Ocampo said it is time to look at our history “from the point of view of the Filipino people.” There is really a need to educate the Filipinos that our history began even before the Spaniards “discovered” the Philippines in 1521 followed by the colonial years and the period where the Filipinos became free, he said. History, he said, is “a recorded struggle of people for every increasing freedom and for newer and higher realization of the human person.”īut the struggle, he explained, is a “collective one” and as such “involves the mass of human beings who are therefore the motivators of change and of history.”
In The Past Revisited, Constantino wrote that history is not merely a chronology of events nor is it just a story of heroes and great men. The late nationalist historian Renato Constantino once noted that those who had earlier documented our colonial past were, by training, “captives of Spanish and American historiography, both of which inevitably viewed Philippine history through the palm of their own prejudices.” Their differing views from “traditional” historians were hardly surprising, considering that Salazar and Ocampo were part of the movement that began in the early ’70s among academic scholars and intellectuals who tried to correct approaches in Philippine historiography, making the study of historical writing nationalistic and more culturally sensitive. , from our Austronesians or Malayo-Polynesian base-culture.” When the Spaniards came to the Philippines, the local inhabitants had been exposed to foreign affinities, from the Arabs to our Asian neighbors, who had influenced them in trading, culture and religion.Īccording to Salazar, “a great deal of what we now call our own has come from a common source, a common civilization formerly shared with at least some of our fellow Asians (particularly the Malays and Indonesians)-i.e. Zeus Salazar, a revered historian and anthropologist, described the event as the country marks the quincentennial of Magellan’s tragic voyage.
Detail from a panoramic painting of the Battle of Mactan, in the Mactan Shrine in Cebu.
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