Toward a History from Below

Abstract

One Sunday morning in May 1967, residents of Manila awoke to find a strange uprising in their midst. A little past midnight, street fighting had erupted along a section of Taft Avenue between the constabulary and hundreds of followers of a religiopolitical society calling itself Lapiang Malaya, the Freedom Party. Armed only with sacred bolos, anting-anting (amulets) and bullet-defying uniforms, the kapatid (brothers) enthusiastically met the challenge of automatic weapons fire from government troopers, yielding only when scores of their comrades lay dead on the street. When the smoke from the encounter had cleared, only a few, if any, of the country’s politicians and avid newspaper readers really understood what had happened. Who or what would shoulder the blame: depressed rural conditions, trigger-happy police, religious fanaticism, or, as intelligence reports claimed, Communists? After some weeks of public uproar, the incident quickly faded in people’s memories. Except for those who had joined or sympathized with the uprising, the whole event was a momentary disruption of the familiar and explicable pattern of the nation’s history.