never odd or even

In their speeches, proclamations, and circulars, Aguinaldo and other leaders shifted between “Filipino” and “Tagalog” in referring to the natives of the archipelago. This may have been a deliberate effort to introduce gradually among the people the idea that they were one and that all the islands were now their Inang Bayan, their Katipunan. The use of “Tagalog” was obviously not directed to that particular ethnolinguistic group alone, and the leaders must have believed that it would be an acceptable and perhaps more comprehensible way of referring to the indigenous people of the islands than “Filipino”. In the nineteenth century “Filipino Spaniard (Español-Filipino, at times simply Filipino)” was employed, instead of the former term “Creole (Criollo” for Spaniards born in the Philippines (Owen, 1976, 1:xxvi).

The category “Español-Filipino” was also applied to the Chinese and Spanish mestizos (Arcilla 1991, 192). Rizal in his novels and the Propagandists in their writings began using “Filipino” to refer to all those born in the Philippines, but their writings were in Spanish and limited to the elite classes. For the vast majority of the ordinary people, therefore, the proclamations adressed to the “Filipinos” would have been somewhat strange and strained. Apolinario Mabini, one of the idealogues behind the Revolution, issued a circular in both Spanish and Tagalog on 24 June 1898, employing the familiar format of the Ten Commandments (Decalogue) to emphasize the idea that all Indios were Filipinos and belonged to an Indio land. In a note to Commandment Seven, Mabini writes: “The country is not only the province, nor the pueblo, much less is it even the place where one has been born; it is formed by all the provinces, all the pueblos and all the places in which a Filipino may have been born, whatever the beliefs he may profess or the the dialect he may speak.