Spanish colonialism

During the Spanish colonial period, the country had encountered transformations in its daily customs. The arrival of the Spaniards in 1565 brought Spanish culture and language. The Spanish conquerors established a strict class system that was based on race and soon imposed Roman Catholicism on the native population.

The priests and friars preached in local languages and employed indigenous peoples as translators, creating a bilingual class known as ladinos. The natives, called "indios", generally were not taught Spanish, but the bilingual individuals, produced devotional poetry written in the Roman script in the Tagalog language. Pasyon is the narrative of the passion, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, which has circulated in many versions. Komedyas were performed in the regional languages for illiterate majority. They were also written in the Roman alphabet in the principal languages and widely circulated. Literature in this period may be classified as religious prose and poetry and secular prose and poetry.

Spain also brought to the country, though at a much later time, liberal ideas and internationalism that influenced our own Filipino intellectuals and and writers for them to understand the meanings of "liberty and freedom". It affected not only the country's whole system but as well tainted the purity of their folklore traditions. And because of the western's strong influence and forceful implication of their civilization, the locals' forms of expression on national issues and self-consciousness were replaced through political essays, novels, poems and religious prose -- a form of learning, however, that led to ultimate awakening of Filipinos regarding the unreasonable colonial rule in the country. Famous examples of these Spanish-adapted writings are the novels of Jose Rizal, El Filibusterismo and Noli Me Tangere.

Nowadays, Filipino writers have continued to patronize the intellectual influence started by Rizal but to further aim at reviving the richness of the country's very own folk traditions and introducing it to new generations as a significant form of art.