Imagining 'Inang Bayan'

ILUSTRADOS are equated with elitism, even if the word is actually a term for a person who believes in the enlightenment philosophy — in equality and the advancement of science. We have a tendency to generalize elites as bad, and this is because we tend to look at society as a class struggle and because many ilustrados advocated for the return of peace in times when we should have been fighting.

But in a time when there was no concept of a unified Filipino “nation,” it was the ilustrados who actually imagined it. One such person was the young medical student named José Rizal, who saw in his travels in Europe beginning in 1882 that the liberal philosophy made possible the development of the continent. He advocated education and saw it as a way to “liberate” the people. He recognized that there were Two Spains, and wanted to bring progressive Spain to change the “backward” Spain in his motherland, even if that meant that at first we had to be Spaniards and then, little by little, ask for more civil rights until we could finally ask for our freedom.