Luis Francia seeks to change how young Filipinos view their country's history with 'A History of the Philippines: From Indios Bravos to Filipinos.'

"Ang hindi lumingon sa pinanggalingan ay hindi makararating sa paroroonan.”

This is a popular Filipino saying that underscores the importance of looking back to the past to better plan out one’s future.

This adage has never been more relevant than it is in “A History of the Philippines: From Indios Bravos to Filipinos”, the new book by poet and Luis H. Francia.

“A History of the Philippines: From Indios Bravos to Filipinos”, is an engrossing narrative of the country’s existence, tracing the history of the country from pre-Hispanic times all the way to the year before the May elections.

But more than just a retelling of the fact and figures that make up the country’s story, the book seeks to place the country within an international community, and hopes to recast our colonial past as something more than a disadvantage.

“When I finished the book, I realized that colonialism is part and parcel of our heritage, whether we like it or not. So we might as well embrace it,” explains Francia. “Even in our country’s name, we carry the burden and the blessing of colonialism. If we keep decrying our past, we only assign ourselves the role of victim.”

The idea for the book first came about three years ago when Francia was approached by his publisher to write a history book about the Philippines, but with a twist – they wanted it written by a non-historian.

“I am not really a historian, but in the same way that politics is too important to leave to politicians, history is too important to leave to historians,” Francia jests. “I really got interested in the different facets of our narrative, why we are the way we are, and how we got to be a nation of 7,000 odd islands.”

Francia would then go through years of research and writing, poring through references such as Renato Constantino’s “A Past Revisited” and Teodoro Agoncillo’s “The Revolt of the Masses”. He would finish the book last year, and within six months the book found its way to print.

Indios Bravos

Choosing to include the term “Indios Bravos” to the book’s title holds a special significance to Francia, whose brother and sister-in-law, Henry Francia and Beatriz Romualdez, owned and operated “Los Indios Bravos”, a favorite hangout of writers and artists during the 1960s.

“I had no inkling what Indios Bravos meant and just thought that it was a cool name. It was only when I started reading about the Propaganda Movement, Jose Rizal and his peers, that I saw that Beatriz and Henry had a keener understanding of history than I did,” he recalls.

Francia explains that the term Indios Bravos came about when Rizal and his fellow ilustrados had seen a Wild West show in Paris. The ilustrados, impressed by the Native Americans and their bearing in the face of abuse, decided to name themselves after them.

“They appropriated the name Indio to disempower the Spanish who had been using the term as a term to disparage the natives. They wanted to present to the world a brave warrior like stance,” Francia says. “To me, that was the moment when the Philippines entered the phase of nationalist imagining. We began to imagine ourselves as a nation.”

Francia says he seeks to achieve the same with his book, educating young Filipinos about the need to recognize their past so they can they have a sense of self in an increasingly borderless global environment.

“The idea of a nation may be a fiction, but it is a fiction that demands imagination, where we need to be participating in creating a nation. A nation is not just thrust upon us, it is something that we all create. And in order to create something, we need to know the circumstances within which this particular notion began to form,” he says.

Francia also hopes that reading about the country’s colonial past from a different perspective, as well as the country’s international dealings even before the arrival of the Spanish colonizers, will also arm readers with a more inclusive world view.

“I really think that there is an artificial divide between a nationalist and an internationalist when in fact I think they are complementary,” he explains. “Knowing what separates us from other nations is necessary up to a point, but now we have to start thinking as part of a larger community.”