite often, simply “pobres y ignorantes”, the poor and ignorant
(pp. 23, 144, 197, 205, 316).
These categories are troubling. Pasyon and Revolution introduced
the phrase pobres y ignorantes as “the common ilustrado term for the
masses” (ibid., p. 18), and yet never questioned the validity of this
ilustrado characterization of the classes that are in fact the book’s
focus. The “masses” in Pasyon and Revolution were a superstitious,
illiterate lot. Ileto sought to learn about the categories of perception
of these pobres y ignorantes; he did not, however, question the idea
that they had been and were backward. This lack of questioning was
particularly evident in the introduction to Pasyon and Revolution.
We modern Filipinos … can either further accelerate the demise
of “backward” ways of thinking (reflected in the Lapiang
Malaya6) in order to pave way for the new, or we can graft
modern ideas onto traditional modes of thought. Whatever our
strategy may be, it is necessary that we first understand how the
traditional mind operates, particularly in relation to questions of
change. This book aims to help bring about this understanding.
(ibid., p. 2)

Despite the scare quotes around “backward” in the above quotation,

the masses’ modes of thought were clearly pre-modern in Ileto’s
conception; to belong to the masses was to possess a “traditional
mind”. Without a clear sociological definition of the class or classes
to which it referred, Pasyon and Revolution began with the ilustrado
notion of pobres y ignorantes and then asked what consciousness
this “group” possessed.

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 Reynaldo Ileto’s Pasyon and Revolution Revisited, a Critique 39

An examination of Aguinaldo, the ilustrado landowner from

Cavite, and Bonifacio, the urban worker from Tondo, reveals just
how deeply flawed Ileto’s schema was.
Emilio Aguinaldo was a religious man who held Bonifacio’s
secular worldview in contempt. He would have spoken a pasyon-
inflected language with far greater conviction than Bonifacio (Saulo
1983, p. 37). We have as yet found no evidence that Bonifacio ever
owned anting-anting; we know that Aguinaldo possessed several.
Pasyon and Revolution gave an example of one of Aguinaldo’s
anting-anting, citing an article from an August 1897 edition of the
New York Herald that stated,
Among other followers he [Aguinaldo] had two youths
appropriately dressed as pages who accompany him everywhere
and who seemed to be considered as persons of no little
importance by the others. One of the youths in particular has
attracted attention which is explained by others of his followers
in this way. This interesting youth possesses the supernatural
qualities of anting-anting. (Ileto 1979, p. 26)

Finally, and on a matter that cuts to the heart of the categories of

class in Pasyon and Revolution, the ilustrado Aguinaldo could not
read or write Spanish. In fact, he took little interest in his own
education at all. He confessed late in life that he had never read
José Rizal’s classic nationalist novels Noli Me Tángere (1887) or
El filibusterismo (1891). This was true not only of Aguinaldo but
also of many ilustrados (Ocampo 2001, p. 144). Employed as a
class category and applied to figures like Aguinaldo, ilustrado
can no longer mean enlightened or educated; it must simply refer
to native owners of the means of production, largely of mestizo
background.
Bonifacio, the self-taught urban worker, could read Spanish. He
had read Rizal, Victor Hugo, Eugene Sue, Lives of the Presidents of
the United States, and books on the French Revolution. He translated
Mi último adiós, the poem that Rizal composed on the eve of his
execution by the Spanish in December 1896, into Tagalog. He was
an educated man (Schumacher 1981, p. 49).

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 40 Joseph Scalice

One of the few definitions of the lower classes that Ileto gives us
in Pasyon and Revolution appears on the fourth page of the book.
There he glosses the “masses” as “the largely rural and uneducated
Filipinos who constituted the revolution’s mass base” (Ileto 1979,
p. 4). If we ignore the anachronistic use of the word “Filipino”, we
are left with a definition that would clearly make Aguinaldo one of
the masses and Bonifacio not.
Actual class relations were exceedingly volatile in the nineteenth-
century Philippines. New classes emerged; old classes disappeared.
Subsistence agriculture gave way to cash cropping and commodity
production. While class consciousness is notoriously viscous and
lags behind objective circumstances, the transformations wrought by
capitalism in the decades leading up to the Philippine Revolution
would have had profound effects on the consciousness of workers
and peasants. The uninterrupted continuity in categories of perception
that Ileto found stretching from Apolinario de la Cruz in the 1840s
to Valentin de los Santos in 1967 thus warrants a healthy amount
of suspicion.7

An Elite Textual Hermeneutic

Pasyon and Revolution studied two main sources to discover the
consciousness of the masses. These were awit, Tagalog verse, and
the pasyon, the sung version of the passion of Christ. Ileto argued
that a close examination of this nineteenth century literature of the
masses could reveal the ways in which they perceived the world.
Ileto read these sources as texts in which the basic unit of meaning
is the lexeme and allusions are intertextual. This is precisely how
a member of the elite would have read the pasyon or an awit. It
does not, however, give us a sense of how peasants and workers
would have understood them. In order to address lower-class
consciousness through an analysis of these works, we must read
them in a different manner altogether; we must concern ourselves
with their performance.
Individual words were the fundamental units of meaning in Pasyon
and Revolution. They indicated the masses’ apparent categories of

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 Reynaldo Ileto’s Pasyon and Revolution Revisited, a Critique 41

perception, as found both in the pasyon and in awit. Words like layaw,
damay, awa, loób and liwanag, all of which might seem profound
to the non-native speaker, circulated untranslated throughout Pasyon
and Revolution. They thus acquired a reified sense of meaning far
out of keeping with their actual workaday significance. Thus we
commonly read sentences like, “Since damay is a manifestation of
a whole and controlled loób, the Katipunan’s loób radiates heat and
flame, just as Christ and other individuals of exemplary loób radiate
liwanag” (Ileto 1979, p.  136). The italicized words flew fast and
thick and gave the portentous feeling of significance. They attained
a magical status, academic anting-anting rendering Pasyon and
Revolution bulletproof against scholarly criticism.8
The book did not, however, afford ilustrados the privilege of
communicating in deeply meaningful untranslated words. When
Aguinaldo appealed to “banal na kalayaan”, in a proclamation
addressed to workers not to go on strike during the war against the
Americans, Ileto translated the phrase as “sacred independence”, and
included no Tagalog original. Ileto dismissed this “sacred liberty”
as an “abstract notion” (ibid., p. 124).
Italicized, untranslated Tagalog clings, however, to the speeches
of Bonifacio, Jacinto, and other mass leaders, even when they had
delivered them in Spanish. The katipunero Aurelio Tolentino wrote
“Viva la Independencia Filipina!” on the wall of the cave of Bernardo
Carpio. Ileto rendered the text in English and then extrapolated the
full Tagalog significance of the phrase. The passage is representative
of the hermeneutical style of Pasyon and Revolution, and it is worth
reproducing.
We can also understand why Bonifacio’s hand trembled with
fierce emotion as he wrote on the walls of the cave: “Long live
Philippine independence!” This slogan must be interpreted in its
entire form — Panahon na! Mabuhay ang Kalayaan! — which
was the battlecry of the Katipunan. Its common translation as
“The time has come! Long live Liberty!” does not quite capture
its meaning. Panahon na! (It is time!) implies, not only that the
revolution has begun, but that a totally new era (panahon) is
about to succeed the old which has irreversibly winded down.
And Mabuhay should be translated literally as “May it live” or

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 42 Joseph Scalice

“May it come to life.” “Long live” or “cheers” fails to capture the

meaning of the struggle as the experience of hardship in order to
redeem or give life to a “dead” or “slumbering” condition called
kalayaan. (ibid., p. 103)
All of this was derived from four Spanish words written by Aurelio
Tolentino.9 Upon this slight foundation, Pasyon and Revolution builds
a comparison between the “ ‘slumbering’ condition called kalayaan”
and Bernardo Carpio, whom the masses supposedly saw Bonifacio
to be awakening.

Pasyon as Performance
Attention to the significance derived from the public performance of
the pasyon and of awit, as an alternative to Ileto’s application of an
elite textual hermeneutic, allows us to gain insights rather different
to those of Pasyon and Revolution.
The text of the passion of Jesus Christ was first translated into
Tagalog by Gaspar Aquino de Belén in 1703. This pasyon began
with the Last Supper and continued through the death of Christ.
In 1814, a second pasyon, known as Pasyon Genesis or Pasyon
Pilapil, was composed. The latter name resulted from the popular
attribution of its authorship to Father Mariano Pilapil, who submitted
the document for imprimatur in 1884 (Trimillos 1992, p. 8). The
Pasyon Pilapil begins with the creation of the world and concludes
with the coronation of Mary in heaven. It was performed in two
separate Lenten folk rituals, pabasa and sinakulo.
Pabasa is the public singing of the pasyon.10 Traditionally
sponsored by prominent families, these performances reinforced local
hierarchy. The sponsoring family dictated the order of singers and
could hire semi-professional pasyon performers. The performance of
the pasyon was an extended event occupying the space of several
days during Holy Week. Refreshments were provided in keeping
with the Spanish colonial meal structure: desayuno, café, almuerzo,
merienda, cena, and café de noche.11
The audience came and went, talking loudly and eating during the
performance. Sections of the pasyon varied in popularity. Audience
interest tended to wane with the singing of the story of Cain and

