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Welcome to my personal website. I research and teach modern Philippine, Latin American, and Asian-American literatures, with a focus on the literatures and cultures of early modern globalization under the Spanish Empire (Philippine, Latin American, and Asian), in the Department of Literature at the University of California, San Diego. My current research and book manuscript engage in the co-fabrication of Philippine Christianity and native custom in the literature of spiritual Conquest in the Philippines between the 16th-18th centuries. In it, I highlight the processes of counter-Hispanization and the conjuration of law as phantasmagoria in the mission provinces under the religious Orders. I am also the author of Frontier Constitutions: Christianity and Colonial Empire in the 19th Century Philippines (UC Press, 2009) and the translator of Julio Ramos, Divergent Modernities of Latin America: Culture and Politics in the 19th Century (Duke UP, 2001), in addition to various other publications and editorial work. I also served as the director of Latin American Studies at UC San Diego (2019-2023).
Selected Publications
Selected Publications
Counter-Hispanization in the Colonial Philippines: Literature, Law, Religion, and Native Custom (book). Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam Press [forthcoming, 2023].
“The Allegory of the Billiken in Nick Joaquin’s The Woman Who Had Two Navels: Capitalism as Religion in the Philippines under US Rule (1902-1946).” In UNITAS 95:2 (2022). 100-year centennial special issue.
“Spanish-Galleon Trade.” SAGE Encyclopedia of Filipina/x/o Studies. Kevin Nadal and Allison Tantiangco, eds. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publishing, 2022.
"History: Routes Through Roots of Filipinx Longing and Belonging," in Keywords in Filipinx American Studies: A Critical Registry of Terms, eds. Enrique Bonus and Antonio Tiongson. NY: Fordham University press, 2022.
“El príncipe Cristiano oriental: el teatro jesuita en Filipinas durante el siglo XVII y la visión global de las monarquías compuestas.” Translation by Jorge Mojarro. Guaraguao (Revista de Cultura Latinoamericana) 42:65 (Winter 2021).
“Presumptions of Empire: Relapses, reboots and reversions in the transpacific networks of Iberian globalization.” In Routledge Companion on Colonial Latin America and the Caribbean (1492-1898) Santa Arias and Yolanda Martínez San-Miguel, eds. New York: Routledge, 2021.
“Afterword: From Colonial Histories to Colonial Genealogies,” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 19:2 (Spring 2020), 130-140.
“Between the Economy of Law and the Law of Economy in the Trans-Pacific Cultural Imaginary” (translated as: “在法的經濟與經濟法之間的跨太平洋文化想像”), in Border-Sovereignty-Law, ed. Shu-Fen Lin, Hsinchu, Taiwan: National Chao Tung University, 2020.
“Barlaam and Josaphat in Early Modern Spain and the colonial Philippines: Spiritual Exercises of Freedom at the Center and Periphery,” in Iberian Empires and the Roots of Globalization, eds. Anna More, Rachel O’Toole, and Ivonne del Valle. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press (Hispanic Issues series v. 44), 2019. 303-330.
"A Mexican Princess in the Tagalog Sultan's Court: Floripes of the Doce Pares and the Trans-Pacific Efflorescence of Philippine Romance and Theater." UNITAS 91:2 (Winter 2019).
“Orientations and Orientalizations of Philippine Nationalism in the Twentieth Century,” in Philippine Palimpsests: Essays for the 21st Century, edited by Martin Manalansan and Augusto Espiritu. New York: New York University Press, 2015.
With Ivonne del Valle, “Reorienting Carl Schmitt’s Nomos: Political Theology and the Colonial Space of Exception in the Creation of Modern and Global Worlds.” Introduction to Política común 5. Special Issue: Modern Political Theory and Colonial Studies, edited by John D. Blanco and Ivonne del Valle), Spring 2014. http://quod.lib.umich.edu/p/pc/12322227.0005.0*.
“Christian Identity in the Philippines” (translated as: « L’identité chrétienne en 1898 »), in Philippines Contemporains, ed. William Gueraiche, Paris and Bangkok: Les Indes Savants / IRASEC, 2013.
“Race as Praxis in the Philippines at the Turn of the Twentieth Century,” Southeast Asian Studies (Kyoto) 49:3, Fall 2011.
“Subjects of Baroque Economy: Creole and pirate epistemologies of mercantilism in the 17th century Spanish and Dutch (East) Indies,” Encounters 1 (winter 2009). Reprinted in Engaging Otherness, ed. Rafael Reyes-Ruiz. New York: Macmillan, 2013.
“La religión Cristiana Filipina durante la época colonial: transculturación de las costumbres e innovación de las prácticas,” in Repensar Filipinas: Política, Identidad y Religión en la construcción nacional filipina, Barcelona, Ediciones Bellaterra, 2009 (pp. 207-232).
