Viajes de Madrid

A liberal Arts degree in the Philippines in the early ’60s required 24 credit-hours of Spanish, and any level-headed student at the time resisted the imposition of a language no longer in use except among ilustrados, the well-to-do, and history majors.

I attended classes, memorized Rizal’s Mi Ultimo Adios without understanding meanings, let alone the nuances, of what is evidently a hearty poem written by a very lucid mind.

Then came the early ’80s when we conducted Desaruyo Humano (human development) courses for community workers in the Caribbean and America Sud, including Guatemala,Venezuela, Brazil, Chile, and Peru. That’s when I literally kicked myself in the butt for not paying more attention to Msgr. Diosdado Talamayan (who became Arzobispo de Nueva Segovia) and his instructions on Iberian language and culture.

(An aside: I landed in Santiago, Chile the morning Gen. Pinochet got a diplomatic slap from Ferdinand Marcos. Señor Augusto Pinochet y Ugarte was heading for China from Fiji when his invitation to Manila was rescinded so he turned around and returned home in a huff. I arrived from Rio with a Philippine passport at about the same time; oblivious, was detained by the Interpol for six hours. Fortunately, English was then in vogue—economist Milton Friedman’s Chicago boys were doing a radical makeover of Chile’s economy at the time—so we were not deported. My destination several miles out of town was an Allende bailiwick so El hombre de las Islas Filipinas was an instant hero!)

We belabor this pasacalle because historian Carlos Madrid Alvarez-Piñer is about to present a broad picture of the Marianas’ relationship to Spain beyond what is available from Don Farrell’s historical narrative, in a spin tonight at the Saipan AMP visitors’ center. Madrid is a featured speaker in NMICH’s 20th anniversary lecture series.

Madrid authored Beyond Distances: Governance, Politics and Deportation in the Mariana Islands from 1870 to 1877, chronicling the deportation of Spanish political prisoners from Spain and the Philippines to the Mariana Islands, and how it impacted the lives of the islanders. One will recall that Guam was a penal colony, a destination for exiles who were deemed by the Spanish authorities to be politically unstable in Iberia, and unsuitable to colonial discipline in both the Philippines and Nuevo España (Mexico).

Shortly after France established its democratic experiment in the Third Republic and extended its liberalizing influence in Europe, Spain’s reactionary authorities went on to stem the progressive influences of the New Spanish Constitution, resulting in the deportation of those involved in the so-called Philippine Cavite Mutiny to the Marianas.

We are not too familiar with the details (and we did not get a chance to review Madrid’s research, though we served in the Humanities Council from 2003-07) but we seem to recall Joaquin Pardo de Tavera y Gomez, a reformist and liberal lawyer, was in the group.

Deportation to the Marianas has been one of Madrid’s special fields of study, canvassing, cataloguing and copying extant documents related to the 1870 period. I am sure Carlos Madrid will regale his audience with both the minutiae and the overarching umbrella of his research. It would be well for Saipan’s enlightened community to attend his lecture. Won’t be there, though; self-deported early this morning!

On deportation, we recall assisting a Chinese national last year who was slated to be deported after serving a year’s sentence on a felony but languished in jail for 88 days more without due process while authorities tried to locate her confiscated passport, and once found, have it renewed. It expired while felon was in custody. She sued the government for willful negligence; we tried mitigating against protracted proceedings but recalcitrant and devious AG personnel were not about to be held accountable for their jobs, let alone their incompetence by one of our able, albeit, quixotic local barristers.

Sure enough, just when she finally got the wherewithal to self-deport, ICE got the message that they should proceed with her deportation, even without the case being juridically resolved. Suddenly, the CNMI was deportation itchy! From friends in the legal profession, that seems to be the order of the day up to the present.

The Marianas hosted deportees in 1870s and that did not go too well by all accounts, though we would not be surprised if the laissez faire attitude of the exiles contributed to the chromosome pool on island. We are now deporting undesirable aliens, particularly those involved in “ice” traffic. A colleague not normally given to wild exaggeration estimates that 50 percent of respectable folks on Saipan had been, and some still are, into “ice,” and that does not include our famed personnel in blue. So, sure, let’s deport the desperate and despondent penny ante retailers. We won’t have them telling on their customers, would we?

But for the deportees more than a century ago, we have Madrid to journey us then. OK, Carlos, your turn!