Iwas born in Manila, in 1945. My father was in the movie business in the Philippines, and involved in advertising and entertainment. My mother was a singer and composer—both of them were interested in the arts. My father read widely. The story goes that he was immersed in Thoreau when I was born, and decided to name me Walden; though I have two or three Spanish names as well. My parents were both Spanish-speakers, but they didn’t transmit it to us—English was more or less the first language in our household when I was growing up. I had two other Philippine languages, but just spoken ones, not written. I was taught by Jesuits, from first grade through to college graduation, and my initial radicalization was a reaction against that conservative educational system—the Jesuit schools in the Philippines essentially catered for the children of the elite. I wasn’t from that background, and was instinctively opposed to their strict class bias, in a pre-political way.
There were only a handful of people from the university who took up radical positions in the early part of the Marcos period. For the most part, the Jesuit system has been a fairly efficient producer of ruling-class minds. As in Latin America, a layer of Christians with a national-liberation perspective did emerge from some of the religious orders, especially the relatively newer ones, such as the Redemptorists. But that never predominated among the Jesuits. I knew them all, and very few of them—maybe eight or ten—ever embraced a progressive politics. The Jesuits always had a liberal façade; but in terms of their education and the people they produced, they were really quite conservative.
Upper-class education in the Philippines led automatically either to a corporate career with the multinationals, or into law and government. I didn’t want to be trapped in either—at least, not so soon. So I went down to Sulu and taught in a college in Jolo for about a year. There I got involved in discussions with Muslim intellectuals—people who would go on to form the Mindanao National Liberation Front, in which a number of my students later became active too. I was in sympathy with their analysis of a systematic discrimination against Muslims in the Philippines, although I might not have supported outright secession.
After that I worked for a few years as publications director of the Institute of Philippine Culture, which had been set up by anthropologists from the University of Chicago. Their approach was highly empirical but their ideas about Filipino social structure and behavioural patterns still had a lot of influence. They were closely linked to the US Agency for International Development. At that time, a huge proportion of American funding for social-science research came from the military. People would go to the Philippines—to places like the IPC—on US naval-research grants. This was in the second half of the sixties, at the height of the war against Vietnam—but the social scientists there still claimed their research had no military application. It was a highly politicizing moment for me, in understanding how the system worked: that there was no distinction at all between this sort of funding and academic research.
I left for post-graduate studies at Princeton just before the elections in 69—it was a vicious campaign. These were momentous times. In 1970 there was the so-called First Quarter Storm in the Philippines, with the rise of the student movement. But it was the American student struggle against the war in Vietnam that really politicized me, in the United States itself. My next important experience was going down to Chile for my doctoral research in 1972. I was attracted by Allende’s constitutional road to socialism, and wanted to study political mobilization in the shanty towns. I spent a couple of months working with Communists organizing in the local communities, but as soon as I arrived I realized that the correlation of forces had already shifted: it was now the counter-revolution that was in the ascendant. So I ended up re-focusing both my academic work and political interests on the emergence of the reaction in Chile. Coming from the Third World, this wasn’t easy to do. If you weren’t Chilean, and were brown-skinned, you tended to be marked down as a Cuban agent. That got me into trouble a number of times.
The dissertation developed into a comparative study of counter-revolution in Germany, Italy and Chile. It acknowledged the role of the CIA, but put equal, if not greater, weight on domestic class forces in explaining the consolidation of the anti-Allende bloc. The experience gave me a healthy scepticism—running clean against much standard American political science on developing countries—about the democratic role of the middle class. I could see that this was a very ambivalent layer.
By the time I got back to the US to defend my thesis in early 73, Marcos had declared martial law, and the Filipino community in the States was in uproar. It was then that I first became active in exile Filipino politics. Various groups were forming. There was a Movement for a Free Philippines, associated with Senator Raúl Manglapus, one of the stalwarts of the elite opposition to Marcos who had fled to the US straight after the declaration of martial law. A number of Americans, some of them specialists in the area, set up a group called the Friends of the Filipino People; among them was Daniel Schirmer from Boston, who had just written Republic or Empire. I gravitated towards the Union of Democratic Filipinos—the Katipunan ng Demokratikong Pilipino (KDP)—which was allied to the Communist Party of the Philippines and the New People’s Army.