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 Reynaldo Ileto’s Pasyon and Revolution Revisited, a Critique 43

Abel, the lineages of Christ, or the aral — homilies addressed directly

to the audience. It is important to note that much of the vocabulary
in Ileto’s pasyon idiom was derived from the aral — typically the
least popular, most ignored sections of a performance. In contrast,
Christ’s walking on water and his encounter with Mary on the Via
Dolorosa, with their magic and drama, were generally popular and
well attended.12
Performers sung the pasyon in punto, a pattern of chanting that
varied with the characters whose lines were being sung. Christ
was sung in a slow and meek manner, and Mary in tagulaylay,
a mournful singsong chant residual from the performance of pre-
Hispanic epics. Doreen Fernandez writes, “It is logical to assume
that from chanting the pasyon aloud, some towns progressed to
assigning parts, then to adding costumes, and finally to having the
parts acted out in costume” (Fernandez 1996, p. 16). Sinakulo, the
extended dramatic performance of the pasyon with actors, costumes,
marches and special effects, originated in pabaasa.
The staging of sinakulo required a large budget; the wealthiest
families in a town served as its sponsors. The dramatized pasyon
opposed the banal or the holy — slow of speech and movement,
hands folded and eyes downcast in meekness and resignation —
to the hudyo, or the Jews, who pranced about the stage, gloating,
boasting, and were the entertainment of the performance.13 Innovation
in performance was strongly discouraged, and the holier the character
represented, the stricter was the adherence to text and tradition. Only
the hudyo, for whom variation in acting and changes in dialogue were
not looked upon as blasphemous, engaged in comic behaviour and
innovation. To be holy was to accept suffering without complaint;
it was to hold unswervingly to the script that God had predestined
for you.

A Linguistically Specific and Class-Universal Idiom

The idiom that Ileto found in the pasyon was linguistically specific.
It also crossed class boundaries. Both of these facts present serious
problems for the arguments of Pasyon and Revolution.

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 44 Joseph Scalice

Rene Javellana compiled an extensive bibliography of pasyon

texts and used it to construct a genealogy of the translation of the
pasyon. This genealogy neatly captures the problem of the linguistic
specificity of the pasyon (Javellana 1983). The pasyon was not
translated into Pangasinan until 1855; Bikolano, 1867; Kapampangan,
1876; Ilokano, 1889; Hiligaynon, 1892; and Samareño, not until 1916.
At least some of these pasyon in languages other than Tagalog were
not performed. Vicente Barrantes, an observer commissioned by the
Spanish colonial government, wrote in 1889 that “in Ilocos it is not
the passion but the Lamentations of Jeremias that is chanted during
Lent. The former is not chanted but read, and that privately.”14 In
Ilocos, the pasyon was a very recent introduction, which was not
publicly performed, but privately read. It seems likely that the new
pasyon librettos were purchased and read largely by the elite.
Translation of the pasyon into the language of many regions vital
to the progress of the Philippine Revolution had only occurred a
decade or two before the uprising, and this is before we mention the
possibility of an additional lag between the translation of the text
and its adoption in public performance. In the case of Ilocos, but
seven years separated translation of the pasyon and the outbreak of
the revolution. It strains credulity to assume that Ilokanos developed
a deep-seated pasyon idiom in this interval and that that idiom
enabled them to conceive of a pattern to universal history and of
their role in it. And yet the revolutionary struggle in Ilocos, which
erupted in 1898 against Spain, and persisted subsequently against the
Americans, was fierce, long lasting, and founded upon peasant and
working-class participation (Scott 1986). This was true also of Samar
(Marco 2001; Constantino 1975, pp. 283–86), whose inhabitants did
not see a translation of the pasyon into their language until long
after the revolution had ended. That mass revolutionary upsurges
occurred in similar fashions in both Tagalog and non-Tagalog
regions would suggest that an explanation grounded in the pasyon
is, at least partially, invalid. While other linguistic regions outside
the Tagalog provinces did have alternative religious texts, these did
not share the narrative pattern and specialized vocabulary that Ileto

