The Journal of Asian Studies Vol. 74, No. 2 (May) 2015: 283–302.

© The Association for Asian Studies, Inc., 2015 doi:10.1017/S0021911814002241

The War of Translation: Colonial Education,

American English, and Tagalog Slang in
the Philippines

VICENTE L. RAFAEL

This paper examines the role of language in nationalist attempts at decolonization. In the case
of the Philippines, American colonial education imposed English as the sole medium of
instruction. Native students were required to suppress their vernacular languages so that
the classroom became the site for a kind of linguistic war, or better yet, the war of translation.
Nationalists have routinely denounced the continued use of English as a morbid symptom of
colonial mentality. Yet, such a view was deeply tied to the colonial notion of the sheer instru-
mentality of language and the notion that translation was a means for the speaker to dominate
language as such. However, other practices of translation existed based not on domination but
play seen in the classroom and the streets. Popular practices of translation undercut colonial
and nationalist ideas about language, providing us with an alternative understanding of
translation in democratizing expression in a postcolonial context.

a key battleground in the nationalist attempts at decoloni-

L ANGUAGE HAS ALWAYS BEEN
zation, especially in Southeast Asia. In the case of the Philippines, the legacy of Amer-
ican colonial education included the use of English as a medium of instruction. Learning
English, however, required that native students suppress their vernacular languages. The
classroom thus became the site for a kind of linguistic war, or better yet, the war of trans-
lation. The postwar nationalist response has been to denounce the hegemony of English
as a morbid symptom of “colonial mentality” whose continued use would doom native
culture and kill the emergent Filipino nation. Yet, as I argue in this essay, such a critique
rested on the colonial assumptions about the sheer instrumentality of language. Nation-
alism, like colonialism, was tied to the ideology that translation was a means for the
speaker to assert his or her will to dominate speech, whether one’s own or that of the
other. This view tended to set aside the historical reality whereby non-colonial and non-
nationalist practices of translation flourished. Such practices were predicated on the play
rather than on the domination of language. I examine how such possibilities emerged
both in the resistant soundings of English on the part of native students in the classrooms
and in the emergence of Tagalog slang during the 1960s and 1970s in the streets. Formed
from the woven fragments of vernacular languages, creole Spanish, and American
English, Tagalog slang gives us an alternative understanding of the role of translation
in democratizing expression in a postcolonial context.

Vicente L. Rafael ([email protected]) is Professor of History at the University of Washington.

284 Vicente L. Rafael

EDUCATION AS COUNTERINSURGENCY

In an attempt to “pacify” Filipinos during the Philippine-American War (1899–

1902), the United States established a network of public schools all over the archipelago.
The military governor, General Arthur MacArthur, thought that the schools would have a
counterinsurgent effect. They would serve as “adjuncts to military operations,” needed to
“expedite the restoration of tranquility throughout the archipelago.”1 American soldiers
were initially assigned to serve as teachers. They were shortly followed by an army of
American civilian teachers known as the “Thomasites” (named after the USS Thomas,
the army transport that brought them to the country) in 1901. By the 1920s, however,
most American teachers had been replaced by Filipinos as part of a larger effort to Fil-
ipinize the colonial government en route to granting the colony eventual independence.2
The key feature of the colonial public school system was the adoption of English as
the sole medium of instruction. Given the considerable linguistic diversity of the archi-
pelago, where more than eighty mutually unintelligible languages continued to be
spoken, combined with the unevenness of knowledge of Spanish, whereby only about
5 percent of the population claimed to be fluent despite 350 years of Spanish rule, Amer-
ican policy makers deemed it necessary to use English as the dominant language of rule
and education. Within weeks of the occupation of Manila on August 13, 1898, the U.S.
military reopened several schools in the city, assigning from among its ranks a teacher of
English to each of them. By January of 1901, the colonial civilian government passed a
law known as Act 74 that established the Bureau of Education. Among its provisions
was the mandatory use of English as the “basis of instruction.”3
From the start, the decision to use English, like that of colonizing the Philippines,
was fraught with contradiction. It had the effect of simultaneously incorporating Filipinos
into the emergent colonial regime while keeping them at a distance from the metropol-
itan center. On the one hand, English was meant to speed up pacification, drawing natives
closer to American interests and thereby putting an end to their resistance. It was to be a
key part of the policy of “benevolent assimilation.” Deemed an essential element for their
“uplift,” English would inject erstwhile “savage” Filipinos with “Anglo-Saxon” values. On
the other hand, its teaching coincided with the designation of Filipinos as colonial sub-
jects with limited rights. Segregating the archipelago from the mainland, the U.S.
Supreme Court defined the Philippines as an “unincorporated” territory, or, in the

1
Cited in Camilo Osias, “Education and Religion,” in Encyclopedia of the Philippines, ed. Zoilo M.
Galang, 20 vols. (Manila: E. Floro, 1950–58), 9:126. For a more or less critical look at the first thir-
teen years of colonial education, see Glenn May, Social Engineering in the Philippines (Westport,
Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1980), 77–126. See also Maria Teresa Trinidad Pineda Tinio, “The
Triumph of Tagalog and the Dominance of the Discourse on English: Language Politics in the Phil-
ippines During the American Colonial Period,” PhD diss., National University of Singapore, 2009;
and Barbara Gaerlan, “The Politics and Pedagogy of Language Use at the University of the Philip-
pines: The History of English as the Medium of Instruction and the Challenges Mounted by Fil-
ipinos,” PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 1998.
2
See Paul Kramer, The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States and the Philippines
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006).
3
Osias, “Education,” op. cit. note 1, 136; May, “Social Engineering,” op. cit. note 1, 81–83.
 The War of Translation 285

words of Justice White, “foreign in a domestic sense.”4 Its people were thus consigned to
a racial state of exception. They were subject to American laws but, by virtue of their
racial difference, not entitled to the same rights. In a similar vein, mass literacy in
English was meant to mitigate social inequalities and pave the way for a more democratic
society. Yet, the chronic shortage of funds, the failure to extend universal access to schooling,
and the difficulty of retaining most of the students beyond the primary grades meant that
education in English was bound to create the conditions for intensifying those inequalities.
It eventually created new social divisions based on language use. Alongside a Spanish-
speaking elite, there arose an English-speaking minority who achieved fluency and with it
greater economic wealth and social influence. By the 1930s, they comprised an impressive
35 percent of the population, making the Philippines the most literate in any Western lan-
guage in all of colonial Southeast Asia.5 However, for the majority who had some years of
education, familiarity with English did not necessarily mean fluency, while many others
with little or no schooling at all could neither speak nor write in the new language. Barely
literate in English, the majority lived in largely vernacular worlds where English (and
Spanish) circulated intermittently, emanating as the language of colonial institutions and
elites. In other words, the colonial legacy of English, like that of Spanish, included the
creation of a linguistic hierarchy that roughly corresponded to a social hierarchy.
In the wake of American rule, one of the most enduring and influential critiques of
this colonial linguistic legacy can be found in Renato Constantino’s 1966 essay, “The Mis-
education of the Filipino.”6 Though written nearly half a century ago, its arguments are
still remarkably current among many nationalist intellectuals both in the Philippines and
among some Filipino-American scholars today.7 Given its staying power on both sides of
the Pacific, it is a text that demands serious reconsideration.

