The historico-cultural writings of Isabelo de los Reyes and the formation of Ilocano Identity

• Main Author: Foronda, Luis Bienvenido N.
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Animo Repository 2021
• Subjects: Reyes y Florentino, Isabelo de los, 1864-1938; Ilokanos (Philippine people); Historiography > Philippines > Ilocos; Ilocos (Philippines) > History; History
• Online Access: https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/etdb_history/8; https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1007&context=etdb_history
• Institution: De La Salle University

Filipino newspapers since before the 1896 Revolution in the colonial Philippines had not been given much attention of their role in the construction of an ethnic consciousness beyond their Spanish Insular counterparts. This thesis attempts to address the large gap in historical scholarship by examining news articles in El Ilocano from 1889 to 1891. The study traces the newspaper’s role in asserting Ilocano ethnic identity in the expression of Isabelo de los Reyes’ grand historical agenda of ethnic nationalism. El Ilocano’s significance had not yet been fully grasped as an agency of the people. Subsequent studies rather simply fail to maintain details and themes among bilingual broadsheets that have gone unexplored thus far. The study is an effort to respond to historian Resil Mojares’ call to reevaluate local and intellectual scholarship among the first generation of modern Filipino intellectuals. This thesis demonstrates a new intellection of the usable past through the historical method and phenomenological hermeneutics as a lens to analyze textual evidences. The author contends further that such representations of people, their culture, and values were instrumental in the building of a nuanced Iloko thought-world and homeland.