GE1804

Section: BSCpE 201A

Score:

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 Your Thoughts About the Blood Compact

According to Filomeno V. Aguilar, the Pacto de Sangre rendered in
English (blood compact) that despite its crucial significance in Filipino
conceptions of history, is seldom interrogated in Philippine historiography.
To the Filipino, the blood compact was an agreement between equals, a
pledge of eternal fraternity and alliance by which the Filipinos had sworn
loyalty to the King of Spain and simultaneously had become Spaniards in
the full sense of the word. For their part the Spaniards had to do their part
in "assimilating" the Filipinos. However, "since the Spaniards had violated
their side of the contract," the Pacto de Sangre was used to "signify the
right of the Filipinos to withdraw from the pact their ancestor had entered
into" (ibid. 1973, 207; 1997, 229).
According to Vicente Rafael
I think that Spaniards saw the blood compact as an
opportunity for bonding with natives and gaining their trust.
This was a political move that was strategic on the part of
Spaniards as this became a bridge towards taking territory
and converting natives to Christianity. I think the Spaniards
were also insensitive towards doing the blood compact
because they did not value the cultural significance of the
tradition. They only saw the blood pact as a political and
military move to gain allies against rebelling tribes who
refuses their friendship and religion.

Vicente L. Rafael examined the role of language and translation in

the religious conversion of -Tagalogs to Catholicism its main argument is
that translation was crucial to the emergence of Filipino.
He rightly posits that translation and conversion are the consolidation of
Spain's imperial order and Tagalog conversion in the Philippine lowlands
are best understood in terms of a series of translations between the agents
of a Castilian Catholic regime and various classes of Tagalog society. Such
affinities, according to Rafael, "reflect as much as they are reflected by their
historical configurations" in the Spanish Imperio Rafael argues that
translation's "configurations" reveal the Spanish intent and desire to
identify, relocate, and reorder words or ideas. But for Spaniard and Tagalog
alike, the history of colonialism entailed the translation or conversion-what
we might call the "restructuration"-of threatening linguistic or political
conventions into safe spaces from which to speak as Rafael prefers,
"mistranslation," denotes a political interest in both "rendering the 'other'
understandable" and "reading into the other's language and behavior
possibilities that the original speakers had not intended or foreseen"
(Rafael, V. 2010).

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