Ilustrado

Pronounced i-lus-TRA-do, “the enlightened.” The educated Filipinos of the late nineteenth century, mostly the sons of families that had acquired property in the colony’s cracks, many of them schooled in Europe. Rizal, del Pilar, López Jaena and the rest of the Propaganda Movement came from this class.

Two things about them are true at once and the course holds both. Their reform demands were specific, legal and structural, which is evidence of political maturity rather than of imitation. And they are also the faction that ended up holding the revolution after Tejeros, which is the first national-scale instance of a mass movement being captured by people with land and standing.

The strong version of the second claim belongs to Renato Constantino and is attributed to him by name rather than stated as settled fact.

Source: The class and its role are standard in Philippine historiography. The capture argument is Renato Constantino, The Philippines: A Past Revisited, 1975, in print in the Philippines and hard to obtain abroad. Benedict Anderson’s 1988 essay supplies the origin of the class, in the legally distinct Chinese mestizo stratum that accumulated both capital and Christian standing under Spanish rule.

First used in: 1.3 · What Filipinos built the moment they could