Nationalism, Feminism, and Modernity in Maria Paz Zamora-Mascuñana’s Mi obolo

This article aims to discuss Maria Paz Zamora-Mascuñana’s Mi obolo (1924) in light of biographical and culturally meaningful findings obtained through archival work conducted in 2018 and 2022 using the Library of Congress’s holdings of Philippine periodicals from the American colonial period as well as those of the Southeast Asian Newspaper collection at the East View Global Press Archive (GPA).3 The main claim here is that, with the publication of Mi obolo, Zamora-Mascuñana materialized her political will to contribute to the construction of the nation at a time when women’s participation in Filipino politics was met with resistance due to the opposition of most political leaders to women’s suffrage. However, Zamora-Mascuñana strategically chose the setting of the fundraising campaign organized in support of the Third Independence Mission to publish her short story collection, using as the title a contemporary buzzword—obolo [“contribution”]—which other writers, such as Jesus Balmori, had already employed to support the campaign, thus boldly placing herself and her creation on the same level as that of her male counterparts. This article’s working hypothesis is that as a woman writer and a member of the elite, Zamora-Mascuñana displays in Mi obolo the ideological program that women from the Hispanophone Filipino privileged class had supported since the early 1900s. This agenda, directed towards the construction of the Philippine nation, pivoted mainly around Christian values and the rejection of American symbols of modernity. The article is divided into three main sections devoted, firstly, to an overview of Zamora-Mascuñana’s production and its significance within the corpus of the Golden Age of Filipino Literature in Spanish; secondly, to the connections between Mi obolo and the Third Independence Mission; and thirdly, to the analysis of Mi obolo in relation to the discussion of womanhood at a time when evolving notions of modernity were transforming traditional gender roles. In this way, it is possible not only to characterize Zamora-Mascuñana as a Filipina patriot, but also to redefine Mi obolo as a pro-independence text.
This article would not have been possible without funding from several institutions. In 2017, the Franklin Institute of the University of Alcalá (Spain) funded the purchase of preliminary bibliographical references as well as a fifteen-day stay in Alcalá de Henares to do research on Philippine women’s writing. A year later, I spent three months doing archival work on the same subject at the Library of Congress under the supervision of Prof. Adam Lifshey of Georgetown University thanks to a SAAS – Fulbright grant. Finally, in 2022, thanks to funding from the Requalification Program of the Spanish System of Higher Education for tenured track positions, I continued my research on Zamora-Mascuñana at the University of Antwerp from February 2022 to July 2023 under the supervision of Prof. Rocio Ortuño Casanova.
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