MISEDUCATION, AMERICAN ENGLISH, AND NATIONAL DEATH

According to Constantino, if the Philippines remained economically underdevel-

oped, socially divided, politically corrupt, and culturally bankrupt, it was largely

4
Downes v. Bidwell, 182 U.S. 244 (1901). See also Christina Duffy Burnett and Burke Marshall,
eds., Foreign in a Domestic Sense: Puerto Rico, American Exceptionalism and the Constitution
(Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001).
5
Philippines (Commonwealth) Commission of the Census, Census of the Philippines, 1939, 5 vols.
(Manila: Bureau of Printing, 1940–43).
6
Renato Constantino, “The Mis-education of the Filipino,” originally written in 1959, first pub-
lished in The Weekly Graphic, June 8, 1966. Republished in The Journal of Contemporary Asia
1, no. 1 (1970): 20–36. My paginations follow this reprint. The most engrossing biography of
Renato Constantino is Rosalinda Pineda Ofreneo, Renato Constantino: A Life Revisited (Quezon
City: Foundation for Nationalist Studies, 2001).
7
For an example of the unreconstructed and uncritical use of Constantino’s essay in the context of
Filipino-American studies, see E. San Juan, Jr., “Inventing the Vernacular Speech-Acts: Articulating
Filipino Self-Determination in the United States,” Socialism and Democracy 19, no. 1 (2005): 136–
54, especially 152. See also Ina Alleco R. Silverio, “Removing Filipino as a Subject in College:
A Betrayal in the Name of Business?” Bulatlat.com, July 23, 2014, http://bulatlat.com/main/
2014/06/27/removing-filipino-as-a-subject-in-college-a-betrayal-in-the-name-of-business/ (accessed
January 1, 2015).
286 Vicente L. Rafael

because of the fact that it continued to be a colonial appendage of the United States. Two
decades after Independence, the country’s dependency on America had intensified. Not
only did Filipinos continue to be subservient to their former colonial masters, but worse,
they craved their subservience. For this “shameful” condition, Constantino places blame
squarely on the country’s educational system. Run by foreigners, foreign-trained Filipi-
nos, or worse, by an authoritarian clergy, Philippine schools perpetuated the work of co-
lonial education, he claims. They fostered uncritical views of the benevolence of the
United States, training Filipinos to blindly embrace American models. “Nurtured in
this kind of education,” he writes, “the Filipino mind has come to regard centuries of co-
lonial status as a grace from above rather than a scourge.”8 Rather than enlighten stu-
dents, schools were guilty of furthering their state of tutelage. They thus educated
students by miseducating them, leading students to believe that they could be modern
by being “little Americans.” Students were consigned to the impossible task of seeking
what they could never attain by trying to become other than who they were supposed
to be. In this way, colonial education foreclosed their future. It kept them ignorant,
holding the country in a state of abject backwardness. While other Asian countries
were then vigorously promoting their national cultures along with their national econo-
mies, the Filipinos continued to disavow their distinctiveness. Deferring to America,
they were deluded into thinking of themselves as exceptional Asians: as “Filipino Amer-
icans.” In short, schools produced subjects incapable of knowing themselves, much less
understanding the “basic ills” of their country. Barred from the truth of their being, they
were deprived of the true knowledge of their past marked by imperial injustice and anti-
colonial struggles. As such, Filipinos could not be redeemed for the future.
The “tragedy” of miseducation thus revolves around the frustration of a nationalist
teleology. Colonial conquest is supposed to beget anti-colonial resistance, which in
turn is supposed to give birth to a sovereign people steeped in the righteousness of
their struggle and the knowledge of their destiny. This is the truth of nationalism, the
justice of its cause. Miseducation has concealed and distorted such a truth inasmuch as
schools collaborate in carrying out American designs. For Constantino, the chief tool
for bringing about the tragedy of miseducation is the very language of instruction,
English. The hegemony of English—its power to shape thinking and constrain dissent
—stems from its historical deployment as a weapon of colonial conquest.
As the “master stroke” of colonial education, the use of English as the sole medium of
instruction had the effect of “separat[ing] the Filipinos from their past” while dividing
“educated Filipinos from their countrymen.” Thanks to English, native students were
turned into “carbon copies of [their] conqueror.”9 Rather than unify native societies by
providing a common language, English intensified social divisions while promoting histor-
ical amnesia. An alien language, it could only produce alienating effects. It turned natives
neither into Filipinos nor Americans but into copies of the latter. Thus did natives
become triply displaced: not only from whom they had been as native peoples, and
from what they were destined to be as national subjects, but also from what they were

Constantino, “Miseducation,” op. cit. note 5, 29.

8
9
Ibid., 24.
 The War of Translation 287

taught to become but were barred from achieving: faithful copies of their colonial
masters.
Sent ontologically adrift by English, natives could only grasp a “distorted” view of
their history. “The history of our ancestors was taken up as if they were a strange and
foreign people who settled in these shores. . . . We read about them as if we were tourists
in a foreign land.”10 English thus completes the task of conquest by imaginatively displac-
ing the natives from their own land. Compelled to speak the master’s tongue, the natives
actively identify and collaborate in this displacement. As “tourists,” natives confront their
own past as if it were someone else’s, just as they regard their own land as a transient pos-
session, as if they were renting it from some other owner. So, too, with their native
tongue. Learning English has meant suppressing the vernacular language. Here, it is
worth recalling that as late as the 1960s, students were routinely fined five or ten centavos
by teachers who caught them conversing in their native languages in school. Still, the fact
remains, Constantino argues, that English could never take the place of the vernacular. It
has instead remained irreducibly foreign, incapable of finding a proper home among Fil-
ipinos. The foreignness of English comes not only with its association with conquest but
also through its very agents of transmission. Early on, American teachers taught the lan-
guage but were eventually replaced by Filipinos for whom English was at best a second
and often imperfectly spoken tongue.
For this reason, education in English has produced an intolerable linguistic and
social situation. On the one hand, students are unable to master the master’s speech in-
asmuch as its sounds, references, and nuances remain outside of their experiences. On
the other hand, they have lost their capacity to speak their mother tongue, which has
been forbidden to them. Bereft of fluency in any language, students are unable to
think and express themselves except in the most “mechanical way.” This makes for a
“deplorable lack of serious thinking” in society. “We half understand books and periodi-
cals written in English. We find it an ordeal to communicate with each other through a
foreign medium, and yet we have so neglected our native language that we find ourselves
at a loss in expressing ourselves in this language.”11 The bio-political consequences of this
situation have been nothing short of disastrous. Having failed in its function as a lingua
franca, English lets leaders speak only “in general and vague terms” while reducing
the masses to a state of inarticulateness, incapable of “expressing [themselves] in any lan-
guage.”12 Originally envisioned as a medium for democratizing society, English has
proven to be a barrier to such a project. Hence, not only does English produce historical
forgetting but also, by suppressing native speech while remaining foreign to native speak-
ers, English sets the condition for the self-annihilation of the Filipino people.
For Constantino, then, to embrace a foreign language instead of one’s own is tanta-
mount to signing the nation’s death warrant. Miseducation thus climaxes with the suicide
of natives who abandon themselves to the very forces that negate them. Writing in
English, the nationalist author, without any trace of irony, warns of its fatal consequences.
For English can only render natives immune to the very source of their lives, which is

