Last of two parts
LAST July 1, 2026, together with a couple of colleagues and their students, I took my students on a globalization-themed educational tour of 1) Museo ni Dr. Pio Valenzuela in Valenzuela City; 2) Chinatown Museum in Manila; and 3) Museo del Galeon in Pasay City.
In last week’s column, I talked about Dr. Pio Valenzuela and the town of Polo (the former name of Valenzuela City), highlighting that while most view globalization as the world flowing into the Philippines, the Philippines is also allowing itself to flow out into the world. Remember that George Ritzer looks at globalization as a process or set of processes that involve increasingly “multidirectional flows of people, objects, places and information.”
This was manifested in the grand project of the Katipunan movement of Andres Bonifacio, Emilio Jacinto and Pio Valenzuela. Ousting Spanish colonialism was not necessarily the raison d’etre of the Katipunan; rather it is more accurately an unavoidable consequence of the grand project of national renewal in (the unending) pursuit of national development. As Bonifacio explained in “Ang Dapat Mabatid ng mga Tagalog,” our ancestors embraced Spanish colonial rule for the promise of development, which Spain miserably failed to deliver. Worse, when Spain pathetically tried to mask that failure through political repression, the Tagalogs (Taga-alog) — the people of the new Katagalugan nation — were forced to rise up in revolution and allow the much-needed national renewal to commence.
Globalization is the natural consequence of the development of technology and process(es) that harness such, beginning, initially, in the community and afterward organically expanding outwards to the rest of the world and vice versa, depending on the particular vista. Globalization essentially begins internally before it gushes outwardly.
When the impulses necessarily have to come from outside, University of the Philippines historian Vicente Villan explains, it is indigenized through “pag-aangkin,” “pag-aandukha” and/or “panghihiyang.” Pag-aangkin means the overall indigenization of global flows from the outside to the inside. Pag-aandukha means giving an internal — sometimes different altogether — meaning for something that flowed from the outside to the inside. Panghihiyang means removing the stigma out of the process of learning, inquiring, experimenting, etc., associated with indigenizing things that flow from the outside to the inside.
Once flow from the outside to the inside is indigenized and integrated through pag-aangkin, pag-aandukha and/or panghihiyang, the process can then proceed once again to flow from the inside to the outside from the community/nation to the rest of the world. Historian Fernand Braudel in his textbook discussed the impulses of civilizations, which could be viewed as pag-aangkin, pag-aandukha and/or panghihiyang, to wit:
“Civilizations continually borrow from their neighbors, even if they ‘reinterpret’ and assimilate what they have adopted. At first sight, indeed, every civilization rather looks like a railway goods yard, constantly receiving and dispatching miscellaneous deliveries.
“Yet a civilization may stubbornly reject a particular import from outside. Marcel Mauss has remarked that every civilization worthy of the name has refused or rejected something. Every time, the refusal is the culmination of a long period of hesitation and experiment. Long meditated and slowly reached, the decision is always crucially important.”
Not everything that flows from the outside to the inside is indigenized through pag-aangkin, pag-aandukha and/or panghihiyang.
In the Chinatown Museum in Manila, the exhibit highlighted the great amount of Chinese culture that Filipinos indigenized, which is widely acknowledged and ought not to be belabored here. Nevertheless, even though this was not the primary concern and focus of the Chinatown Museum per se, it must be pointed out that Chinese influence indigenized in/by Filipino culture — in food and language most notably — flowed back from the Philippines/Filipinos to the world through globalization.
After the Chinatown Museum, our last stop was the newly opened Museo del Galeon in Pasay City.
Other than the replica of the galleon, the museum that I saw during the said visit did not, I thought, have much else to offer the visitor. For an entry fee of P675 for adults and discounted rates for certain types of patrons, I have to say “hindi sulit ang bayad.”
I hope the museum is still a work in progress because it is quite underwhelmingly sparse beyond the 200-foot galleon replica — a shame because there is so much material it could use.
In 2003, when my very first academic journal article came out in the Philippine Studies journal (now Philippine Studies: Historical and Ethnographic Viewpoints), it was next to philologist Paloma Albala’s “Hispanic words of Indoamerican origin in the Philippines.” According to Albala, the Manila galleon, or “Nao de Acapulco,” facilitated “the diffusion of Indoamerican lexicon to westerly regions.”
The only way words of Nahuatl, Mayan, Tarasco, Antilles, Quechua, Algonquin, Tupi-Guarani origin found its way into the Filipino lexicon is through the galleon trade. Some of the more popular indigenized Filipino words of Indoamerican origin are: atsuete, abokado, kakaw, kakawate, kalatsutsi, kamatis, kamatsile, kamote, kangkong, pitaka, sayote, sigarilyo, sili, tisa, tsiklet, tsiko, tsokolate, tukayo, tulis(an), etc.
There is enough information in Albala’s article that could very easily and quite profitably be translated into exhibit/s of the museum.
Historically, the galleons — colloquially called “La Nao de China” (China ship) in Nueva España (Mexico) — are intimately connected to the mass migration of the Chinese into the Philippines. The construction of the galleons served as the impetus for forced labor imposed on Filipinos. The demands of the trade, on the other hand, necessitated the creation of the vandala (an indirect tax on Filipino produce).
The galleon trade unavoidably shaped the early relations between Spain and the Philippines.
Various scholars have shown how the galleon trade made Manila “the center of a circle” of trade and international relations in East and Southeast Asia. In fact, the British occupied Manila during the Seven Years War in the 1760s famously to raid the galleon trade-sourced wealth of the city.
There is so much material available that the Museo del Galeon as it stands appears to have no real appreciation of how the galleon trade facilitated the global flows to and from the Philippines.
