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

Abstract

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

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Keywords

American colonial period, Filipino Literature in Spanish, Third Independence Mission, women’s associations, women’s magazines, women’s suffrage