10
Ibid.
11
Ibid., 33.
12
Ibid., 31.
288 Vicente L. Rafael

their mother tongue—the nature of which remains ambiguous in an archipelago of nu-

merous mother tongues—and in so doing can only lead to their self-destruction.
What do we make of Constantino’s diagnosis? Does the promise of a foreign, colonial
language invariably turn out to be a curse? Does it always lead to the self-destruction of
the miseducated? Or can miseducation itself give rise to something and someone other
than the suicidal colonized subject? Are there ways by which the nation can survive,
perhaps even transform its miseducated state? Can the desire, even if it is forever de-
ferred, for a foreign language—the master’s speech—bring about not death but
another form of life? And could we think of this life as one that, while steeped in the
history of the colonial, also escapes it? And in escaping it, also revises the tragic vision
and unfinished history of the national?
In the latter section of Constantino’s essay, we get a hint of this other possibility.
Rather than the self-inflicted death of a failed national subject, English could also
produce “appreciation” from the masses. “Because of their lack of command of
English, the masses have gotten used to only half-understanding what is said to them
in English. They appreciate the sounds without knowing the sense. This is a barrier to
democracy.”13 Confronted with foreign words, the masses fail to grasp their meaning
but nonetheless “appreciate” their sonic qualities. They are drawn to the sensuous fea-
tures of English and see in them a certain attraction. Constantino laments the failure
of the masses to fully understand what is said to them. He assumes this means they
cannot speak back, thus hindering their political participation. The masses seem more
interested in apprehending rather than comprehending English. They are compelled
less by its meaning than by its materiality, or perhaps conflate the one with the other.
Such a response suggests a stance towards English at variance with nationalist expecta-
tions. In privileging sound over sense, the masses, whoever they are, seem to find a
way to make room for English alongside rather than on top of the vernacular. In so
doing, they seem to translate its strangeness from a menace into a resource. How is
this possible? Is there another history working within colonial education that might
allow us to see this other kind of relationship with English?

SONIC MONSTROSITIES AND THE INSURGENCIES OF SPEECH

In 1924, the Lebanese-American colonial official and scholar Najeeb Saleeby pub-
lished a series of lectures he delivered in Manila on the problem of English-language ed-
ucation. Constantino quotes approvingly from Saleeby to support his argument about the
inherent inability of English to serve as a lingua franca for democratizing the country. But
a closer reading of these passages suggests that Saleeby was not just critical of colonial
efforts to use English as the sole medium of instruction in schools. He was equally im-
pressed by the power of the vernacular languages to withstand the deployment of
English. Just as “three centuries of Spanish rule . . . failed to check the vernacular . . .
twenty five years of intensive English education has produced no radical change. More
people at present [i.e., 1924] speak English than Spanish, but the great majority hold

13
Ibid.
 The War of Translation 289

on to the local dialect.”14 Writing about forty years before Constantino, Saleeby tells a
slightly different story. Where Constantino sees only the overwhelming victory of colonial
education and the unquestioned hegemony of English, Saleeby sees the inability of
English to take hold in schools and regards this as a sign of the failure and hubris of Amer-
ican colonial policy. Even more significant, while Constantino bemoans the neglect of the
vernaculars in the face of English in the 1960s, Saleeby remarks on the tenacity of native
languages that students hold on to in the face of English in the 1920s. In reading Saleeby,
we get a sense that the vernacular had not yet been and, perhaps, could never be re-
pressed. Efforts to supplant it with English produced effects other than those intended
by colonial educators and denounced by the nationalist intellectual. It is to these other
effects that I now want to turn.
In 1925, the all-Filipino colonial legislature commissioned a study of colonial school-
ing from a committee headed by Paul Monroe of Columbia University. The result was a
massive report, A Survey of the Educational System of the Philippine Islands.15 The
Survey sought to assess the conditions of public schooling, especially in the wake of
the Jones Law of 1916 that had mandated the swift Filipinization of the colonial bureauc-
racy, including those related to public education. The Survey was roundly critical of public
schooling. It was especially dismayed at the teaching of English. As “the most critical issue in
the Philippine school situation,” the Survey devotes detailed attention to investigating the
“obstacles” that interfered with the teaching of English.16 While the Survey was impressed
by the enthusiasm of Filipinos for schools where attendance was free and non-compulsory, it
was far more disappointed by the inability of Filipino teachers and students to develop a
working fluency of American English. In accounting for this failure, it mentions a number
of reasons, ranging from the acute shortage of American teachers (roughly 1 percent of
the teaching personnel by 1920) to the inadequate training of Filipino teachers. The small
numbers of American teachers meant that there was little opportunity to correct Filipino
teachers who as non-native speakers of English were prone to transmit and consolidate
errors of grammar and pronunciation to their students.
But the most significant obstacle to gaining fluency in English according to the
Survey was the vernacular languages themselves. Over and over again, the Survey com-
plains about the great disadvantage faced by English forced to compete with the native
languages. Children entered school after seven or eight years of speaking their mother
tongue. Physically attuned and mentally habituated to its intonations, referents, and
rhythm, they were then expected in school to switch over to an entirely different
foreign language. Such a sudden transition, according to the Survey, had the effect of de-
terring children from learning. The task of learning English, which entailed unlearning
the vernacular, took them away from the task of learning as such. They were thus

14
Najeeb Mitry Saleeby, The Language of Education of the Philippine Islands (Manila, 1924),
quoted in Constantino, op. cit. note 5, 32. For a related critique of the limited utility of English,
see also the speech of vice-governor and head of the Bureau of Education, George C. Butte,
“Shall the Philippines Have a Common Language” (Manila: Bureau of Printing, 1931), especially
14 and 19–20.
15
Paul Monroe, Board of Educational Survey, Philippines, A Survey of the Educational System of
the Philippine Islands by the Board of Educational Surveys: Created Under Acts 3162 and 3196 of
the Philippine Legislature (Manila: Bureau of Printing, 1925).
16
Ibid., 115.
290 Vicente L. Rafael

burdened with the demand to speak otherwise as a prerequisite to being able to speak at
all. In this way, English created a kind of disability. It constituted what the Survey calls a
“foreign language handicap”:

The foreign language handicap . . . is from the start a serious obstacle to success
in teaching. From the day a Filipino child enters school he is confronted by the
double necessity of mastering a strange tongue and of carrying out school work
in it. At no time in his career does he encounter the single task of studying in his
mother tongue. He is required to read not in Visayan, not in Tagalog, not in
Ilocano, not in Bicol—but in English. He faces the necessity of mastering the
intricacies of oral speech in a language almost completely unphonetic and
totally removed in accent, rhythm, tonal expression and phonetic organization
from the one which he hears on the playground, at home and in the community.
During seven years of childhood . . . he has acquired the difficult coordinations
[sic] of pronunciation of his native dialect. When he enters school he must dis-
regard and attempt to blot these out of his habit system. . . . Not only do the old
habits fail to facilitate but they actually inhibit the acquisition of new ones.17