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 Reynaldo Ileto’s Pasyon and Revolution Revisited, a Critique 45

explored in his work. To account for the common revolutionary

upsurge through the convergent lower-class consciousness distilled
from these diverse religious texts, would effectively reduce Ileto’s
argument to the claim that peasant thought tended to be religiously
structured, a point neither particularly insightful nor original.
While the pasyon idiom did not cross linguistic boundaries, it
was shared by Tagalog speakers of all classes. The elite participated
in the performance of the pasyon and the creation of the pasyon
idiom. That participation would have informed elite understanding of
the revolution as much as that of the masses. Both the pabasa and
sinakulo crossed class boundaries. Their performance occurred in a
shared space in which landlords and tenants met, not as equals but
as hierarchically ranked participants who spoke a common language,
that of the pasyon.15
The pasyon idiom that Ileto discovered could not speak to the
consciousness of specific class groups, not even to that of the
amorphous “masses”. It was a universal idiom. Rizal understood it
as fluently as did an “unlettered peasant”, as we see vividly in his
exchange with Vicente Barrantes. In his 1889 work El teatro tagalo,
Barrantes criticized what he saw as the purely derivative nature of
Philippine theatre in all its forms: the pasyon, sinakulo, awit, and
komedya. All Philippine theatre, he claimed, was an imitation of
Spanish literature, and a poor imitation at that. José Rizal wrote a
fiercely sarcastic response from Barcelona, dated 15  June 1889, in
which he addressed the topics of the pasyon and of awit.

As poor and rude as they may be; infantile, ridiculous, and mixed
compared to those works which belong to Your Excellency, they
retain for me, however, great poetry and a certain halo of purity
which Your Excellency could not comprehend. The first songs,
the first sainete, the first drama which I watched in my childhood,
and which lasted for three nights, left in my soul an indelible
memory, for in spite of their rudeness and ineptitude, they were
in Tagalog. They are, Exalted Sir, like an intimate fiesta of a poor
family: the name of Your Excellency, which is of a superior race,
would profane and remove all of their enchantment. (Rizal 1931,
p. 196, author’s translation)16

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 46 Joseph Scalice

We see in this passage the intimate formative significance that both

the pasyon and awit had for the ilustrado exemplar, Rizal. Not only
were ilustrados present during the performance of the pasyon, but it
could also serve as an integral part of their moral education.
Pasyon and Revolution examined the pasyon as text rather than
as performance. In performance the pasyon was a shared event that
reinforced hierarchy and privilege. Rather than a unique window
into lower-class categories of perception, the pasyon was in fact
one of the very few truly cross-class idioms in nineteenth-century
Tagalog society.
But what of awit?

Awit as Performance
Soldiers who arrived in the Philippines in the service of Miguel
López de Legazpi in the late sixteenth century are believed to
have been the first to bring from Mexico the metrical romances of
chivalry popular in the Iberian world of their day. A continued trade
in metrical romances flourished in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries via the galleon trade.17 These imported metrical romances
had either dodecasyllabic or octosyllabic structure and assonant verses.
Metrical romances were eventually translated and became awit
and corrido (Fernandez 1996, p. 5). Corrido are octosyllabic poems,
“which might be sung to the tune of the passion”, while awit “are
dodecasyllabic narratives sung in an elegiac and pleading manner”
(Lumbera 1986, p. 52). The mono-rhymed quatrains of awit are
called plosa. There is a caesura after every sixth syllable. Every
two lines complete a clause, and every four constitute a sentence.
Prosody is exact and uniform. These metrical romances were
originally propagated orally and intended to be sung; awit simply
means “song” in Tagalog (Castro 1985, p. 4).
Awit came to be performed in the eighteenth century as komedya,
dramas depicting the conflict between Christians and Muslims.
Komedya became the centrepiece of nearly every town fiesta.
Originally written by a folk poet in the town, the komedya became a

