"Filipino" Wasn't Ours: How We Took the Word — and Why Some Want to Trade It for Maharlika
"Filipino" Wasn't Ours: How We Took the Word — and Why Some Want to Trade It for Maharlika
Yesterday I published a glossary of the words the empire used on us. One word was missing. For most of three centuries, Filipino meant somebody else — and the story of how it changed hands is the best thing our ancestors ever did.
Yesterday I published a long answer to a Spanish schoolmate who argued that under Spanish law, all Christians had the same rights. Halfway through that piece there is a glossary — indio, tributo, polo y servicios, peninsular, principalía — the vocabulary nobody teaches you if you grew up in Vallejo instead of Manila.
A reader wrote overnight to ask the obvious follow-up question, and I did not have a short answer for it. If our great-great-grandparents were indios, then who exactly was being called Filipino?
The answer is the other guy. For most of the Spanish period, in the sense that mattered socially and legally, Filipino meant a Spaniard born in the islands. Your ancestors were not Filipinos. They were the people the Filipinos taxed.
Which raises the second question, the one my kids will actually care about: if the word was somebody else's, and the country is named after a Spanish teenager who never came here, why are we still using either? That question has a name in Philippine politics. It has a bill number, a constitutional procedure, a dictator who poisoned it, and a fund in Taguig currently carrying it around. Let me take all of it.
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Meaning: A free person. Not a noble.
From Sanskrit maharddhika, and a direct cousin of the Malay word merdeka — the word Indonesians and Malaysians shouted at independence. Same seed, two archipelagos. One nation kept it as a battle cry. The other let a dictator turn it into a highway sign.
February 1543: A Teenager Who Never Came
Start with the chart, because the name arrived on paper long before it arrived on a person.
Magellan reached the islands in March 1521 and called them the Archipelago of St. Lazarus. That name did not stick. In February 1543, an expedition under Ruy López de Villalobos — some sources credit his captain Bernardo de la Torre with the actual act — applied the name Las Islas Filipinas to Leyte and Samar. Two islands. Not the country.
The honoree was Felipe, Prince of Asturias. He was born in May 1527, which made him about fifteen years old in February 1543. He was not King Philip II yet; he would not take the throne until 1556. He never set foot in the archipelago, never learned a word of any language spoken in it, and as far as the record shows never gave it a moment's thought that was not fiscal.
The Villalobos expedition then failed completely. It could not feed itself, could not resupply, and retreated to the Portuguese-held Moluccas, where Villalobos died in prison in 1546. The name outlived the man who gave it by four hundred and eighty years.
It was Miguel López de Legazpi, arriving in 1565, who stretched Las Islas Filipinas over the whole archipelago and made it stick. Everything after that — the tribute registers, the surname catalog, the Cortes, the revolution, the war with the Americans, the flag, your passport — happens under a name assigned to two islands in the Visayas in honor of a Spanish adolescent.
The Words They Sorted Us With
Yesterday's glossary covered the tax words. This is the rest of the filing system — the categories a colonial clerk had available when he sat down to write your ancestor into a book.
- naturales
- "The natives." The neutral administrative term for the indigenous population, used alongside indio in official documents.
- indio
- The Christianized native. A tax and labor classification, not merely an insult — as covered yesterday, it determined what you owed the Crown each year.
- sangley
- A Chinese resident of the islands. Restricted in movement and residence, periodically expelled, taxed separately.
- mestizo de sangley
- Chinese-native mixed ancestry. Paid double the standard tribute — and became the wealthiest commercial class in the islands anyway. Rizal descended from this line.
- mestizo de español
- Spanish-native mixed ancestry. A separate legal category with separate obligations.
- insular / criollo
- A Spaniard born in the islands. This is the group the word "Filipino" actually described.
- peninsular
- A Spaniard born in Spain. At the top, and reminded everyone of it.