Coming to school meant leaving the home, stepping into a foreign space dominated by
the other’s speech. One left one’s mother and mother tongue to stand before a foreign
language. One was exposed to the specific, exacting demands of the foreign for several
hours a day, forced to conform one’s body and voice to its commands and expectations.
Submission to the rigors of English, however, was deemed as a way of eventually master-
ing it. Confronting the other’s speech, one was trained to conquer it, to possess it and
make it an integral part of oneself. The goal of mastery, however, proved elusive. Children
were put at a permanent disadvantage by the historical purchase of the vernacular. They
were handicapped in view of the persistent influence of the mother tongue, which estab-
lished a formidable barrier to the learning of the other tongue. In school, children were
expected to engage in a veritable war of separation. They were supposed to “disregard
and . . . blot out” the habits of speech from home. To speak English meant repressing
the vernacular. This entailed exchanging the body at home with the first language for a
new body capable of conquering a second tongue. Put differently, learning English re-
quired the labor of translation. Compelled to substitute the first “premodern” language
for a second “modern” one, children were expected to perform the work of translation as
the essential prelude to learning. The problem, according to the Survey, was that for the
Filipino student, translation never ceased. “If he is to come from the school a well trained
thinker, he must be taught to think in a foreign language. The handicap of translation
must be overcome.”18
The “foreign language handicap” turns out to be the handicap of translation. For
learning to occur, translation must be overcome. Indeed, it was precisely the problems
posed by translation that shaped the American decision to use English rather than
Spanish or the native languages as the sole medium of instruction. Fred Atkinson, who
served as the first Superintendent of Public Instruction from 1901 to 1902, initially

17
Ibid., 127.
18
Ibid., 128.
 The War of Translation 291

considered using the native languages for the primary grades, but quickly changed his
mind, saying that such a move would be “impractical. . . . [I]t would necessitate the
setting of large corps of translators at work, putting not merely school primers but
large numbers of books of every sort into all the principal dialects.” Neither would
Spanish do since “only a small portion of the native population understood much
Spanish,” and almost no Americans could be found who could teach in that language.19
English as the “practical” alternative to other languages implied two things. First, it
meant that Americans were saved from the necessity of learning Spanish or the native
languages. Instead, they shifted the burden of translation onto Filipinos. As native speak-
ers of English, Americans were exempt from the taxing demands of having to speak oth-
erwise, remaining comfortably monolingual. Second, Americans thought that by teaching
Filipinos English, they were endowing the latter with a common language. Learning
English would enable natives to move out of their first language into a second language
with which to reach across linguistic and social divisions. Thus would they come to have
something in common not only with one another but with those who ruled them. English
would allow them to communicate directly with anyone in the country without resorting
to another language. In this way, they would be freed from the need to translate from one
language to another. Once fluent in English, Filipinos would become like Americans, re-
lieved from the arduous task of translating. The “practicality” of teaching English there-
fore had an ideological dimension.
Realizing this goal, however, proved practically impossible thanks to the workings
of the vernacular. “During the years in which children are struggling with the new lan-
guage . . . their efforts are being combated constantly by the pervasive influence of the
dialect with which they are surrounded in all their out of school hours.”20 Children
who found themselves assailed by English in school could hope to find relief with the ver-
nacular at home. Back in school, however, children found themselves plunged into an
asymmetrical war with English. They were forced to translate in a particular way, by sup-
pressing their first language in favor of a second one. Translation as such was meant to
allow children to eventually dominate the language that had until then dominated
them. Suppressing the vernacular and gaining fluency in English were thus conceived
as part of a single movement that would enable students to think in the other language.
Thinking, in turn, meant no longer having to translate. Overcoming the “handicap” of
translation meant making the foreign familiar rather than merely fearsome, taming it
into an instrument of one’s thought and a ready servant of one’s expression.
Created as a counterinsurgent response to the Philippine-American War, colonial ed-
ucation sought to train colonized subjects in a different sort of war. We might think of this
as the war of translation. The pursuit of this war aimed at the conquest and colonization of
languages, both the vernaculars and English. As we have seen, mastering the second re-
quired setting aside the first. School was the site for the production and consolidation of
this linguistic hierarchy. Students learned to translate by way of putting the mother
tongue in its place, under the domination of a foreign one, thereby coming to dominate
the foreign language themselves. Winning this double victory would then transform

19
See May, Social Engineering, op. cit. note 1, 83.
20
Monroe, Survey of the Educational System, op. cit. note 14, 40.
292 Vicente L. Rafael

students into new subjects standing atop and in control of the linguistic hierarchy. Colo-
nizing both languages, holding each to their respective places, the educated subjects
could then command language itself in the service of their thoughts and expressions.
Doing so meant putting an end to the labor of translation or at least minimizing its vis-
ibility, which could only detract from the appearance of thought. The war of translation
was thus also meant to be a war on translation. It would conclude in the unequal peace
among languages that would establish the rule of the thinking subject over the means and
materials of its production.
The Survey makes clear, however, that the aims of colonial education were far from
being realized. There seemed to be no end to the war of translation. English remained
foreign and external to students, while the vernaculars refused to keep to their place.
In fact, it seemed to the Americans that the very attempt to teach English simply in-
flamed the resistance of the native languages. The insurgent energy of the vernaculars
was most visible and audible in their insistent claims on the bodies of the Filipino teach-
ers and students. The vernaculars’ capacity to infiltrate the scene of instruction became
particularly palpable to the Americans when they heard the “Filipinized English” recited
daily in the classrooms. Again and again, the Survey remarks on what to the Americans
appeared to be errors that came with Filipino attempts to speak English. It began with
the Filipino teacher. Lacking in training, she addressed her students,

in strange words, words clothed, however, in the familiar . . . monotone of the

Malayan dialects. Be their native tongue Tagalog, Ilocano, Bicol, Visayan, Pam-
pangan, what not, the teachers of the Islands are passing on to the children
partial English pronunciations set in the rhythm and cadence of their own
tongues. It is our judgment that this setting of Malay rhythm, accent and sylla-
bication is the chief source of unintelligibility. . . . The Filipino child learns to
attach meanings to familiar objects and actions which have been named by his
teacher in strange sounding words. He listens to the new sounds; he tries to
utter them. He hears these strange English words uttered with the familiar Fil-
ipino intonation.21

Hearing the teacher’s English, students followed. But doing so, they were misled,
perhaps miseducated, taking a different path. They ended up not on the road to phonet-
ically correct American English but to the “strange” and “unintelligible” zone of its Filipi-
nized version. “Filipinized English” here consisted of dressing English in the clothes of
“Malay” sound patterns. It was an English that perplexed the authors of the Survey. Stu-
dents addressed in Filipinized English readily recognized the vernacular shaping the ma-
teriality of foreign words, and it was this recognition that allowed them to follow the
teacher’s voice. They saw in the foreign the recurrence of the vernacular, not its
demise. To translate in this case required not the suppression of the first for the
second language, but an alertness to the sound of the first retracing itself around the ap-
pearance of the second. In this way, the classroom was no longer cut off from the home.
The mother tongue insinuated itself into the foreign one, blurring the lines between what

21
Ibid., 155.
 The War of Translation 293

was inside and what was outside the school. English thus reframed was no longer simply a
weapon of colonial conquest. In the hands and on the mouths of Filipino teachers and
students, it became a language for accommodating, or at least signaling the insistent pres-
ence of what was supposed to be excluded and overcome. Conserving the foreignness of
English also meant making room for the recurring traces of the vernacular.22
For the Americans, however, the Filipinization of English was a source of acute an-
noyance. It was the symptom of the dismal limits of colonial policy and evidence of the
racial incapacities of Filipinos. Their “Malay dialects,” so different from American
English, had the effect of converting their own native tongue into a kind of foreign
speech. Filipinos had in effect forced English to appear in drag. Particularly egregious
from the American perspective were the “sound mutations” that Filipinos performed
on English, resulting in veritable sonic monstrosities. Conducting a series of long and de-
tailed tests among thousands of students through many parts of the archipelago, the
Survey categorized and quantified these phonetic mutations. It considered them to be
grave errors that had to be “eradicated” if Filipinos were ever to achieve fluency in
English:

If American English is to become the language of the school and eventually the
Islands, teachers must work hard to correct these errors. . . . They must learn to
say: is, was, and has instead of iss, wass, hass; can instead of caan; river instead of
reevair; servant instead of serbant; go instead of gu . . . stream instead of strim;
of instead of off; put instead of poot; the instead of de; late instead of let; pen
instead of pin; tooth instead of tut; progress and perceive instead of frogress
and ferceive.23

And so forth.
For other Americans, Filipinized English was more than a source of annoyance.
Some experienced it as a violent assault. There was, for example, the case of Jerome
Barry, a former American schoolteacher and superintendent in Albay Province in
1918. In an essay titled “A Little Brown Language,”24 he describes instances of Filipino
teachers’ written and spoken English. These amount, he claims, to the “perversion, con-
tortion and mauling [of] our familiar phraseology out of most of its intelligibility. . . .” Fil-
ipino teachers are guilty of

years of malpractice . . . in mispronunciation so far-fetched that only one trained by

experience could recognize he was not speaking a strange and esoteric jargon. . . .
For Filipino English as it is spoken needs but a stride or two to become a foreign
language. At present an American requires a brief period of training before his
ear can interpret these strange utterances as a version of his mother tongue.25

22
For an early colonial Tagalog precedent for this linguistic practice, see Vicente L. Rafael, Con-
tracting Colonialism: Translation and Christian Conversion in Tagalog Society under Early
Spanish Rule (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993), especially chap. 2.
23
Monroe, Survey of the Educational System, op. cit. note 14, 158–59.
24
Jerome Barry, “A Little Brown Language,” American Speech 3, no. 1 (1927): 14–20.
25
Ibid., 15, 20.
294 Vicente L. Rafael

Two decades of colonial education in English had thus produced not the hegemony
of English but its transformation into a language foreign to the Americans themselves.
Vernacularizing the foreign, Filipinos sustained the work of translation, disorienting
their American interlocutors. Indeed, Barry blames the unending operation of translation
for obscuring thought and confusing conversations between Filipinos and Americans.
“Naturally much of his thinking . . . must be conceived in the native dialect, and labori-
ously translated into English.” The result is that “in conversation, the necessity of trans-
lation and the frequent literal rendition of native locutions result in many
misunderstandings.”26
Expecting Filipinos to speak in their, that is, the Americans’ language, the latter
instead got back something else: not English as they recognized it but the sense of trans-
lation at work. It was not, therefore, the Filipino subjects that emerged, masters of a
foreign tongue with which to make plain their thoughts to the Americans. Instead the
latter were confronted with the relentless movements of the speakers, moving back
and forth between their own and the other’s language. What came across was neither
the meaning of words nor the settled identity of the speakers and the hearers but
rather the sense of the unstable and shifting relationship of languages to one another
and to their users. Translation resulted not in the emergence of thought but in the
spread of “misunderstanding.” This misunderstanding, however, was not meaningless.
It consisted of sending out certain messages. It signaled to the American interlocutors,
for instance, not only the ongoing labor of translation but also the desire for communi-
cation on the part of the Filipinos. It was a desire that formed around the conjunction
rather than the separation of English from the vernacular. Communication tenuously
linked to comprehension, connection loosened from linguistic hierarchy: this was the
war of translation that the Filipinos brought to the Americans. It was one where the ver-
nacular escaped the physiological control of the native body and the pedagogical super-
vision of the American teachers, smuggling its way into the spaces of English,
transforming its sounds and displacing its referents. In the ongoing war of translation,
misunderstanding proliferated. Rather than defer to thought, language indefinitely post-
poned its arrival, suspending the authority of both the speakers and the interlocutors over
the scene of communication.
Faced with this disconcerting onslaught of what Barry deprecatingly refers to as the
“little brown language,” what were the American teachers to do? Was there a place where
they could retreat and escape the “diverse and astounding quackings” of their students
who violated English with their “untrainable tongues,” where even the most attentive
ones were prone to such utterances as “Oh, seer, weel you geeve me bock my pod of pay-
pairr?”27 There was, according to Barry, one area of English where the natives could not
go. It was a region of speech where Americans could converse among themselves, con-
fident in the thought that they would remain unintelligible and thus free from the assaults
of Filipinization. This zone of safety was American slang. Given the “bookishness” of Fil-
ipinos’ English vocabulary, they could not hope to penetrate the “slang and colloquialisms
that are current in our everyday speech.”28 It was precisely because of its currency—its

26
Ibid., 16.
27
Ibid., 19.
28
Ibid.
 The War of Translation 295

swift changes of meaning as these came in and out of fashion, drawing boundaries around
some speakers while excluding others—that American slang could have a specificity im-
pervious to Filipinization. As highly contingent, largely anonymous, and temporally tran-
sient speech acts, slang retained a singularity that made it seem untranslatable. Hence,
Filipino attempts to use American slang were bound to sound absurd, according to
Barry. To prove this, he cites a letter from a schoolteacher in Capiz complaining to his
American supervisor. Wanting to communicate his anger in English, the teacher ends
his letter with “For the love of mud, kid, and why do you do me this way? Dog gone!
Great scott! Yours very truly, etc.”29
The laughable conjunction of colloquial expressions with rhetorical deference proves
to Barry that American slang “is a sealed book to the ordinary native, educated though he
may be.” Barry, however, cites one exception: the “Manila cochero” or coach driver. He
has become “a master of the profane.”30 We can imagine the uneducated cochero, plying
the streets of the city, picking up passengers, dodging pedestrians and other calesas.
Overhearing conversations in English, he intercepts profanities, hurling them at others
when he has the chance. Out of school, he nonetheless learns a kind of English, one
that is close to Americans’ English but closed off to most other educated Filipinos. It
is not hard to imagine the Manila cochero as part of the “masses” that Constantino de-
scribes as “inarticulate.” Cocheros, tinderas, cargadores, criados, and other workers
may have attended a couple of years of school, but more likely none at all. They were
supposed to be reduced to passive acquiescence and confused speech by the hegemony
of English and the neglect of the vernaculars. And yet they seem to have been, at least
from this American account, capable of mastering the most inaccessible aspect of
English.
What do we make of this seemingly flippant observation? Where else can we find
evidence of what Constantino refers to as the mass “appreciation” of the sound of
English, or what Barry calls the mastery of its most profane aspects? In what way do
such appreciation and mastery reflect popular practices of translating the foreign
beyond the confines of schooling and condemnations of nationalist criticism?

