Pamitinan and Tapusi: Using the Carpio legend to reconstruct lower-class consciousness in the late Spanish Philippines Joseph Scalice Reynaldo Ileto, in his classic Pasyon and Revolution, sought the categories of percep- tion of the Filipino ‘masses’ that guided their participation in the Philippine Revolution. Among the sources he examined was the Carpio legend, which he unfor- tunately subsumed to the separate, elite Carpio awit (Tagalog poem). Through a detailed examination of the legend’s historical and geographical context, with its invo- cation of two locations, Pamitinan and Tapusi, I arrive at a different understanding of lower-class consciousness than Ileto. Rather than a counter-rational expression of peasant millenarianism, the legend of Bernardo Carpio was a ‘hidden transcript’ cele- brating the history of social banditry in the region. An examination of the social uprisings of late colonial Southeast Asia is central to a historical understanding of the region. The Cambridge history of Southeast Asia reports that the ‘period from the mid-nineteenth to early twentieth century in Southeast Asia’ was marked by a ‘multitude of resistance movements, popular rebel- lions, [and] acts of insubordination’. 1 This chapter of the Cambridge history was written by Reynaldo Ileto, whose 1979 work, Pasyon and Revolution: Popular movements in the Philippines, 1840–1910, established him as a pre-eminent historian of social movements and peasant upris- ings. 2 Both the argument and methodology of Pasyon and Revolution shaped subse- quent scholarship, particularly as it examined the role of lower-class consciousness in revolts and the sources which could be used to reconstruct it. Ileto sought to establish the categories of perception of the Filipino ‘masses’— peasants and workers — that informed and guided their participation in uprisings throughout the late nineteenth Joseph Scalice is a lecturer and postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Berkeley. Correspondence in connection with this article should be addressed to: jscalice@berkeley.edu. The author would like to thank Jeffrey Hadler. 1 Reynaldo Ileto, ‘Religion and anti-colonial movements’, in The Cambridge history of Southeast Asia, vol. 2, part 1, ed. Nicholas Tarling (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 193. 2 Reynaldo Ileto, Pasyon and Revolution: Popular movements in the Philippines 1840–1910 (Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1979), hereafter PAR. Page citations throughout the article are from PAR. Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 49(2), pp 250–276 June 2018. 250 © The National University of Singapore, 2018 doi:10.1017/S0022463418000218 available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022463418000218 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UC Berkeley Library, on 11 Jun 2018 at 16:28:26, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use,