Critiques of Marcos's Philippines
DEMOCRACY IN THE PHILIPPINES. Diosdado Macapagal. (Cusipag, Ontario, 1976) $A4.00 soft cover. PHILIPPINES: THE SILENCED DEMOCRACY. Raul S. Manglapus. (Orbis, N.Y., 1976) $A7.50 hard cover. THE CONJUGAL DICTATORSHIP OF FERDINAND AND IMELDA MARCOS. Primitivo Mijares. (Union Square, San Francisco, 1976) $A10.00 hard cover.
The proclamation of martial law in the Philippines
(1973). The proclamation of martial law in the Philippines. Australian Outlook: Vol. 27, No. 1, pp. 73-85.
Huk : Philippine agrarian society in revolt
The nostalgia boom which has been apparent in the United States for approximately two years has reached the Philippines. Let us be thankful that it has, for the decision to translate and to compile under a single cover these truly charming columns by one of the scions of Philippine journalism is a most fortuitous one. Since these brief pieces were originally published in the Spanish language Manila newspaper El Debate in the late twenties and early thirties, they were seemingly written to appeal to an already aging readership, most of whom must have even then looked back to the turn of the century with a fin de siecle nostalgia of their own. For that readership no less than for today's readers who, whether Filipino or foreign, in the midst of the upheaval of the seventies must surely long for a more tranquil, a more elegant, and, above all, a more relaxed era, Felix Roxas provides a graceful respite. History in the most elemental sense—the death of Rizal, the revolution of 1896, the Spanish-American War, the First Philippine Commission, the founding of the Philippine Assembly, the Independence Missions, etc.—is recorded in this volume. Yet the real value of the book and the source of its pleasure is the marvelous way in which Roxas as raconteur evokes a mood. True, as Carmen Guerrero Nakpil notes in her "Preface," it is a mood "of the Creoles and mestizos, the Europeanized upper classes of [the] colonial Philippines who traveled to Paris and dined regularly in Madrid restaurants and took summer houses in Antipolo and wore frock coats to balls at the Club Filipino." However, this was the atmosphere which completely surrounded the unselfconscious Hispanicized Philippine elite, the same environment which produced Rizal, Luna, Paterno, the Zobels, the Sorianos, and, of course, Felix Roxas himself. 743