THE PLAY OF TRANSLATION AND THE “BARKADA” OF LANGUAGES

To get a sense of the popular practices of translation, I want to turn to an important

but largely forgotten essay by the writer Nick Joaquin (1917–2004), “The Language of the
Streets.”31 Written in 1963, it was similarly caught up in the postcolonial obsession with

29
Ibid., 17–18.
30
Ibid., 17.
31
Nick Joaquin’s “The Language of the Streets” first appeared in 1963 and has been republished in
Quijano de Manila, The Language of the Streets and Other Essays (Manila: National Bookstore,
1980), 3–21. For the most informative biographical information on Joaquin, see Resil
B. Mojares, “Biography of Nick Joaquin,” Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation, 1996, https://fil
ipinoscribbles.wordpress.com/tag/resil-b-mojares/ (accessed February 7, 2015); and Marra PL.
Lanot, The Trouble with Nick and Other Profiles (Quezon City: University of the Philippines
Press, 1999), republished in “The Trouble with Nick,” Bulatlat 4, no. 13 (2004), http://www.bulat-
lat.com/news/4-13/4-13-nick.html (accessed January 14, 2015).
296 Vicente L. Rafael

language and nationhood. But unlike Constantino’s view of miseducation in English as

historical tragedy, Joaquin provides a radically different and far more joyful account of
linguistic history, one that gives the cochero and others like him their due. It is an
essay that has been overlooked perhaps because of the ways it slides away from accepted
colonial and nationalist views. It is precisely for this reason that it bears close reading.
Joaquin begins not by continuing to wage the Philippine-American War over the
legacy of English and colonial education as Constantino does. Instead, he invokes the
American literary critic and journalist H. L. Mencken on slang to buttress his argument
that “[s]lang, once scorned as the bastard of language, has risen to the status of heir of the
house and begetter of literature.”32 With Mencken, Joaquin proposes to treat slang, or
what he calls “the language of the streets,” not as a “debased” or inferior version of stan-
dard speech, but as the very basis of a national literature. He focuses particularly on
Tagalog slang, which he claims has long been the “common possession of Filipinos.”33
As a lingua franca, it forms the basis of the true national language:

It in fact is the national language, not Filipino, [one that is] a natural growth from
below, not a decree from above. This language . . . is the most daring, the most
alive, the most used language in the country today. . . . [It] is being created by the
masses, out in the open, to express their lives, to express their times, and just for
the fun of it. That’s why it promises to be a great language: because it’s being
created for the sheer joy of creating. Happy-happy lang!34

That a national language has emerged outside the control of official academies and
colonial education suggests the workings of a history missed by nationalist writers.
How can Tagalog slang serve as the basis for the national language? It is because
slang, according to Joaquin, works like a lingua franca. It travels across linguistic and
social boundaries with great speed, thanks to the commercial mass media, enabling
speakers of various vernaculars to understand one another. In this way, Tagalog slang
assumes the historical legacy of Spanish. Herein lies another startling contrast with Con-
stantino. Where the nationalist holds on to the notion of languages as mutually discrete
and arranged in a hierarchy—Spanish or English historically and oppressively lording it
over the vernaculars—Joaquin sees the colonial language of Spanish at the basis of
Tagalog slang, indeed of all Tagalog as it is currently spoken. Such a view is consistent
with a recurring theme in Joaquin’s literary and historical writing: that the colonial is in-
extricably wed to the national as the latter’s condition of possibility. “Spanish,” he writes,
“is not dead in the Philippines. We unknowingly speak it every moment of our lives.”35
Castilian loan words such as “calle, mesa, tren, pier, vapor, libro, coche, cine, gobierno,
Dios” permeate nearly all Philippine languages. Unlike indigenous words, which are ge-
netically related but distinct in their spellings and pronunciations, Spanish words are im-
mediately recognizable across vernaculars.36 This great loan of words has accrued

32
Joaquin, “The Language,” op. cit. note 30, 3.
33
Ibid., 4.
34
Ibid., 4, 18.
35
Ibid., 12.
36
Ibid., 4.
 The War of Translation 297

enormous interest over time, investing vernacular languages with something in common.
What was once the language of imperial authority has come to be parceled and circulated,
borrowed and shared to provide “the foundation of a national language.”37
Here, the power of Spanish is felt most acutely when it has become powerless to
command. It has been detached and broken up from its original speakers and woven
into the fabric of local languages. The foundational significance of Spanish then lies
not in its ability to dominate the vernaculars from above or to serve as their horizon of
their reference. Rather, it has to do with its capacity to connect and conjoin them
while leaving them distinct. That is, it allows for the recognition of something held in
common among languages without reducing their differences.38 Through three and a
half centuries of Spanish rule, many Castilian words have seeped through the vernaculars,
becoming indistinguishable parts of their vocabulary. By the late nineteenth century, as Em-
manuel Luis Romanillos and Benedict Anderson have pointed out, a mix of Spanish, vernac-
ular languages like Tagalog, and Chinese languages like Hokkien had amalgamated into a
lingua franca known by many names: espanol de Parian, chabacano, or lengua de tienda,
for example. It had become widespread in Manila and its surroundings as well as in other
port cities in the Philippines. This creole language grew around the marketplace, spread
throughout the streets, traveled up and down the social hierarchy, and was quickly picked
up by new arrivals from Europe. As Anderson describes it, espanol de Parian, that is, the
Spanish of the Parian, the Chinese quarter designated by the Spaniards just outside the
walls of Manila, was “a real, Hokkien-inflected lingua franca for the streets of Manila, egali-
tarianly shared by poor vendors and their elite student customers. A patois . . . but also an
instrument of social communication, not an emblem of political shame.”39 It continued to
survive and even flourish in many parts of the country in the wake of the American invasion
and occupation, especially in the Ermita district till the end of World War II, and is still
spoken in parts of Cavite, Cotabato, and Zamboanga.40
Joaquin argues that Tagalog slang (and we can perhaps extrapolate this to cover
other, non-Tagalog languages) is the proper heir to what he calls “Spanish,” but what his-
torically was espanol de Parian.41 It “flows” through all the local languages, but

