Navigating Cultures, Forming Identities

This paper recounts the personal history of the Ang Family, focusing especially on three generations of women, starting with the family’s matriarch Carmen Davenport Barraca Ang, to her daughter Teresita Ang See, and lastly to Carmalea Yinching Ang See. Each life account brings out stories of bravery, creativity, and perseverance amidst hardships and challenges in a difficult environment. Carmen, for instance, was a Filipina married to a Chinese, who lived in China and then in Binondo. She endeared herself to her husband’s Chinese family by learning how to speak Hokkien fluently. Teresita Ang See attended conservative Chinese schools in Binondo but used her experience as a student of political science at the University of the Philippines in helping her late husband Chinben See found in the early 1970s Pagkakaisa Sa Pag-unlad; this was a non-government organization which fought anti-Chinese racism in the country. The story ends with Teresita’s children, Carmelea Yinching and Sean Benson, and how they were raised to be comfortable as Filipinos foremost, with the primary identity as Filipino and yet take pride in and promote the duality of their heritage. Through the narratives, the authors aim to give a glimpse of the complexity of identities and identity-formation, shaped as they were by the objective environment and the necessities of the times

The Fires of Revolution: Shared History, Shared Destiny

This lecture underscores the mutual help and support that existed between the Chinese and the Filipinos as early as the 19th century. Chinese records, for example, are replete with writings of Chinese revolutionaries in praise and admiration of the Filipino revolutionaries who dared to fight not just one but two foreign white colonizers. This shared history reflects even more clearly the closeknit relations between the Filipinos and the Chinese as well as the common history and a common destiny they shared

Toward a History of Chinese Burial Grounds in Manila during the Spanish Colonial Period

The study of the Chinese burial grounds in Manila provides a window to the world of the Chinese community and the Spanish colonial regime. In the first two and a half centuries of Spanish rule, the Chinese were buried in church or temple grounds, demonstrating the prerogative of religious authorities over the lives of these colonial subjects. In the nineteenth century, the rise of the Chinese population and new approaches to public sanitation paved the way for the establishment of an extramural Chinese public cemetery. The regulations, and the issues that came with administering this cemetery reflect how Chinese elite interests intersected with attempts by a declining colonial power to assert control produced a cemetery like no other in Southeast Asia.L’étude des sites funéraires de Manille ouvre de nouveaux horizons sur la communauté chinoise et le régime colonial espagnol. Dans les deux premiers siècles et demi que dura cette domination, les Chinois ont été ensevelis à l’intérieur ou autour des églises ou encore sur les terrains des temples, démontrant la prérogative des autorités religieuses sur la vie de ces sujets coloniaux. Au cours du xixe siècle, l’augmentation de la population chinoise et les nouvelles conceptions de l’hygiène publique ont ouvert la voie à la création d’un cimetière public chinois extra-muros. Les règlements et les problèmes auxquels ont été confrontés les administrateurs de ce site funéraire révèlent que les intérêts de l’élite chinoise ont recoupé les ultimes tentatives de contrôle de la puissance coloniale, donnant ainsi naissance à un cimetière unique en Asie du Sud-Est