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 Reynaldo Ileto’s Pasyon and Revolution Revisited, a Critique 47

more urbane, polished and sophisticated form, written by poets such

as Huseng Sisiw and Francisco Baltazar, in the nineteenth century.
Fernandez writes, “The years between 1820 and 1896 have been called
the period of ‘first flowering,’ during which ‘cosmopolitanization,
urbanization and Christianization’ merged to institutionalize the
komedya” (Fernandez 1996, p. 61).
This first flowering, Resil Mojares argues, represented the
culmination of the shift from “oral to written text, and from a living
audience to a reading public” and “also a geographical shift to a
proto-urban complex of school and print-shop” (Mojares 1983, p. 68).
The rise of an urban reading public, for whom the possession of awit
chapbooks — or libros de caballerías — with their highly stylized
poetry on foreign subject matter, was a mark of class and distinction,
drove these shifts. The chapbook became one of the commodities
used in the self-construction of the hispanized Chinese mestizo.
Staged as komedya, these more polished awit became the viewing
fare of the Manila working class and of rural labourers and peasants.
Like that of sinakulo, the performance of komedya required a
substantial budget. Sponsors, patrons drawn from the town elite
who would fund the productions and receive in return honour and
recognition, were necessary. Each performance would open with
a loa, a long poem dedicated to the patron saint of the festival at
which the komedya was performed and honouring the elite guests
in the audience (Tiongson 1999, pp. 15–16).
The staged komedya was a lengthy affair, performed in segments
every evening over the space of three to five days. In Manila, there
were permanent theatres. Bonifacio himself was an actor in one of
them, the Teatro Porvenir (Serrano 1960, p. 96). In the provinces,
the stage was a temporary construction. In either case, however,
a standard design prevailed. The façade of a palace served as the
backdrop, divided down the middle into two colours, which separated
the Moro and Christian kingdoms. Spartan props indicated scene
changes. The addition of chairs would create a palace court or potted
plants a forest. Across the stage would march the actors. Marching
played a central role in every production; different characters and

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 48 Joseph Scalice

different events called for different styles of marching, but no one

ever walked. The marches were given folk Spanish names in the
script: regal, paso doble, paseo, karansa, batalya (Fernandez 1996,
p. 67).
This script, however, was not available to the general public; it
was not even available to the performers. It was called orihinal, and
escribientes copied it by hand. The only copy belonged to the director,
who had absolute control over all theatrical goings on. The actors did
not memorize the verses of a komedya. The apuntador, who held the
director’s script, fed them their lines during the performance from
a hidden location. He read each stanza to the actors, who would
declaim the lines in dicho, a singsong lilt designed to be heard by
large audiences without the benefit of amplification.18
Sainetes, comic skits performed during breaks, punctuated
komedya. A favorite character in the komedya was the jester, or
pusong. Unlike the other characters in the komedya who were not
allowed to deviate even slightly from the script, the pusong could
ad lib freely. He was allowed to make topical jests and political
commentary. Such commentary, of course, was not preserved in the
text of any komedya for the benefit of historical analysis (Fernandez
1996, pp. 9, 173; Tiongson 1999, p. 12). The script of the komedya,
with its stylization, authority and structure, reinforced hierarchy and
colonial values. Tiongson correctly noted that “komedya strengthened
the hierarchy of classes in town and country” (Tiongson 1999,
pp. 25–26). In performance, the role of the pusong could often be
subversive, but his subversion is not subject to discovery through
an analysis of the text of awit.
Fray Joaquín Martínez de Zúñiga, who arrived in the Philippines
in the late eighteenth century, noted that the native komedya tended
to “satisfy the sight rather than the sense of hearing” (Fernandez
1996, p. 9). In particular, komedya were famous for their spectacular
special effects. The audience delighted in fireworks set off on stage,
characters lifted into the air with cords, and the brilliant marching
patterns of the actors. As in the case of the pasyon, the audience
of komedya ate during the performance, moved around, and talked

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 Reynaldo Ileto’s Pasyon and Revolution Revisited, a Critique 49

