Inventing a Hero

Book excerpt: Andres Bonifacio, the leader of the Philippine Revolution of 1896, has become one of the country's great national heroes. He is celebrated in history textbooks read by millions of young Filipinos. His image, cast in bronze and cut into stone, stands on plazas across the archipelago. But what do we really know about him? As succeeding generations of historians have re-created his legend, has the real Bonifacio been lost to us forever? In this carefully researched work, Glenn May sifts through the slender documentary legacy that Bonifacio left behind after his execution in 1897. Through a close reading of these texts, he uncovers a history of mythmaking in the service of nationalism. Our contemporary image of Bonifacio is the sum of unreliable personal testimony and dubious, possibly doctored, documents. If the real history of the Philippine Revolution is to be written, May concludes, historians will have to break through these heroic myths and admit to the limitations of the existing sources. Distributed for the Center for Southeast Asian Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison