Fierce Filipino Hispanista releases essay collection in the United States

Hailed as "the last defender of Spanish in the Philippines," Guillermo Gómez Rivera makes a splash with a compendium of untold and withheld facts on Philippine history

The Filipino State and Other Essays

Guillermo Gómez Rivera

Guillermo Gómez Rivera is a well-known book author, linguist and academic in his native Philippines, but it is his life-long advocacy to reclaim the Hispanic soul of his country that has catapulted him to international fame.

Various publications and institutions in Spain and other Spanish-speaking countries have recognized his efforts as "the last defender of Spanish in the Philippines."

In his debut book in the United States, published by CentiRamo Publishing in New York, Gómez Rivera reveals the truth about the founding of the Filipino state which, he says, is being deliberately omitted in Philippine history books. Keeping Filipino schoolchildren in the dark about their country's history is part of a pattern to revise Philippine history in order to hide some of the most gruesome events that occurred in the Philippines at the turn of the last century when the United States invaded the country following the Spanish-American War.

Their ignorance about their own history makes generations of Filipino political leaders vulnerable to manipulation by neo-colonizers whose aims are not always in tune with the welfare of the Filipino nation.

Gómez Rivera also bewails the near eradication of the Spanish language in his country, which he considers as the key to Filipino national identity. Since the country's heroes wrote mostly in Spanish to demand for reforms from Spanish colonial authorities, they encapsulated their thoughs on Filipinism in that Iberian language.

He accuses Filipino education authorities of unwittingly allowing themselves to be used as tools in promoting cultural genocide with pigheaded policies that have led to the pidginization of both Tagalog and English.

Learn more about Guillermo Gómez Rivera.

Links

La Razon

ABC

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