Mining a city's memories

A FEW weeks ago, the American historian Michael Cullinane came upon “a whole bundle” of records that, he hopes, will reveal new information and insights about why the principalia of San Nicolas joined the revolution of Tres de Abril. Cullinane already knows this subject better than most Cebuanos, but the process of uncovering history, he says, “never ends.”

In an interview at the Casa Gorordo Museum, Dr. Cullinane shares his fascination with the origins of the Cebuano political elite, as well as Cebuano history in general—a scholarly interest he has sustained since he first visited the Philippines as a Peace Corps volunteer in the early 1970s.

The local stories and personalities that get overlooked in the national histories: they’re what fascinate Dr. Cullinane.

“Almost all the national events took place in Cebu also, but they took place differently. For instance, how did the Philippine-American War operate in Cebu? The best book on that war, in my opinion, is the one by Resil Mojares. So why not use it? Teachers can give some introductory material about the Philippine-American War in general, and then, drawing from Resil’s work, say, ‘Here’s what happened here.’”

Cullinane serves as the associate director of the Center for Southeast Asian Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and is credited with helping set up the Cebuano Studies Center at the University of San Carlos. Most recently, he wrote “Ilustrado Politics: Filipino Elite Responses to American Rule, 1898-1908.”

“There’s a tremendous amount of material that I, in my lifetime, cannot even come close to exhausting, so I’ve defined things that I do want to exhaust,” he says. “I’ve read all the notarial records from 1818 to 1873, and 1888 to 1903. My job on this trip was to close the gap, but it’s too much. So I’ll keep coming back until I do.”

Read the full interview here.