- moro
- A Muslim Filipino. Taken from the Spanish word for the Moors of Iberia and applied to people the empire never conquered. Held as a slur for four centuries — and then reclaimed, which we will come back to.
- infieles / remontados
- "Unfaithful" and "those who went back up the mountain." The unconverted, and those who fled the lowland colonial towns to escape tribute. Being outside the system was itself a category.
Look at what that list is. It is not a description of a society. It is a sorting apparatus, and every slot in it carries a different bill.
The First Man to Call Himself Filipino
His name was Luis Rodríguez-Varela. He was born in Tondo in 1768, he was a full-blooded Spaniard, and he is generally credited as the first person to claim the word Filipino in print in something like a nationalist sense.
He styled himself El Conde Filipino — the Philippine Count. He was educated in France during the Enlightenment, he published El Parnaso Filipino in Manila in 1814, and he argued for things that would sound familiar a century later: local colleges teaching mathematics, medicine and navigation, free primary schools for the poor, representation in the Spanish Cortes, secularization of the parishes, and a legal system that took crimes against natives at least as seriously as crimes against Spaniards.
He was, in other words, running the ilustrado program seventy-five years before the ilustrados. And he was punished for it the way they would be: in February 1823, Governor Juan Antonio Martínez expelled him from the islands along with a circle of fellow creoles who called themselves the Sons of the Nation.
I want to be fair to the man. He was not a colonized subject reclaiming his own name. He was a member of the colonial class, arguing for his class as much as for anyone else, and the peninsulares used "Filipino" against people like him as a sneer — the provincial, the man born out in the colony, not quite the real thing. That is the tension the word carried before it ever reached us. It was already a word about being second-class. It was just a different second class.
How the Word Changed Hands
Here is the part I want my children to know, because it is the single most impressive thing our ancestors did, and nobody teaches it as an accomplishment.
They did not petition for the word. They took it.
In Paris in 1889, during the Exposition Universelle, Rizal and a group of Filipino students went to see Buffalo Bill's Wild West show. They watched French crowds cheer for Native American performers. According to José Alejandrino, who was there, Rizal turned to his companions afterward and made an argument that sounds almost modern: if Europeans can admire these Indians, then we should take back the word indio and make it something to be proud of. They renamed their circle Los Indios Bravos.
That is the move. Not "please stop calling us that." Rather: we will keep the insult, and we will make you say it with respect.
The same men were writing La Solidaridad in Barcelona and Madrid from 1889 to 1895, and in its pages they simply started using Filipino to mean themselves — natives, indios, the people the word had never legally covered. There was no decree, no committee, no proclamation. They used it until it was true. By the time the Malolos Congress promulgated the constitution of the República Filipina in January 1899, the transfer was complete and permanent.
And Bonifacio Refused It Entirely
Not everyone agreed the word was worth taking.
Andrés Bonifacio would not use a name honoring a Spanish king. His term for the nation was Haring Bayang Katagalugan — the sovereign nation of Katagalugan — and the Katipunan defined its terms carefully. The Kartilya carries a footnote explaining that Tagalog here means everyone who grew up in these islands: Bisaya, Ilocano, Kapampangan, Bicolano, all of them.
It did not survive him. Non-Tagalog revolutionaries heard regionalism in it whatever the footnote said, and after Bonifacio's execution in May 1897 the Aguinaldo faction reorganized his republic under the Spanish name. The country we live in is the ilustrado answer to the question, not the Katipunan answer.
That is worth sitting with. There were two decolonization strategies in 1896 — capture the colonizer's word, or refuse it and build our own — and we are living inside the outcome of that argument. The rename debate is that same argument, reopened.
What Maharlika Actually Means
Now the other word.
If you have only ever encountered maharlika on a highway sign or in a Marcos speech, you have been handed a counterfeit. The real thing is better.
The word is a Sanskrit loan, from maharddhika — a person of wealth, ability, or competence — and its living cousin is the Malay and Indonesian word merdeka, which means freedom, and which is the word people shouted in the streets at independence. Maharlika and merdeka are the same seed planted in two archipelagos.
In sixteenth-century Tagalog society, the maharlika were a class of free warriors. They sat below the ruling maginoo, not above them. They were exempt from tribute and taxation. In exchange, they owed military service to their datu — they brought their own weapons at their own expense, answered his summons wherever it came, and took a share of the spoils. The Boxer Codex records the term as manlica and glosses it, in one word, as a freeman. Fray Juan de Plasencia describes the class in 1589. William Henry Scott, whose Barangay is the standard modern work, lays out the whole structure.
So the modern definition — royal nobility, aristocracy, the blood of kings — is wrong in the specific direction you would expect a colonized people to get it wrong. The word means free. We remembered it as noble. That is not a translation error. That is what centuries of being taught to admire rank does to a reading.
What Marcos Did to It
Here is why the word is radioactive in the Philippines and merely pretty in the diaspora.
Ferdinand Marcos claimed throughout his career that he had led an anti-Japanese guerrilla unit called Ang Mga Maharlika from 1942 to 1944. He asked the U.S. Army for official recognition of it twice, in 1945 and again on appeal in 1948. The Army investigated, and investigated again, and rejected him both times. Its assessments of his claims used words like distorted, exaggerated, fraudulent, contradictory and absurd. The roughly three-hundred-page file concluded that the unit was a fictitious creation and that no such unit ever existed. In 1950, the U.S. Veterans Administration and the Philippine Army found that some men who had claimed Maharlika membership had committed atrocities against Filipino civilians.
Those documents sat in American archives for thirty-five years. The historian Alfred W. McCoy came across them while researching the war; The New York Times published the story on January 23, 1986 — three weeks before the snap election that ended the regime.
By then Marcos had spent twenty years bolting the word onto the state: a hall in Malacañang, the government broadcast network, and the Pan-Philippine Highway, which most people in the Philippines still call the Maharlika Highway. He also stripped its meaning. Maharlika in his usage meant nobility, greatness, a lost aristocracy — the exact reading the primary sources do not support, and precisely the reading a man building a personality cult would need.
Then came the rename bill, and it is worth getting the details right because they are usually gotten wrong.
1962 — The rename debate is not new and did not begin with Marcos. In the early 1960s, Philippine legislators seriously considered renaming the country Malaysia, out of a pan-Malay current running back to Apolinario Mabini and Wenceslao Vinzons. The proposal is associated with Ahmad Domocao Alonto, the Maranao leader from Lanao. Kuala Lumpur adopted the name first, in September 1963, and that was the end of it. (Sources date the Philippine bill to 1962; Alonto's Senate term is recorded as ending in December 1961, so treat the exact year with caution.)
1978 — Parliamentary Bill 195, filed by Eddie Ilarde in the Interim Batasang Pambansa, proposes changing the country's name to Maharlika. Note the body: there was no Philippine Senate in 1978. It had been abolished under martial law. Anyone who tells you this was "Senate Bill 347" is repeating an error. Marcos backed the bill. It went nowhere, partly because ethnic groups outside Luzon read the term as imperial, and mostly because of the man attached to it.
2017 — Rep. Gary Alejano files House Bill 5867, proposing a Geographic Renaming Commission to study the question properly. It does not advance.
2019 — On February 11, in Maguindanao, President Duterte says Marcos was right, and calls for the Republic of Maharlika. Malacañang clarifies within a day that this would require an act of Congress and a national referendum. Nothing follows.
2023 — On July 18, President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. signs Republic Act 11954, creating the Maharlika Investment Fund, the country's first sovereign wealth fund. The word is back on the front page of the business section, attached to a Marcos, and attached to money.
Ilarde's own justification for the 1978 bill contained the tell. He explained the word as maha, Sanskrit for noble or great, plus likha, to create — "nobly created." That is folk etymology. It is not where the word comes from. The bill to decolonize the country's name was itself built on a misreading of the pre-colonial term it wanted to install.
Could It Actually Happen?
Legally, yes, and the mechanism is simpler than most people assume.
Article XVI, Section 2 of the 1987 Constitution says Congress may, by law, adopt a new name for the country — along with a new anthem or seal — provided it is truly reflective of the ideals, history and traditions of the people. The law takes effect only upon ratification by the people in a national referendum.
No constitutional amendment required. One statute and one referendum. The framers left the door open on purpose.
Politically, it is nowhere close. And I am going to be careful here, because this is exactly the point where an article like this usually invents a statistic. There is no reliable national polling on renaming the country. Social Weather Stations has polled Filipino opinion on the Maharlika investment fund — and found in 2023 that most respondents knew little about it and were split on whether it would help — but that is a survey about a financial instrument, not about a name. Anyone quoting you a percentage on the rename is making it up.
What the record does show is a graveyard of alternatives, each of which failed for its own reason: Maharlika, contaminated by Marcos and read as Tagalog-centric everywhere else; Katagalugan, rejected as regionalist in 1897 and still would be; Malaysia, taken; Rizalia and Republika Rizalina, honoring a reformist who did not himself call for separation; Luzviminda, a bureaucratic contraction that sounds like a government agency; Kapatiran and Katipunan, never seriously pursued.
Add the practical costs — passports, treaties, currency, corporate registries, every map on earth — and the honest assessment is that this will not happen in my lifetime, and probably not in my children's.
That is fine. I am not campaigning for it. I want something narrower and more achievable, which is for Filipinos to know where the word came from.
F or P: The Fight You Have Already Lived Through
If a national rename sounds far-fetched, consider that we have already changed our own name three times in a century, in a quieter way, and most of us did not notice.
Filipinas was the Spanish name and the name of the 1899 republic. Philippines is the American spelling, arriving in 1898 and written into the 1935 constitution. Pilipinas came from the abakada — the twenty-letter Tagalog alphabet promoted from around 1940, which had no letter F. The national language was named Pilipino in 1959.
Then the 1987 Constitution named it Filipino and restored the full alphabet, adding back F, J, V, Z and four other letters. The stated reason was decolonial in the most useful sense: those sounds occur naturally in Philippine languages that the Tagalog-based abakada had excluded. Without the letter F, as Virgilio Almario has pointed out, the word Ifugao is not spellable in the national language. Neither is Ibaloy safot. The alphabet had been shutting out our own country.
The Komisyon sa Wikang Filipino then resolved in 2013 to restore Filipinas as the country's name in the national language, and reversed itself years later back to Pilipinas, citing the Tagalog text of the Constitution. That fight is still live, in a small office in Manila, over one letter.
So: the country's name has been contested continuously for a hundred and twenty-five years. The Maharlika proposal is not a fringe idea. It is the loudest version of an argument that has never stopped.
The Reclamation That Actually Worked
There is one more thing I owe this article, and it is the thing that keeps it honest.
Maharlika is a Tagalog word. The Visayas had timawa. Mindanao and Sulu had sultanates that Spain never conquered and that had no interest in either vocabulary. To rename the whole archipelago after a Luzon class term is to do to the country what Bonifacio's critics accused him of doing in 1897. That objection was raised against Ilarde's bill in 1978 and it has never been answered.
And the group with the strongest claim to have done this successfully is not the one in the Marcos speeches.
Moro came from the Spanish word for the Moors. It was applied to Muslim Filipinos as a slur and functioned for four centuries roughly the way indio did. Then in the late 1960s and 1970s, young Muslim leaders in Mindanao picked it up on purpose. The Moro National Liberation Front put the insult in its own name. They paired it with bangsa, the Malay word for nation, and made Bangsamoro — a term now written into Philippine law and carried by an autonomous region.
