It was a time of deep contradictions. In the streets were protesters calling for land reform and the end of American hegemony. In Malacañang was a duplicitous figure who publicly cussed at foreign meddlers while gunning for their support in private.
One could be forgiven for thinking these are snapshots from the present. But these were the realities Salud Algabre came to know in the early 20th century Philippines.
President Manuel Quezon helmed the nation still in the process of coming to terms with the transition from one colonial master to another. “Better a country ran like hell by Filipinos than one ran like heaven by the Americans,” he declared.
And ran like hell it was. Political machinations and vested business interests characterized—and compromised—the Quezon administration’s independence movement.
As a vassal of the secret American Empire, the Philippine economy was structured to prioritize US interests. The country’s landed elite who ran the political arena were more than happy to participate.
Cash crops exportable to America like sugar and tobacco were grown in the haciendas. Who tended to these farms were but the countless peasants whose fate had been tied, often forcefully by circumstance, to the lands they would till for generations but could never hope to own.
One of them was Salud Algabre. Born two years before the Philippine Revolution against Spain, Algabre had the blood of warriors in her veins. Her family fought the Spaniards, Maria Luisa Camagay, a historian, wrote in the 2013 anthology Women in Southeast Asian Nationalist Movements.
Ironically, it was the American education system that sparked the nationalist sentiments in Salud Algabre. “She recalled that it was through [school] that she internalized her identity as a Filipino and her love for her country,” Camagay recounted.
As a one-time beauty queen, Salud had no shortage of suitors. But she fell in love with a bakery worker named Severo Generalla, a fellow Cabuyao native. Their marriage was characterized not only by mutual love for one other but for the nation they called home.
Both ended up as laborers in Manila: Salud as a seamstress and Severo in a tobacco factory. Like Salud, her husband had an astute sense of justice. Severo got involved in the labor movement, becoming the president of the Union Obreros de Tabaco de Filipinas where he fought to improve the working conditions of farm workers like him.
“Although Salud and Severo may have started life as members of the Filipino educated elite, they experienced growing impoverishment. Severo’s involvement in the labor movement in Manila then forced him and Salud to return to their place of origin, now as landless peasants,” Camagay narrated.
In their hometown, the couple experienced firsthand the true meaning of injustice as they tilled land owned by an outrageously wealthy landlord who got most of the revenue without breaking a single drop of sweat.
“When we worked the land, we were cheated. The terms on the estate were 50-50. But we never got the agreed 50 percent,” Algabre recounted in an interview with the historian David Sturtevant in 1966.
Convinced that there had to be a more humane system, Salud, then 36, joined Sakdal, a movement founded by writer Benigno Ramos in opposition to American imperialism, which, back then, they had already linked to the injustice of the feudal hacienda system. Inspired by writer Èmile Zola’s scathing open letter against the French government, “J’Accuse,” Ramos called both their organization and publication “Sakdal,” a Filipino translation of the title of Zola’s piece.
The primary issue, then, was the means of attaining freedom. The Quezon government was banking on the Tydings-McDuffie Law that provided for a ten-year transition period before independence.
“The Sakdalistas viewed Quezon as being in cahoots with the Americans in withholding independence. They perceived him as misleading the people by saying that the Commonwealth government was transitional when in reality, he wanted US interests to continue in the Philippines,” wrote Camagay.
For Algabre and the Sakdalistas, freedom was not something to be begged for or something that could be granted by the Americans. It is a right that could only be declared by Filipinos themselves, they said.
“Nothing could solve our problem except independence,” Salud declared. “With independence, the leaders would cease to be powerful. Instead, it would be the people who were powerful.”
For Salud, this power lay in having their own lands to till. No longer should land ownership be limited to landlords and politicians, she said. This fervent desire to liberate the nation eventually drove them to stage an armed uprising.
Leading an army of Sakdalista men, Salud managed to capture her hometown of Cabuyao on May 2, 1935. Asked of her demands, she responded with “immediate, complete, and absolute independence.”
But government soldiers managed to strike back the next day, storming the Municipal Hall where the Sakdalistas held fort. They were overwhelmed, and the bodies of the slain Sakdalista men were displayed in the plaza as a warning to all would-be rebels.
Salud was jailed, her trial languishing for four years before she was sentenced to six to ten years in prison as a dissident. Asked if she had any regrets in staging a “failed” uprising, Salud proudly responded that no uprising fails.
“Each one is a step in the right direction. In a long march to final victory, every step counts, every individual matters, every organization forms part of the whole,” Salud Algabre said, hopeful, still, of the final victory to come. And hopeful she remained until her death on May 2, 1979—exactly 44 years after the uprising she led.
For UP anthropology professor and Algabre descendant Dr. Nestor Castro, celebrating his Lola Salud’s legacy is a necessary act of defiance in these times when the societal ills that prompted the Sakdalistas to revolt persist.
“Nananatili pa ring sunud-sunuran ang ating pamahalaan sa dikta ng mga dayuhan, hindi pa rin nakakamit ng ating mga magsasaka ang tunay na reporma sa lupa,” Castro lamented. “[Kaya] dapat nating ipagpatuloy ang kanilang mabuting mga mithiin.” ●
This article was originally published on October 28, 2020.