Frontier Constitutions: Christianity and Colonial Empire in the 19th Century Philippines. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009. Philippine reprint by University of the Philippines Press, Quezon City [2010]).
“1896-1996: Patterns of Reform, Repetition, and Return in the First Centennial of the Filipino Revolution” in Positively No Filipinos Allowed, eds. Antonio Tiongson, et al. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006
“The Pastoral Theme in Colonial Literature and Politics,” Diliman Review 52: 1 (2005). Reprinted in Philippine Studies: Have We Gone Beyond St. Louis?, ed. Priscelina Patajo Legasto, Quezon City (Philippines): University of the Philippines Press, 2008.
“The Gothic Underside of U.S. Imperialism,” Amerasia Journal 31:2 (2005)
"Baroque Modernity and the Colonial World: Aesthetics and Catastrophe in Nick Joaquin's Portrait of the Artist as a Filipino," Kritika Kultura: An electronic journal of literary / cultural and language studies, no. 4 (March 2004) [http://www.ateneo.edu/kritikakultura]
“Transformations of the Blood Compact: International Law and the State of Exception in the 1896 Filipino Revolution and the U.S. Takeover of the Philippines,” Postcolonial Studies 7.1 (Spring 2004)
"Bastards of the Unfinished Revolution: Bolívar's Ismael and Rizal's Martí at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century," Radical History Review 89 (Spring 2004). Reprinted as Imagining Our Americas: Toward a Transnational Frame, edited by Sandhya Shukla and Heidi Tinsman. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007.
“Translator’s Foreword,” in Julio Ramos, Divergent Modernities: Literature and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Latin America, trans. John D. Blanco with intro. José David Saldívar. Durham: Duke University Press, 2001
Selected courses I teach
Selected courses I teach
LTAM 130 Reading North By South: The "Southern Question" in Literatures of the Americas
LTAM 132 The Dark Side of Enlightenment in the Americas and the Philippines
LTEN 181 Asian Decolonization and the US Civil Rights Movement
LTSP 116 Representations of the Spanish Conquest
LTSP 140 Latin American Novel
LTSP 174 Topics in Culture and Politics:
La cuestión del "Oriente" y el orientalismo en América Latina
Antropología y narrativa latinoamericana en la formación de las identidades culturales
Políticas culturales de los ss. 19-20
LTWL 140 Novel and History in the Third World
Selected graduate seminars
Selected graduate seminars
ETHN 289 Colonial Modernities and Decolonization in Asia and Africa
LTCO 283 Literature and Political Philosophy
Colonial Modernities of the Spanish Empire
Politics of "Spiritual Conquest" in the Early Modern Transpacific World
Masses, Crowds, Hordes, and the Multitude
LTSP 252 Políticas del (neo-) Barroco
LTSP 272 (Pre-) Historias de la globalización en América Latina y la frontera trans-Pacífica
Latin American Studies and the Philippines
Latin American Studies and the Philippines
As director of Latin American Studies, I see my primary task during the past two years as coaxing students, faculty, and staff out of the forms of isolation and solitude we developed as a response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Even prior to the pandemic, soaring rates of college student depression, combined with a toxic political atmosphere exacerbated by gun culture, extreme signs of accelerated climate change, xenophobia, and social-media powered disinformation, all play a role in the erosion of collective confidence in the notion of community. Beyond family networks, we depend on the ties that bind us to friends, co-workers, and interlocutors, which are channeled through language, culture, traditions, and even institutions. As Mr. Rogers famously sang, these are the people in your neighborhood....the people that you meet each day.
How do we restore that confidence? At LAS, this begins with taking stock of and channeling the forms of community that have survived the despair brought on by the challenges we face: from the senior professors who make every effort to attend the talks and workshops we facilitate, to the Latinx student community that mine the deep connections between our intellectual pursuits and our personal ones; and even our relationships of accountability and trust with the administration. And we do that by being together, getting together, planning to get together, and celebrating our togetherness. Whether or not our political positions or even ideologies diverge, we share the study of Latin America as both a concrete place (or world of places) and an abstract idea, which immerses us in the histories of "la ciudad letrada," world-systems thought, indigenismo and indianismo, populisms and the national-popular, border-thinking and nepantla, deculturation and transculturation.
On a personal level, as a second-generation Filipinx American, I've also been invested in providing opportunities for bringing the Latinx and Filipinx - and by extension, Asian-American - communities at UCSD closer together. While this seems like a formidable task, it is important to remember that Latin Americans and Filipinos do share a common history between the 16th and 19th centuries. Even afterwards, the interweaving legacies of colonialism and Eurocentrism impact not only the formation of states and societies throughout the non-Western worlds, but also the economics and politics of migration and diaspora.
As with every community, at UCSD and beyond, we have to search for a culture that can sustain us. Failing that, we have to create one out of the materials and existing communities nearest and dearest to us. And we have to give that culture the space, light, and elements it needs to grow. More we cannot do.
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