Saints of Resistance: Devotions in the Philippines under Early Spanish Rule by Christina H. Lee (review)

A small statue of the Christ Child with a darkened face towers above the blurred images of devotees’ hands holding the divine image aloft. The main title (Saints of Resistance) in large white font against an orange background anchors the eyes as they travel below to the secondary title and author’s name. The evocative title and book jacket design entice the reader to explore the contents within. The book is organized in six chapters including the introduction (chapter 1) and conclusion (chapter 6). Each of the four main chapters focuses on a particular Philippine devotion: Santo Niño de Cebu (chapter 2), Our Lady of Caysasay (chapter 3), Our Lady of the Rosary (chapter 4), and Our Lady of Antipolo (chapter 5). The font is reader-friendly, and the photographs, though black and white, are well chosen.

The author, Christina Hyo-Jung Lee, is a professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Princeton University. Her work addresses cultural productions of Iberian Spain and the Spanish Pacific. Born in South Korea and raised in Argentina, she immediately engages the reader with her introductory statements:

My first visit to the Philippines was laced with simultaneous feelings of eerie familiarity and strangeness. I encountered reverberations of my Hispanic and Asian upbringing wherever I went

(p. 1).

The introduction includes a useful review of studies on iconographic devotions in the Spanish world in general, and in Spanish colonial Philippines in particular.

Lee’s transpacific background, native fluency in the Spanish language, and meticulous scholarship generate important new interpretations and insights into popular Philippine devotions heretofore unexplored. For example, her careful rereading of primary sources interrogates conflicting translations of sixteenth-century Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan’s chronicler Antonio Pigafetta’s original account of their encounter with the ruler Humabon and his wife on the Philippine island of Cebu. An important point of contention is whether the image now venerated as the Santo Niño de Cebu is indeed the icon that Magellan had gifted Humabon’s wife in 1521 (pp. 19–21). Combining contemporary field research in Cebu with critical re-reading of early Spanish accounts, Lee calls attention to competing narratives where local inhabitants claim the statue as their own, all versions claiming that the Spanish usurped a pre-existing local devotion by snatching the image away.

The next three chapters on Our Lady of Caysasay, Our Lady of the Rosary, and Our Lady of Antipolo similarly explore how foreign icons and narratives are purposely appropriated as autochthonous phenomena and subsumed into the corpus of Filipino culture. Closely reading primary sources, Lee points to mechanisms that transform the narrative of European images into counter-hegemonic narratives and strategies of resistance. Lee concludes with the general observation that the santos discussed “were widely embraced by their followers . . . because their devotions embedded narratives that memorialized their communities’ survival and resistance amid impossible situations” (p. 132). Lee’s intriguing interpretations and engaging writing style, free of jargon that often plagues academic writing, encourage the reader to read the entire book in one sitting; and to re-read and ponder the ideas presented anew.

I have advocated in previous publications for scholarly dialogue between “cultural insiders” and “cultural outsiders” to de-colonize and move forward the discourse on global history. In studying Spanish colonial Philippine iconographic devotions, Lee occupies a liminal space between cultural insider and outsider, creating an intellectual bridge for both to meet. This book is useful for students and scholars of cultural history, art history, religious studies, and material religion. It is a must read for scholars of the sixteenth-to-nineteenth-century Spanish colonial period in the Philippines.