loudly. They came and went freely and heckled actors who had
trouble with their delivery.19
A glance at the back matter of the chapbooks in which late
nineteenth century awit were published is instructive. Printed and
sold in Manila by J. Martínez, these chapbooks were and are
the sources that Ileto used in the analysis of awit in Pasyon and
Revolution. At the back of several of them one finds a page entitled
Salitaan sa Panyo, “speaking with handkerchiefs”. The page details
a range of romantic messages that an individual could communicate
by gestures with a handkerchief. “Ihaplós sa caliuáng camáy: Icao
ay quinapopootan co”/Wipe across the left hand: I despise you.
“Ticlopin ang manga dulo: Hintain mo aco”/Fold the ends: Wait
for me. “Pilipitin nang camay na canan: May ibang iniibig aco”/
Twist with the right hand: I love someone else. Other gestures with
the handkerchief communicated: “I have a fiancé”, “I am married”,
“I am yours” (Buhay 1916, backpage).
In like manner, the back page of another chapbook has the title
Salitaan sa pamaypay, “speaking with a fan”. From it we learn
that abruptly to close the fan signified loathing, while to dangle
the fan from the right hand indicated romantic availability (Ang
Calaguim-laguim 1923, backpage). The fans in question were not
the large woven anahaw of the lower classes, but the delicate
folding abanico fans of the elite. The back matter of the chapbooks
makes the intended readership of printed awit very clear. It was
members of the mestizo elite who, as they increased their wealth
and power in the course of the nineteenth century, hispanized
themselves. They sought to erase their indio and Chinese origins
by the acquisition of artefacts, accents, behaviour and culture from
the Spanish metropole.
Nineteenth century awit were not the reading material of the
peasantry or of the urban working class; these people had access
to awit as komedya — that is, in performance. Neither the pasyon
nor awit give us any access to a uniquely lower-class text or
experience. One could plausibly argue that the masses, despite the
shared performance space, experienced and interpreted the pasyon

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 50 Joseph Scalice

or awit in a manner distinct from the elite. To attempt, however,

to reconstruct this lower-class perception on the basis of these
cross-class texts would be to start with our own preconceptions and
prejudices and impose them on the nineteenth-century working class
and peasantry in the Philippines. It would presuppose precisely what
it was necessary to discover. Yet this, unfortunately, is exactly what
Ileto managed to do. Pasyon and Revolution found the wrong idiom
because it read the wrong sources in the wrong way.20

Conclusion: The Explanatory Primacy of Objective Historical

Circumstances
To locate the categories of perception that informed the consciousness
of the urban working class, agricultural day labourers and the
peasantry in the Philippines, we must look for sources other than the
pasyon and awit, and we must read in a manner altogether different
from the manner of Pasyon and Revolution.
If we succeed in locating and interpreting these sources, we may
be able to begin to understand how members of the groups that
constituted Reynaldo Ileto’s “masses” would have interpreted their
role in the Philippine Revolution. We will not, however, learn from
this reconstructed consciousness why the masses revolted to begin
with. To address this latter question we must address the historical
circumstances that shaped working-class and peasant consciousness
and that made revolution an objective necessity for members of
those groups.
The Philippine Revolution emerged in the late nineteenth century
from out of the dramatic transformations in the colony’s economic
and political life. A rapid rise in population began in the late
eighteenth century and lasted until 1870. Available resources were
under tremendous strain. From 1870 until the century’s end, “the
archipelago suffered an unprecedented siege of crisis mortality”
(Doeppers and Xenos 1998, p. 4).
Commodity production took hold of every aspect of Philippine
life; each region was transformed by capitalist economic relations
and export production, most notably of sugar, abaca and tobacco

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 Reynaldo Ileto’s Pasyon and Revolution Revisited, a Critique 51

crops (Fast and Richardson 1979; Owen 1984; de Jesus 1980).

Populations became intensely mobile in response to changing
economic circumstances and shifting demands for labour. Steamboat
and railroad transit facilitated this mobility (Corpuz 1999). Mass
mobility in turn facilitated the spread of communicable disease.
Smallpox, beriberi, malaria, and cholera devastated the human
population. Rinderpest wiped out an entire generation of draft animals
(De Bevoise 1995, p. 8).
Concepts of space and time, the common sense ways in which
people measure their lives, inevitably shrank in this new, intensely
mobile, and unpredictable world. These changes also rang the death
knell for the central role of the pasyon in everyday life. Its expiring
gasp may have been a long one, but gradually the incompatibility of
the interminably slow performance of the pasyon with the intensity
of the demands of commodity production has reduced the pasyon
to a cultural residue.
The latter half of the nineteenth century reveals enough evidence
of “ongoing and episodic migration to demolish whatever may be
left of the myth of the timeless Asian peasant rooted firmly to his
ancestral lands” (Doeppers and Xenos 1998, p. 10). Factory production
transformed Manila. Huge masses of people, predominantly women,
were employed as factory workers.
The social and economic transformations of the nineteenth
century simultaneously destroyed peasant self-sufficiency — leaving
the rural population intensely vulnerable to changes in the world
market — and forced upon them a new, intensely mobile life, one
without roots in any particular piece of land or homestead. It is no
surprise that banditry became rampant during this time (Bankoff
1996, pp. 13, 61–62). What is important is that many sections of
the populace moved beyond the traditional response to an antiquated
and collapsing social system that banditry embodied and looked
instead to the revolutionary anti-colonial politics of the Katipunan.
Isabelo de los Reyes wrote in 1899,
During the past decade the country has been suffering a business
recession that has deteriorated the last years. Indigo production is
completely paralyzed, and hemp and sugar prices have fallen so

