Los legados de la Primera República en Filipinas a finales del siglo XIX: retórica de la discapacidad en las colonias penales

Abstract

This paper aims to analyze how the ideas debated during the First Spanish Republic on penal reform influenced the establishment of penal colonies with Filipinos in the southern Philippines during the Restoration. To this end, I study that the Republican leaders did not consider the Philippines as an integral state of the Republic but relegated them to a marginal space with a population that they described as disabled for the exercise of their citizenship functions. I study a contest of the Royal Academy of Moral and Political Sciences, organized at the end of the First Republic, whose objective was to ask if it was convenient to establish penal colonies in these islands. I explore how certain jurists such as Francisco Lastres, Concepción Arenal, and Pere Armengol responded to the competition. Lastres spoke of “rebirth” while Arenal and Armengol emphasized their rejection of the exploitation of prisoners to build the colony. Arenal, in particular, insisted on the need to respect human rights at all times. My thesis is that these sources show us that the penal reveals the imperial administration. Finally, I insist on the need to study Philippine sources from the Restoration period and pay attention to the establishment of a penal colony with Filipino prisoners: the agricultural colony of San Ramon in Zamboanga, on the island of Mindanao. I highlight how Spanish administrators who worked in the penal colony used a rhetoric of disability to refer to the bodies of Filipino prisoners, stripping them of all agency and civilization.