Reynaldo Ileto


Reynaldo "Rey" Clemeña Ileto is a Filipino historian known for his seminal work Pasyon and Revolution: Popular Movements in the Philippines, 1840-1910 first published in 1979. He is an Honorary Professor at the Australian National University and currently lectures at the Nanyang Technological University and the University of the Philippines. Ileto specializes in Asian history, religion and society, postcolonial studies, and the government and politics of Asia and the Pacific. Ileto finished his undergraduate degree at the Ateneo de Manila University and received his Ph.D. in Southeast Asian History at Cornell University in 1975.
Ileto is known for his interdisciplinary approach combining history, literature, anthropology, cultural studies, and politics. In 2003, Ileto received a Fukuoka academic prize for his scholarship.
His father is former Department of National Defense Secretary and Vice Chief of Staff of the Armed Forces of the Philippines Rafael Ileto.

''Pasyon'' and Revolution

In this work, Ileto explored the possibility of understanding the 1896 Philippine Revolution and its peasant following, and subsequently the various popular peasant movements that emerged, through the pasyon, a widely popular religious document narrating in verse Christ’s suffering and eventual redemption. The document’s structure and content , Ileto argued, may have shaped how the common tao understood the Revolution—in effect, providing the Christianized peoples a "language for articulating its own values, ideals, and hopes of liberation." Hence the Christian religion, once an instrument of the Spanish colonizer for the pacification of the islands' inhabitants became the means toward the emancipation of the native people.
The book explores the cases of Hermano Pule and the Cofradía de San José, a millenarian peasant movement in Luzon; revolutionary leader Andres Bonifacio and the Katipunan in 1896 ; Emilio Aguinaldo's elite-led Republican Revolution; Macario Sakay's Tagalog Republic and continued resistance to "benevolent assimilation;" and later peasant leader Felipe Salvador and the Santa Iglesia struggle in the early years of American occupation.
The work challenged the dominant narrative of an ilustrado or elite-led Revolution by using an ignored “master text” such as the pasyon which offered an alternative reading of the Revolution. Ileto advanced a "history from below" approach, emphasizing the agency of the common man, and sought for an exploration of an indigenous rationality to discover a wider "possibility of meanings" in Philippine history.
Some historians such as Milagros C. Guerrero challenged the unconventional approach of the work particularly in its use of non-traditional sources such as literary documents, poems, including religious folk traditions and rituals, previously ignored and marginalised in Philippine historiography. In her arguments, Guerrero emphasized the importance of the socioeconomic structures and patterns prevalent at the time such as the spread of ilustrado and secular thought, the entrenched patron-client relationship, and the linguistic Catholic unity among both ilustrado and masa at the time of the Revolution.

Published Books