Personal Names in Asia: History, Culture and Identity

Chapter 2: Looking for Claveria’s Children: Church, State, Power, and the Individual in Philippine Naming Systems1 during the Late Nineteenth Century

Looking for Claveria’s Children 37 37 CHAPTER 2 Looking for Claveria’s Children: Church, State, Power, and the Individual in Philippine Naming Systems1 during the Late Nineteenth Century Francis Alvarez Gealogo Introduction On 21 November 1849, Spanish Governor-General to the Philippines Narciso Claveria issued a decree that a catalogue of family names should be compiled for Filipinos to adopt. The aim of the decree was to put administrative order in the Philippine naming system, utilizing Spanish surnames, as well as indigenous words related to things like plants, animals, minerals, geography, or arts to be adopted as Filipino surnames. The result was the organized systematization of the Philippine naming system that has been viewed by some historians as Hispanicizing Filipinos by giving them Spanish surnames.2 This paper takes a contrary view, and regards the Claveria decree not as an attempt to design an administrative system to Hispanize Filipino surnames, but one to regularize recordkeeping so colonial officials could trace their subjects for purposes like taxation and law enforcement. This second view is suggested by the fact that the Spanish authorities allowed their subjects to adopt Chinese, Spanish, or indigenous surnames that were then entered into the colonial record system. 38 Francis Alvarez Gealogo This paper analyzes the impact of Claveria’s decree on Philippine naming systems, evaluates the actual rationale behind its implementation, and assesses the different orientations, characteristics, and types of Philippine naming systems put in place by the Claveria decree. This paper is limited to the description of the naming systems of lowland Christian Filipinos and does not include the naming practices of Filipino Muslims in the southern Philippine islands of Sulu, Basilan, Tawi Tawi, and the southwestern portion of the islands of Mindanao and Palawan. Also excluded are the naming systems of non-Christian and non-Muslim indigenous peoples, including those from the northern Luzon communities in the Cordillera mountains, the Mangyan communities on the island of Mindoro; the Negrito communities in Luzon, Negros, and eastern Mindanao; and the Lumad (indigenous peoples of Mindanao). Some of these communities remained “pagan,” while others were later converted to Christianity or Islam during the twentieth century. But most of them retained their indigenous naming systems and never adopted Spanish or Islamic surnames. Name Types and Naming Practices in Contemporary and Historical Lowland Tagalog Societies One way of describing Philippine naming types and practices is to understand the differences of meaning between binyag, bansag, pangalan, and apelyido. The Christianization of Filipino communities meant ministering the sacraments of the Catholic Church to save the souls of the converted peoples. One important element in the sacrament of baptism is giving names to new Christians to reflect their new religious orientation. Called binyag in Tagalog, the term not only connotes the equivalent of a baptismal name but more importantly the notion of name giving.3 In fact, Rafael mentions the caution made by the Spanish missionaries about using the terms binyag and bautizar interchangeably, lest it create confusion between the notions of Christian conversion and baptism, and naming practices. The other concepts associated with the means of adopting formal names are pangalan and apelyido. Pangalan is the generic term used to refer to all naming types. It may refer to the full name of an individual, which usually includes a given first name, the mother’s maiden surname as the middle name, and the surname. A more specific pangalan refers only to the given name without the surname. An informal pangalan may also refer to palayaw, or nickname, and all its many attendant variants. In fact the term pangalan itself is the closest term to the Anglo-American Looking for Claveria’s Children 39 or European concept of name because the other terms indicate more specific name types of concepts related to naming practices. Another thing that must be highlighted is the total absence of an indigenous term that refers to the concept of surname or apelyido (from the Spanish apellido, “surname”). All of the dictionaries and vocabulary books consulted for this paper indicate the term as derived from Spanish and the absence of an indigenous equivalent to this. This indicates that the practice was never adopted until after Spanish colonization. The other important concepts in Philippine naming systems are the terms associated with the less formal names that Christian Filipinos usually acquire, the palayaw, taguri, bansag, tukso, and tawag.4 Palayaw is the...