Abstract

Scholars on the Philippine Revolution face two major challenges: navigating the divide between the nationalist and the imperialist narratives, and properly locating the stories of the “masses” excluded from the dominant discourses. As a response, this paper narrates the history of two Katipunan chapters in Zambales: the North, led by Roman Manalang, and the South, led by the Pansacula brothers. Their stories of resistance reveal that dichotomies of elites vs. non-elites, and Christianized vs. un-Christianized, which proliferate in the dominant historiography, are blurred or non-existent in local contexts, and that the linear timeline of the Revolution does not hold true in places where the fighting did not cease even after 1897. Trickle-down narratives of elites passing down Enlightenment ideas towards what Reynaldo Ileto called the “pobres y ignorantes” were also defied by the Revolution in Zambales, as the native practice of pangangayaw dominated the behavior of the two chapters. 

Keywords: Katipunan, Philippine Revolution, Zambales, Pangasinan, local history

DOI: https://doi.org/10.64743/XKSJ4026