So this allows for the development of kind of a middle class in the Philippines.

So by the late 1800s, an influential group of Filipinos who had studied in Europe

and learned about all these amazing liberal ideals come back to the Philippines

and they tell everybody about this crazy concept they've heard of called nationalism, and they try to start a revolution.

So they were part of an educated middle and upper class called Illustratos.

The most famous of these men organized into what was called the propaganda movement was Jose Rizal,

a novelist thinker and reputed great romantic

whose family actually leased farmland

from a Dominican hacienda.

So, all right, it's a little too complicated to explain here,

but in, and this is just a little aside

about Jose Rizal's hacienda situation.

But in 1887 to 1888, he was embroiled in a court dispute with the Dominicans.

When he led his fellow tenants against the landlords, they had this lawsuit, etc., etc., etc.

They won a case.

But the Dominicans won the appeal of that case, and then soldiers of

the Spanish Empire came and burned down some of their houses and beat the shit out of some

of their people and took the land.

This is a process that has essentially been going on since the beginning of Spanish colonization

in the Philippines, continuing to the

present day by one perpetrator or another that's called land grapies.

This is something that I guess we don't really have to think about maybe so much in the U.S.

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