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 52 Joseph Scalice

much that they can scarcely cover costs. A canker has attacked the
coffee plantations and coffee has disappeared from the market.
Only rice, which is precisely the article of prime necessity, being
the staple food of the Filipinos, has risen in price; and, because
of the unfavorable exchange, imported goods.
To this must be added the fact that in June and July of 1896
thick swarms of locusts completely ruined the rice fields, and
farmers faced a future that was bleak indeed. They already
groaned under the hard yoke of the friar hacenderos, who far
from remitting even a part of ground rent in consideration of the
low prices, the locust plague and the drought, steadily increased
it; and so the peasants, driven to desperation, swelled the ranks
of the revolution. (de la Costa 1965, p. 205)

It was this set of crises that compelled revolutionary struggle,

and determined the revolution’s objective character. Ileto posed a
valuable, but secondary, question: how did the masses conceive of
their participation in this revolution? His answer to this question has
proved a dead end, and it has misguided a good deal of subsequent
scholarship.
To begin to address ourselves anew to Ileto’s question, we must
locate new sources and read them with a honed sensitivity to their
historically specific reception in performance. Ileto examined the
perceptions of the “masses” and found superstitions, amulets, and
“a society where King Bernardo Carpio was no less real than the
Spanish governor-general” (Ileto 1982, p. 63). Pasyon and Revolution
examined the worldview of those masses, demonstrating that it was
internally coherent and possessed its own rationality, or counter-
rationality. Ileto began with the age-old prejudice that the elite are
elightened — ilustrado — and the masses, “pobres y ignorantes”.
He then privileged superstitiousness and backward conceptions. He
transvalued old elite prejudices without ever once questioning their
validity.
The Katipunan was founded on militant politics and, under the
leadership of Andrés Bonifacio, it openly advocated for immediate
independence. It did so in terms that, while Tagalog, would be largely
unfamiliar to the reader of Pasyon and Revolution. Rather than a static

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 Reynaldo Ileto’s Pasyon and Revolution Revisited, a Critique 53

and atavistic idiom that structured the worldview of the “masses”

between 1840 and 1910 and far beyond, what we find is a dynamic
ideology of revolution which was consonant with the objective lived
experience of the urban working class and of agricultural labourers.
It was this consonance, this apt articulation of objective experience,
in the Katipunan that appealed to the “masses”.
Bonifacio did not speak in a “pasyon idiom”. He did not identify
with a king hidden in a cave in whom the masses are supposed
to have credulously believed. Bonifacio did not wear amulets to
ward off bullets. He did, however, articulate the inchoate strivings
of revolutionary sections of the peasantry and of the emergent
working class better than almost anyone of his generation. This fact
explains both his success as a leader and his death at the hands of
the landowning class of ilustrados.

Joseph Scalice received his doctorate in South and Southeast Asian Studies at
UC Berkeley in 2017. Department of South and Southeast Asian Studies, 7233
Dwinelle Hall, University of California, Berkeley, California 94702, USA; email:
jscalice@berkeley.edu.

NOTES
  1. The term ilustrado, meaning “the enlightened”, is treated by most scholars
as a class label for the educated mestizo elite of the late Spanish-colonial
Philippines. I interrogate the usefulness of the term ilustrado in a later
section of this article. The classic works on the Philippine Revolution are
Agoncillo (1956 and 1960); Kalaw (1969); and Zaide (1939).
Any work that deals with Bonifacio must make reference to May
(1997). May subjected the basic source material on Bonifacio’s life
to trenchant criticism and concluded that it was in its majority either
forgeries or simply unreliable. He criticized Ileto’s use of material on
Bonifacio, but nonetheless held that “Ileto’s book is superb … Pasyon
and Revolution may be the best book ever written about the mentality of
common people in Southeast Asia” (May 1997, pp. 140–41). May posed
sharp, and needed, questions of the sources, but the conclusions that he
reached were invariably negative, the product of insinuation added to
speculation. For the purposes of this article, the material on the class
background of Bonifacio, his basic reading material, and above all, his

