My Master's is on pause
Musings on learning and my research interest
“What's in it for me, for us, to study the Spanish colonial past?” is a question I keep on asking myself when I’m on the verge of losing hope in my present research but before I delve into answering that I first would like to say…
Hey there mate,
It’s been a while since my last newsletter, and it also has been a while since I last finished writing something. Attempts were made but almost all were like unfinished sentences left in midair. Setting my other more urgent writing projects aside, I feel this itch to just finish this newsletter first and release something out into the world. I am hoping that this would magically lubricate the gears of my mind.
For this issue, I want to talk about my masters -- it doesn’t look great. However, I don’t feel as pressured to finish on time, to do well, or to score good. It’s not like undergrad anymore where it was a matter of life and death for me to finish to find a good job and provide for my young family. What’s important for me this time is to savour the knowledge I intake and hopefully contribute something worthy to the existing pool of knowledge. Merely passing or finishing through the coursework is not my jam at the moment.
I acknowledge that this is a privilege I have as I’m not working in the academe (yet) nor it is an urgent occupational requirement. Therefore, finishing the program as soon as possible is not a priority in my case. It is crazy then to call it a hobby, a past time, an escape from the monotony of the corporate world. It’s as if I don’t want my post-uni personality to just revolve around work.1
The impetus for my master’s journey has been funny. When applying you need recommendation letters. During my undergraduate years, there were only two professors who I had more than two classes with. One had already retired and the other is, well, not getting any younger. She is a professor emeritus of the department and the 199 (senior essay) adviser for our batch who I ran into the supermarket one time. There I shared to her how I’m currently in digital advertising and that I plan to return to the academe soon. I never expected that soon would be less than a year from that encounter.
So here I am now — a dropped class, which the decision for it was made after The 1975 concert and another class with an incomplete grade since I’m not yet done with the final paper for it yet.
the research (period) interest.
As scholars interested in studying the Spanish period, what we try to avoid is to be branded as apologists. The objective of this study into the Spanish colonial era is not to evoke a dangerous nostalgia of a colonial past but to further uncover a massive chunk of Philippine history. That for me is the reason why I want to study the Spanish colonial period. Like how can we successfully transition into a postcolonial framework without fully grasping the source of our tethers? Or another motivation is to further fill in the gaps of the fragmented understanding of our past.
The Spanish colonial period is a period that I believe was glossed over in basic education and heavily contrasted with the so-called benevolence of the American colonizers. My exposure to it was merely a paragraph or a chapter where the bulk of the textbook was skewed towards the contemporary period or just the past century. The Spanish colonial period is therefore a terra incognita in our national consciousness, especially the 17th-18th centuries.
It is the period that I honestly know nothing much about. Thus, to sate this burning curiosity, it is the period I want to study and specialise on in my graduate studies. Otra razón es para practicar más mi español. If possible, it is the only period I want to research about in the five History classes I need to take for masters.
It is indeed daunting and a humbling enterprise. While I have doubts on which direction I’ll proceed, I must remind myself to keep going.
palaeography and rekindling.
A class that I enlisted in my first semester of grad school was a class on 19th Century Philippines with a focus on palaeography. The class was facilitated by the amazing and famed Dr. Ros Costelo who graduated with high marks at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid.
What I really appreciated from Ma’am Ros’s class is, for the first time, I was introduced to pre-20th century archival sources in Spanish. It was kind of daunting at first but to be able to read through the flourishes and squiggles made me better appreciate a discipline where I felt so passionate about at first pre-college but not so much in the latter part of my BA degree.
Flipping through the expedientes in class developed within me an entire new fascination with primary material. It made history alive and exciting again. It was also apt that accompanying me through this journey, during the second semester of AY 2022-2023, was Rebecca Kuang’s Babel with its discourse on translation and power. The novel with its characters, in a sense, was a good companion while I was trying to read and transcribe archival text.
Through this act of sifting through archival material, I came to the realisation that historical research, especially of time periods with lesser access to primary sources, is indeed a labour of love. You probably wouldn’t be able to use all the things you’ve strained your eyes for hours. A whole expediente might just result to a single paragraph or sentence.
La lengua española es una llave o una clave de nuestra historia. I believe that us Filipino scholars can present new perspectives and insights amidst the multitude of studies done by hispanohablantes. I think this newsletter would be too long if shared my current research in detail but it’s on the surrounding ideas, views, and conceptualisations of primary education in the Philippines (1812-1890).
The personal problem
This section will be brief. I just felt that I’ve been letting myself down. I’ve put too much pressure on myself. Instead of feeling good about some progress, I didn’t feel good with not progressing enough. I’m trying to get out of it.
This video which suddenly popped in my algorithm gave a good reminder of how to actually set and achieve goals.
This is an outro 🤣
Hope all’s well on your end.
Thank you for reading,
Eli
a work in a company is one thing but domestic work is a whole new level of exhaustion
I WANT TO READ ABOUT UR CURRENT RESEARCH!!thanks for ur update eli!! i agree wt all ur points completely (like some profs r borderline spain apologists rn...) missed ur writing!