El Día de La Hispanidad
>> 11 October 2009
I won't be blogging in Spanish for the angloparlantes. =P Today, October 12, the entire Indias is celebrating El Día de La Hispanidad o El Dia de La Raza (Columbus Day) and the Feast of Pilar which is celebrated in the Hispanized city of Zamboanga and some other cities and municipalities here in the Philippines. The Virgin of Pilar was said to be the patron saint of the Hispanic peoples. Why should Filipinos commemorate such celebration? According to history, this is the day when Cristobal Colón (Christopher Columbus) found the Indies at the dawn of the Age of European Exploration.
It was said that 9 months after the discovery of Hispaniola (now, Haiti and Dominican Republic) the first latinoamericano was born from the intermingling of the Indian Natives and Europeans. West Indies or East Indies, the natives were called Indios. The West Indies was the Americas while the East Indies, the Asia-Pacific region and some parts of Asia. Columbus never reached the Philippines we can't argue that. But because of the discovery of the West Indies that drove the exploration of the East Indies where geographically, the Philippines, the Spice Islands and Marianas were found.
There are a lot of disputes and ramifications about commemorating this celebration but in my opinion there's nothing we can do about it. It's history and we can't change it. We should be thankful for the rich culture, shared history and beautiful genetic stock, a bitter-sweet legacy of October the 12th thereafter. I believe the Pre-American Filipino commemorated this celebration. I found a chromolithographicized photo of a headless statue of Columbus at the height of the Philippine-American War. The caption said that the Filipinos vandalized the statue but I believe it was an act done to maneuver the colonial plans of a new imperialist. I'm not sure where it was taken really but I found this in an archive about Old Philippines in Facebook.
