why did jose marco became the greatest conman in philippine history
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Answer:
Explanation:
It is no secret that over the past century Filipino history books have been riddled with errors and outright hoaxes, especially in the area of the pre-Hispanic period. After more than 300 years of Spanish rule, Filipinos had many blank spots in their collective memory concerning their pre-colonial past. At the beginning of the 1900s, the new American regime helped to regain some of these lost memories through new research, which was fuelled by the post-revolution nationalism of the Filipinos and the Americans’ curiosity about their new possession. However, some of these over-enthusiastic efforts to resurrect the past led to sloppy historical research on both sides. Often, a basic talent for forgery was hardly even needed to fool the “experts.”
Perhaps the most famous hoax was that of Datu Kalantiaw, the first Filipino lawmaker. It was wildly successful for 50 years before anybody seriously questioned its validity, even though the perpetrator of the hoax was probably one of the most inept frauds in history – José E. Marco.
The forgeries of José E. Marco were extremely crude, almost childish in execution and full of absurd stories, anachronisms, contradictions and errors. Marco’s career as a phoney historian apparently began in 1912 while he was working for the post office in Negros Occidental. He published a Historical Review of the Island of Negros in the Spanish language journal, Renacimiento Filipino (Filipino Renaissance) where he cited several unknown authors and mentioned meaningless pre-colonial dates, which he did not connect to any particular events or calendars. These idiosyncrasies would become Marco’s trademark for every one of his alleged discoveries in the following 50 years.
At the time, Marco’s essay was not particularly remarkable but it would later become significant for what was not in it. Marco didn’t mention any lawmaker by the name of Kalantiaw and one of the footnotes even said that there were no lords or kings in the pre-colonial Philippines, and that crimes went unpunished. This may have slipped his mind when, years later, he told the famous anthropologist, H. Otley Beyer, that his father had discovered the Kalantiaw documents in 1899 while looting the convent in Himamaylan, Negros – 13 years before he wrote his essay in 1912. Marco changed his story, though, when the University of Chicago requested details of his discoveries in 1954. He said that an old cook, not his father, had stolen the documents and then sold them to Marco in 1913.
In 1912, Marco also donated to the Philippine Library and Museum some ancient documents written in baybayin script on three sheets of tree bark. Marco told a schoolteacher named Luther Parker that he had found them wrapped in wax inside the horns of a wooden six-legged bull-shaped idol in a cave near La Castellana, Negros Occidental. Parker visited the cave a few weeks later in December 1912 and found that the only bull there was the story itself. Yet, according to a Philippine Library bulletin in September the following year, these were “the greatest literary find ever made in the Philippine Islands.”