05 Activity 1

DIRECTIONS: Complete the table below. Use the back of this page
or a separate sheet of paper (as needed. (100 points)

QUESTION: Why did the Spaniards partake in the blood pact with
the precolonial Filipinos?

According to Filomeno V. Aguilar

 According to Filomeno V. Afuilar, the Pacto de Sangre (Blood

Compact) was done as contractual agreement between equals, by
which the Flilipinos had sworn loyalty to the king of Spain. For
their part the Spaniards had to do their part in “assimilating”
the Filipinos. How-ever, “inasmuch as the Spaniards had violated
their side of the contract,” the Pacto de Sangre was used to
“signify the right of Filipinos to withdraw from the pact their
ancestor had entered into.”
In 2003, as part of the official commemoration of
Philippine-Spanish Friendship Day, Virgilio Almario (2003) put
out a book titled Pacto de Sangre: Spanish Legacy in Filipinas,
which gives the blood oath a transcendental significance that
verges on a post nationalist reading. As Almario (ibid., 2)
contends, merging the historic event with the book of the same
title, “Pacto de Sangre is symbolic of the cultural transfusion
which transpired after Sika-tuna drank the wine mixed with
Legazpi’s blood,” but admits that, although the “Spanish blood
[is] in our veins,” “The transfusion, perhaps, is largely one-
side.”
These peace pacts were made between two datus, however, not
between two nations or tribes, and so were binding on other
members of the community only to the extent of the pact holder’s
effective authority, and in no case on other datus.”
According to Vicente Rafael

 There is a reason why Rafael refers to this double process of

substitution and estrangement as “translation.” The Promise of
the Foreign focuses on how nationalism’s politics of inclusion
and exclusion were underwritten by the “violent heterogeneity of
the historical and the non-human agency of the technological.” A
crucial but much-overlooked property of anti-colonial nationalism
is its reliance on “technics” of trans-mission capable of
breaching the geographic, linguistic, and social barriers within
an “imagined community.” This intimate but ambivalent
relationship to the “foreign” is a fundamental feature of
Filipino nationalism. Viewing their precolonial past through
texts written by their Spanish colonizers, Filipino nationalists
did not define themselves by positing a “pure” indigenous
identity that was profoundly distinct from that of the
colonizers. Instead, they wrought their visions of community out
of strategies of substitution and estrangement, “appropriating
and replacing what is foreign while keeping its foreignness in
view.”

Your Thoughts About the Blood Compact

 the blood compact was done to form alliances. A blood pact was
considered a dorm of brotherhood and was meant to maintain
alliances in the pre-colonial era. In this way, a feudalism will
be transplanted to the Philippines. The blood compact should mean
to obligate each parties to help each other out not only in war
but also in times of needs.