Abstract

Departing from the historiographies of nationalism, this paper recontextualizes the life and works of Isabelo de los Reyes as an Ilocano by revisiting how and why he produced extensive (and “excessive” as his critics would say) ethnohistorical knowledge about the Ilocano people within the historical milieu of the late- nineteenth-century world. This paper then reads the “Ilocanist ethnohistorical project” of Isabelo as an articulation of what might be considered as ilustrado (enlightened) Ilocanism. Drawing from his writings on Ilocano folklore and history, this re-reading identifies interwoven themes that underpinned Isabelo’s ilustrado Ilocanism—reflecting a spatial, temporal, affective, and ideological configuration of Ilocano-ness along the currents of modernity. This paper foregrounds the significance of reexamining historical narratives that center ‘local’ intellectual figures like Isabelo de los Reyes, whose life and works reflected the dynamic (and often paradoxical) entanglements of modernity, coloniality, and anticolonial imagination in the late nineteenth century.

Keywords: coloniality, knowledge, Ilocano, ilustrado, and modernity

DOI: https://doi.org/10.64743/SMBS4026