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 54 Joseph Scalice

position at the head of the revolution are sufficiently well established as

to be safely used without the need further to dispute May’s contentions.
 2. Ileto’s use of class categories is deeply problematic, as this article
explains. For purposes of simplicity, I use his phrase, “the masses”, when
reconstructing and interacting with his argument.
  3. The term “indio” was Spanish colonial usage for the native population.
  4. It is interesting to note, however, that the word kalayaan was first used in
a political context by the ilustrado Marcelo del Pilar in 1882 to translate
the Spanish “libertad”. In 1891, Rizal used kalayaan in translating The
Declarations of the Rights of Man and the Citizen to convey liberté in
Tagalog (Richardson 2005).
 5. As I demonstrate in Scalice (2018), Tapusi was in fact not a mountain,
nor was it the destination of Bonifacio’s journey. The cave of Bernardo
Carpio was located in Mount Pamitinan, while the Tapusi valley was
known as a legendary den of bandits and located at least forty kilometres
removed from Pamitinan.
  6. Lapiang Malaya (Freedom Party) was a Southern Luzon peasant religious
cult which in May 1967, armed with anting-anting and bolos, marched
on the presidential palace demanding that Marcos resign. Government
forces opened fire, killing thirty-three and wounding forty-seven. It was
the same month that Ileto departed for graduate school at Cornell.
  7. Valentin “Tatang” de los Santos was the charismatic Bikolano leader of
Lapiang Malaya. He survived the May 1967 massacre of his group but
was arrested by government forces and committed to an insane asylum.
  8. Guillermo wrote an insightful analysis of non-translation in Ileto’s work
and arrived at conclusions similar to my own, remarking that, “although
Scalice has devoted much more time developing a critical Marxist
perspective on Ileto’s work, I have been surprised by our convergence of
views independently arrived at while using quite different tools” (Guillermo
2014, p. 26n24).
  9. And not, as Ileto claims, by the trembling hand of Bonifacio (Kalaw 1965,
p. 225).
10. The pabasa is sung in a kapilya (a small chapel) or in private homes
where shelters are constructed specifically for the purpose. The pasyon
is not performed in churches because of the belief that it should not be
sung where the host, the communion wafer, is present.
11. That is, breakfast, coffee, lunch, snack, dinner, night coffee.
12. On the performance of the pasyon, see Trimillos (1992) and Tiongson
(1975). Trimillos makes an instructive comparison between the performance
of the pasyon and that of the wayang kulit of Java.
13. All villains in the pasyon, including the Roman soldiers, were known as
hudyo.

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 Reynaldo Ileto’s Pasyon and Revolution Revisited, a Critique 55

14. Vicente Barrantes as quoted in de la Costa (1965, p. 165). While Barrantes
is a problematic source for information on Philippine theatre — as Rizal’s
scathing response to him, cited in this article, makes clear — his reporting
on the performance of the pasyon in Ilocos is another matter.
15. On the role of Holy Week traditions in reinforcing hierarchy, see Venida
(1996, pp. 503–5).
16. Sainetes are explained below.
17. Irving Leonard studied the peregrinations of the metrical romances in his
two classic works, Leonard (1933 and 1949).
18. The thesis advanced in Rafael (2005) builds on the importance of
untranslated bits of Castilian in komedya. The audience’s encounter with
these untranslated foreign words was vital, Rafael argues, for their imagining
of the nation. Without examining the logic of this argument, it is worth
noting that these untranslated Castilian words were stage directions which
would only have been visible in the one copy of the script that was the
sole property of the director. How the audience encountered these words
remains a mystery.
19. Doreen Fernandez writes that an audience member might “return home
briefly to cook dinner, during the play. When she returns, she will not
really have missed a major part of the story or skipped a beat of the
feeling, not only because the plot is episodic and references are repetitive,
but also because it is assumed, predictable, and she hardly needs the
actual performance to unfold the story for herself” (Fernandez 1996,
p.  177).
20. I explore in detail in Scalice (2018) the reconstruction of a class-specific
idiom using alternative sources, and document how legend and folklore
constitute viable sources for this project. Such an exploration is not possible
in this initial critique, however, as it is necessary first to demonstrate that
Ileto’s own sources represent a dead end.

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