Maria and Bernardino’s divorce

Bantayan Island native Bernardino Dimabasa had gone to war in Mindanao and when he came back to the Visayas his wife Maria Mutia no longer wanted to live with him.

Bernardino insisted on co-habitation and would get angry. Maria finally filed for a divorce. The court heard their respective witnesses, including testimony that Bernardino tried to kill his wife, and decided to grant Maria her divorce. The year was 1647. The couple signed the divorce document in their native script, Baybayin.

The rest of the document was in Spanish as the court proceeding in Iloilo was adjudicated by a Spanish official affiliated with the church. It’s a captivating window into a little known past, when colonial patriarchal attitudes still had not taken hold in the archipelago, a mere eight decades after Miguel Lopez de Legazpi claimed the islands for Spain.

The 1640s were a time when many indigenous customs still held sway, including egalitarian relations between the sexes that allowed for divorce. In the Dimabasa-Mutia case, the court sided with the woman despite her husband being a high-ranking indio officer in the Spanish army.

In Iloilo in particular, according to one historical study, “women inherited equally, had equal rights to their children after divorce, and could independently decide whether they wanted to stay married or not.”

This episode from nearly 400 years ago seems to come from a more enlightened age, at least in terms of gender relations. (Just to guard against over-romanticizing this period, readers need reminding that slave trading and beheading were also accepted customs.)

The early Spanish missionaries pushed back against indigenous divorce, denouncing it as barbaric and of course, un-Christian. In time, the islanders would be forced to live under laws that reflected Catholicism’s concepts of male supremacy.

I learned about this particular divorce case in detail while producing a documentary about the gold riches of the now little noticed but historically important island of Bantayan in Cebu.

The eminent historian William Henry Scott made only a passing reference to Bantayan in his landmark book on pre-colonial history, “Barangay,” where he notes that the earliest known native writing in the Visayas were the signatures of a Bantayan couple in the 1647 divorce document.

I was actually more struck by the mention of early divorce. So once in Bantayan, I interviewed a local historian, Trizer Mansueto, who referred to “The Myth of the Barangay,” a 2017 book by the historian Damon Woods, an American who grew up in Baguio.

That brought me to the UP Press in Diliman where I bought a copy of the recent book. Woods describes how he also noted Scott’s mention of the case and tracked down the obscure divorce document in the Filipinas Heritage Library in Makati.

Woods painstakingly analyzes the 1647 court case as a way of understanding how Filipinos in those days lived.

At least in this case, which was decided in less than six weeks and recorded testimony from nine witnesses, a reader gets the impression that the Philippine justice system then respected indigenous views, and could be swift and fair.