37
Ibid.
38
See Vicente L. Rafael, The Promise of the Foreign: Nationalism and the Technics of Translation in
the Spanish Philippines (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005), chap. 6.
39
Benedict Anderson, Why Counting Counts: A Study of Forms of Consciousness and Problems of Lan-
guage in Noli me Tangere and El Filibusterismo (Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2008),
79. See also Emmanuel Luis Romanillos, “El Chabacano de Cavite: Crepusculo de un Criollo Hispano-
Filipino?” [The Chabacano of Cavite: The Twilight of a Spanish-Filipino Creole?], Linguae et Litterae 1
(1992), 9–14. See also Carme Guerrero Nakpil’s account of speaking Ermita Spanish during the 1930s in
her autobiography, Myself, Elsewhere (Manila: Circe Communications, 2006), 75–76.
40
Indeed, as Anderson conjectures, had the United States not arrived and the First Republic sur-
vived, Spanish would have become one of the official languages of the state while “a kind of Filipino
Spanish would have become, de facto, either the official language or the country’s lingua franca”
(Anderson, Why Counting Counts, op. cit. note 37, 84). It would have been, as Joaquin would
say regarding Tagalog slang, a language that would be “open to everyone to adapt it, corrupt it,
change it in accord with local needs” (86).
41
Joaquin, like many others who have written about Tagalog slang or Taglish, elides the presence of
Hokkien contributions to the lingua franca or national language in the same way that he tends to
repress the profound Chinese presence in Philippine history.
298 Vicente L. Rafael

acknowledges neither source nor directive. It comes instead from “the anonymous word-
coiners on the street” who through no coordinated or systematic efforts nonetheless “are
doing more to speed the coming of a common tongue than all the schools and the aca-
demics put together.”42 If this is the case, then the foundational status of Tagalog—or
presumably, any other vernacular—slang, like Spanish, will have to be qualified. They
cannot be seen to form a firm bedrock on which the national language is built, but shifting
and contingent nodes linking various languages as in a network. Slang as the contingent
foundation of a common speech operates in a distributive and decentralized fashion.
Hence, it can only have variable and unknown authors, obscure and unverifiable
origins, indiscriminate interlocutors, along with uncertain and erratic life spans. This
“coming of a common tongue” feels like a messianism without a messiah. It has always
already happened, but it is always yet to arrive.
In coming, this common tongue shows its power to register particular moments in
the nation’s historical becoming. Constantino, as we saw, feared that colonial education
through English would obliterate the true history of the country’s anti-colonial struggles.
Joaquin sees a possible antidote to this amnesia in slang’s capacity to “sum up a whole
period.” It does so by its rampant theft (for this is one of the purported origins of the
word “slang”) of other languages, including other vernaculars. For example, there is
sipsip buto from Ilocano, popular in the 1930s to denote the political sycophants that sur-
rounded Commonwealth president Manuel L. Quezon; genoowine from the English
“genuine” widely used during the Japanese Occupation to refer to anything good and
of great value; and the withering Hanggang pier ka lang, “He’s only taking you as far
as the pier,” often heard during the American reoccupation of the country after the
war, addressed to Filipina women having relations with American servicemen.43
Joaquin excavates other linguistic artifacts that preserve the fleeting images and sensa-
tions of other eras: from the 1920s, stamby (bum, lumpen) who could easily become a
thug or maton, sanggano, and butangero.44 In the 1930s, a new social type emerged:
the fashionable man about town, cocksure and a touch arrogant, known as hambug,
sikat, or siga-siga,45 while the new urban experience of going out on the town was re-
ferred to as naggoo-good-time, that is, “having a good time.”46 Flash forward to the
late 1960s and 1970s when class replaced genoowine, jingle was to urinate, and the for-
mative years of a new gay culture is archived by such words as “T-Y (thanks), sibai (call
boy), serbis (paid sex), and type (somebody you’re aroused by),” as well as the all-purpose
affirmation, “Anong say mo!” What do you say!47 The history of the drug culture that ac-
companied the spread of American youth culture in the Philippines is embedded in the
numerous terms for getting stoned, as in trip; durog; durog na durog; shotgun; iskor (i.e.,
to buy drugs); bitin (not high enough); and high na high (very high) and its synonyms,
banggag, sabog, and basag.48 Joaquin sums up the whole era with the word that replaces

42
Joaquin, “The Language,” op. cit. note 30, 5.
43
Ibid., 18.
44
Ibid., 6.
45
Ibid., 8.
46
Ibid., 9.
47
Ibid., 19.
48
Ibid., 19–20.
 The War of Translation 299

the 1920s siga: jeproks, “which can mean anything from hippie to mod to rebel to flam-
boyant [youth].”49
For Joaquin, cataloguing slang terms provides hurried glimpses into a history of
emergent social types; novel subcultural formations; and popular practices around
fashion, sex, leisure, and consumption. These words are shards that do not necessarily
add up to a whole. Instead they remain fragments of larger narratives yet to be
written, the traces of social histories that may never be told. Here, language does not
reveal historical truth, which brings self-knowledge and national redemption. The bits
and pieces of slang instead suddenly trigger the recollection of the past as fractured, in-
conclusive moments through a series of linguistic associations. One slides gleefully from
trip to durog to durog na durog, to banggag, to basag, to jeproks, and so on without
pausing to think what they all mean, only that they stimulate more associations. These
chains of associations are potentially endless and so are likely to be of little use to nation-
alist historiography. In the drama of nationalism, as explicated by Constantino, language
linked to education is a matter of life and death. The very survival of a people is at stake in
the future of English and the national language. By contrast, Joaquin’s linguistic history
suggests something else is at play. In “summing up an era,” Tagalog slang converts the
past into language, that is, into a series of expressive possibilities over which no one
has the first or final word. By reconfiguring the past into an ever-expanding constellation
of associations, slang for Joaquin opens up speech and loosens the grip of linguistic hier-
archy. Such a development leads, arguably, to the very democratization of society that
Constantino had longed for. The basis for a common language emerges through the
sudden but recurring appearance of slang, converting the most mundane and abject
aspects of life into rich and commonly available sources of the literary.
To see these literary possibilities at work, we can look at the following example.
Joaquin explicates the Tagalog term barkada, made up of one’s closest friends, at times
referred to as ka-rancho (that is, from the same ranch) or chokaran (the syllabic inversion
of ka-rancho). Popular since the 1950s, the term comes from the Spanish barco, or boat,
which brings it in association with the precolonial Tagalog barangay, the word for boat as
well as village. But Joaquin does not stop at translating barkada into English. He deploys
it alongside related slang terms. In the process of talking about barkada, he begins to tell
a story not only about its possible associations but of the network of other words that lead
away from these associations:

When a barkada has an atrazo that means trobol, a rambol, a golpehan, also de-
scribed as balasahan, or shuffle. In a good barkada, every member is kumakasa
or fighter. . . . A kumakasa would rather be tepok—that is, killed—than find
himself turned into an under, or stooge. Such a fate is diahe, or hadya, slang’s
coyer version of a major Filipino term: hiya, shame.

But a barkada’s chief foe is always the law, represented by the policeman who is
known as lespo, alat [i.e., tala or star spelled backwards, a reference to his badge]
or—this is the latest term—parak. Alagad ng batas [i.e., officers of the law] is,

49
Ibid., 21.
300 Vicente L. Rafael

like all formal Filipino phraseology, uttered only with a smile. . . . When the alat
appears it’s best to batse or sebat, derivations from the Spanish se va and pase. If
you don’t botak fast enough, you end up in Munti [i.e., Muntinglupa, the peni-
tentiary] and your chokarans explain you’re na sa loob [inside] where if you’re
guwapo [i.e., good looking] you may find yourself forced to become some
tougher convict’s señorita. But if you’re ugly—askdad is the word for it—
you’ll still have to pay tribute in the form of yosi (cigarettes) or maman
(liquor) or atik (money).