Same move as Rizal in Paris. Same move as the ilustrados with the word Filipino. Take the insult, refuse to be ashamed of it, and make the empire's own vocabulary the vehicle of the answer. It is the most Filipino political technique there is, and the Bangsamoro executed it most recently and most completely.
For My Kids, and the Ones I Haven't Met
Here is what I actually want you to carry out of this.
You are named after a fifteen-year-old Spanish prince. Your surname probably came out of a 1849 catalog, as I wrote yesterday. The word you use for your own people was, for most of its history, a word for somebody else. Almost nothing about how you identify yourself was chosen by anyone you are descended from.
And yet the word is ours now. Not because Spain gave it to us — Spain never gave us anything — but because a generation of Filipinos in Barcelona and Madrid and Paris decided to use it about themselves until the usage became the fact. They took the empire's own noun and walked off with it. That is not the behavior of a conquered people. That is a heist.
So when someone tells you that Filipino is a colonial name and you should feel embarrassed by it, you have two entirely defensible answers, and you do not have to pick between them today.
The first: yes, and we stole it fair and square, and it means us now.
The second: there was another word, older than the galleons, and it did not mean noble. It meant free. Our ancestors said maharlika the way Indonesians say merdeka. A dictator took it, cheapened it into a fantasy about aristocracy, hung it on a highway, and left it too soiled to use. Getting it back from him is a smaller job than renaming a country, and it is the one actually in front of us.
I am not asking anyone to change what is printed on the passport. I am asking that when my granddaughter reads the word on it in 2070, she knows exactly where it came from, who it used to belong to, and what her people had to do to get it.
That is not grievance. That is literacy, and the nerve to use it.
- William Henry Scott, Barangay: Sixteenth-Century Philippine Culture and Society (Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1994)
- Fray Juan de Plasencia, Las costumbres de los indios tagalos de Filipinas (1589); the Boxer Codex (c. 1590)
- Pedro Chirino, S.J., Relación de las Islas Filipinas (1604); Francisco Colin (1663); Juan Francisco de San Antonio (1738)
- Teodoro A. Agoncillo, History of the Filipino People; Renato Constantino, The Philippines: A Past Revisited (1975); Ambeth R. Ocampo, Rizal Without the Overcoat; Luis H. Francia, A History of the Philippines: From Indios Bravos to Filipinos (2010)
- Ruth de Llobet on Luis Rodríguez-Varela, Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana 45:90 (2019)
- José Alejandrino, La Senda del Sacrificio (1949), on the founding of Los Indios Bravos; Paul A. Kramer, The Blood of Government (2006)
- Kartilya ng Katipunan (Emilio Jacinto), footnote defining Tagalog; National Commission for Culture and the Arts, "Andres Bonifacio and the 1896 Revolution"
- Jeff Gerth and Joel Brinkley, "Marcos's Wartime Role Discredited in U.S. Files," The New York Times, January 23, 1986; U.S. Army guerrilla-unit records, U.S. National Archives, surfaced by Alfred W. McCoy
- Parliamentary Bill 195 (Eddie Ilarde, Interim Batasang Pambansa, 1978); House Bill 5867 (Rep. Gary Alejano, 2017); National Historical Commission of the Philippines statements on the Maharlika name
- 1987 Constitution of the Republic of the Philippines, Article XVI, Section 2 (Official Gazette)
- Republic Act No. 11954, the Maharlika Investment Fund Act of 2023
- Social Weather Stations survey on the Maharlika Investment Fund, March 2023
- Komisyon sa Wikang Filipino, Ortograpiyang Pambansa (2013); Virgilio S. Almario on the Filipino alpabeto
- Ahmad Murad Merican on Pan-Malayan consciousness and the proposal to rename the Philippines "Malaysia"
- Cesar Adib Majul, Muslims in the Philippines; Institute for Autonomy and Governance, on the evolution of Bangsamoro identity
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