Las gotas de agua

In the midst of the Philippine War of Independence, and in a process of almost constant struggle against two colonizers that lasted from 1896 to 1902, the University of Santo Tomas de Manila published the newspaper Libertas. It was a Catholic newspaper, but it also repudiated the American invasion. In many of its issues, page 3 (of the four pages of the newspaper) included a section called "Pasatiempos" with poems, usually by contemporary (and therefore, modernist) Latin American authors. 

The poems fulfilled a double function. On the one hand, many implicitly spoke of themes related to freedom, liberation, or could be related in some way to the desire for independence. For example, this poem by the Equatorian poet José Trajano Mera (1862-1919) deals with drops of water that, by dint of falling, end up piercing the rock, a metaphor for constancy and for how things are achieved.Moreover, by noting the drop responsible for the final crumbling, it gestured towards the endurance, on the part of the people, of disdain injustice until the revolution breaks out. On the other hand, Filipino authors of the time were inspired by Latin American modernism in writing their own poetry, given the ties that they maintained with South American republics, which had also been Spanish colonies and which had already freed themselves from colonialism years ago.

Álvarez Tardío, Beatriz. 2019. “‘Un bizarro poema de granito al infinito’: Modernismo and National-building in Philippine Poetry in Spanish", Unitas 92(1), May: 167-199.