Atik, one of the most used expressions today is the Tagalog word for earnings,
kita, spelled backwards. A guy with a lot of money is maniac; to be broke is to
lawang-lawa. The old term for extortion, diligencia, has been joined by kikil
(to chisel) and arbor (an anagram of robar). Nakatipak is to hit the jackpot;
and tipak na tipak is to be in the chips. Then you can buy toga (shoes) a polo
(shirt) or even a cana (coat). . . . And you can go into a restaurant and
[chicha], eat without having to do the one-two-three, which is to flee or poga
(from the Spanish fuga) after eating without paying the bill.50

I could go on but will resist the temptation to quote many other similar passages in
the essay.
Reading the section above, or better yet reciting it out loud, one gets an acute sense
of what Joaquin says are the characteristics of slang: its speed, its spontaneity, and its re-
markable capacity to “absorb without fuss” terms from other languages, including Tagalog
itself.51 The speed of slang’s transmission, enabled by mass-mediated technologies and
the spread of the marketplace, endows even familiar words with a recurring novelty.
One senses this in the rhythm of Joaquin’s telling. He begins with barkada but is
quickly off to other words: atrazo, trobol, rambol, golpehan, etc. What emerges is a
kind of accidental narrative about a barkada settling a score or atrazo, then getting
into trouble with the law or lespu, being sent to jail, Munti, having to pay off guards
and other prisoners with yosi, cigarettes or atik, money. The last word, atik, triggers
another chain of associations: earnings, kita, extortion, diligencia, theft, arbor, that in
turn opens up another set of linkages: jackpot, nakatipak, shoes, toga, going out and
eating, chicha, that leads to several words for drinking, alcoholic drinks, then getting
drunk. It is as if in talking about slang, one ends up talking in slang. One is contaminated
by its metonymic pull and disdain for linguistic conventions. Like the barkada that has to
botak fast enough from the lespu after settling an atrazo, slang evades the institutional
authorities of home and school. It is impatient to move on, as Joaquin does, jumping
from one word to another to string together less a story about the national language
than an enactment of its expressive possibilities.
For Constantino, as we saw, miseducation in English impairs thinking by impeding the
translation of language into thought. Instead, like American colonial officials, the nationalist
bemoans the failure of translation to work properly, that is, to make language, both English
and the vernacular, into transparent and servile instruments for the formation of a self in

50
Ibid., 13–15.
51
Ibid., 3.
 The War of Translation 301

control of its own thoughts. Miseducation means that colonial education continues in the
postcolonial classroom characterized by the war of translation. In seeking to replace
English with Filipino as the more effective medium of instruction, Constantino seeks to
win this war—to stop language from posing obstacles to learning by putting an end to
the need for translation. Hence, for the nationalist who inherits the colonial legacy, the
answer to the war of translation is similar to the latter’s: a war on translation.
For Joaquin, by contrast, translation has a different trajectory. In the passages above,
Joaquin translates Tagalog slang into English. But as we have seen, the English prose is
punctuated and punctured by the speedy and restless appearance of slang to the point
where the English sometimes blurs into Tagalog. The power of slang to absorb and dis-
place all languages affects the very language that is seeking to capture and objectify it.
English is repeatedly ensnared in slang. Most of the time, Joaquin provides approximate
English equivalents to the Tagalog. At other times, the chains of associations move so
rapidly as to carry away the English. Freed from the conventions of home and the insti-
tutional constraints of school, slang makes possible a way out of the war of and on trans-
lation. It turns translation instead into promiscuous and ongoing play. Veering from the
serious responsibilities of an officially mandated national language, Joaquin’s translation
of the language of the streets is underwritten by an ethos of attentiveness to what is new
and what passes for new regardless of its provenance or precise meaning. Such is,
perhaps, the basis of its literary promise. Translation liberated from the task of reproduc-
ing hierarchy is another way of experiencing the nation, whether in its colonial or post-
colonial state. This indecorous, vulgar, miseducated nation is one where, for example,
vaudeville actors, like cocheros, atsays, tinderas, and kanto boys, might take their place
alongside academics, politicians, and landlords to give their own treatise on the national
language. We get a sense of what this other nation might be like when Joaquin performs a
shtick he doubtless learned from his time working as a stagehand in vaudeville produc-
tions. It consists of asking:

Did the English language spring from Tagalog? Yes, averred the vaudeville pro-
fessors; and they point out that many English words have an obvious Tagalog
origin—for example, pussy from pusa, mother hen from inahen. There’s some-
thing to this theory, really. Those English words, tot and toy—don’t they clearly
come from totoy, the Tagalog for child? And another Tagalog word for tot,
bololoy—usually shortened to boloy or boboy—is just as clearly the source for
boy. Where would the English suit have sprung from but from our word for
wear, suot? . . . What pronoun came first: the Tagalog ito or the English it? . . .
The friction of our kiskis undoubtedly sparked kiss, as the laceration of gasgas
grows bigger in gash, and the dangle of luslus swings again in loose, and the
sibilance of sipsip is scissored in sip. . . . But what need we to go on? Even
the English word for nurse, nanny, is obviously a derivative of nanay.52

Joaquin carnivalizes the relationship between the imperial and subaltern languages,
placing the latter not only on top but at the origin of the former. This reversal,

52
Ibid., 17–18.
302 Vicente L. Rafael

however, is less about nationalist revenge or resentiment as it is about highlighting what

Constantino referred to as the masses’ “appreciation” for the sound of English—and, we
might add, for the sound of any language. The joke here rests on the fact that the vernac-
ular words are neither the semantic equivalents nor the etymological origins of the
English. Rather, a series of phonic similarities are made to resonate between the two,
loosening the authority of English to delimit the vernacular and vice versa. The two
are juxtaposed in the mode of call and response: kiskis returns as kiss, gasgas calls
forth gash, luslus yields loose, sispsip breaks into sip. In retailing this “venerable
theory,” Joaquin seizes another opportunity to show the literary potential of slang, that
which makes it the basis of a national language.53 Such potential, as I have argued, con-
sists of mobilizing the practice of translation as play. It means being alert to the materi-
ality of languages, beginning with their sounds. Translating after a fashion Tagalog into
English reveals neither their semantic equivalence nor their relative capacities for civiliz-
ing bodies or yielding thought. Rather, as Joaquin shows, it demonstrates their fleeting
kinship. As if descended from Tagalog, English, like Spanish, gives up its power to
command and order native speech. It becomes instead a kind of relative, perhaps a
friend, a chokaran, a member of the barkada of Tagalog slang. Together they come to
share something in common, forming the basis for a kind of national language. Happy-
happy lang!

53
This “venerable theory” of language, one predicated on translation as play, dates back further than
the introduction of vaudeville to the Philippines. See, for example, the awit or songs of the
sixteenth-century ladino, or bilingual poet, printer, and translator for Spanish friars, Tomas
Pinpin as discussed in Rafael, Contracting Colonialism, op. cit. note 21, chap. 2.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without
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