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La Girl Filipina: Paz Marquez Benitez, Brokering Cultures
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 November 2010
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A 1910 Normal School Yearbook featured six young women in basketball uniforms. Sixteen-year-old Paz Marquez, the tallest among them and the captain of the team, looks out unsmilingly. In the early years of the century, photographs of women's basketball teams appeared in hundreds of normal-school yearbooks across the American landscape, but this photo came from the normal school in Manila. Two years later, sharing another American ritual, the former team captain graced the cover of the weekly magazine Renacimiento Filipino, this time dressed in a luxurious gown befitting the Queen of the Carnival. That same year, 1912, Paz Marquez graduated with a B.A. in the first class from the College of Liberal Arts at the newly formed, secular University of the Philippines. Participating in commonplace American events, Paz Marquez (later Benitez) acted as a bridge, a link, between two cultures. Over the next decades, Paz continued in this role. In addition, however, she also became a cultural broker, as she confronted the conundrum that the use of English as the official language had imposed on Filipino culture. In these ways, Paz illustrates the complicated and intriguing story of U.S. nation-building from an intimate and distinctly Philippine viewpoint.
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References
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54 In this column, Marquez Benitez elaborated:
If we were daring enough, far-sighted enough, to plan ahead one hundred years, we could take the first step by introducing the National Language as the language of instruction in all but the elementary schools.…One hundred years should solve most of our language problems. By then all the bickering and jealousies should have died down. Every one will speak the national language…much enriched and so modified and evolved that it will bear only a slight resemblance to Tagalog. But by 2055, English may have become the International Language!
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