By Zaldy Dandan
Variety Editor

THE author is the young Spanish scholar Carlos Madrid Álvarez-Piñer and his book’s complete title, like other serious works of scholarship, is a mouthful — “Beyond Distances: Governance, Politics and Deportation in the Mariana Islands from 1870 to 1877.” By funding the research and publication of this book, the NMI Humanities Council has, once again, done a great job in generating more interest in local culture and history, the accounts of which, until recently, were usually mentioned in passing in the more voluminous works on the great powers that once claimed these islands as their own. Like other former colonial possessions, the Marianas — Guam and the NMI — hunger for “new,” because more detailed, accounts of their history to have a better sense of where they are now and where they are headed.
It’s not surprising then that the early reviews of Madrid’s work were generous — “detailed,” “insightful,” “superb,” “skillful,” “keen,” “effective,” “valuable” — but after reading the book, the only accolade I found accurate was the last one.
It is a handsome volume and a steal for $15. Hardbound with glossy pages, you can lay it down flat on a table, which is what I’ve done as I write this review. The cover art is attractive and there is something poetic about the title which is paradoxical in its redundancy. “Beyond” connotes distance, and to be distant is to be “beyond.”
But for the unfortunate deportees to these islands during the Spanish era, the Marianas were indeed “beyond distances.” In an era when steamships and the telegraph were considered cutting-edge technology not readily available to everyone, they were banished to the end of their known world where time stood still, far from everything they held dear. (The prime minister of Asia’s first republic, Apolinario Mabini, described by the then-American governor of the Philippines and future U.S. President William Howard Taft as “the most prominent irreconcilable among the Filipinos,” was one of those deported to Guam by the new colonial masters of Las Islas Filipinas. Taft feared that Mabini’s presence in the P.I. would only fuel the insurrection against U.S. rule. After only two years in exile, the Filipino patriot, who was crippled as a young man by polio, finally agreed to pledge allegiance to the American flag so he could return to his homeland, where he died a year later, 10 days and two months short of his 39th birthday, still agitating for “independencia.”)
The book has typos, which is unfortunate for a work that took years of research and writing. There is also this apparent confusion over whether British or American English rules should be followed in certain punctuations and word constructions. Moreover, Madrid did not explain the construction of Spanish names which can be confusing for some readers. In Spanish culture, your mother’s surname is added to the end of your father’s surname. This is why the name of one of the deportees from the Philippines was Pedro Dandan on page 65 and Pedro Dandan Masancay on page 70. (And this is why we can call Carlos Madrid Álvarez-Piñer Mr. Madrid but never Mr. Álvarez-Piñer.)
Neither did Madrid point out that during the Spanish era the term “Filipino” referred to a Spaniard born in the Philippines, and that the natives, thank you very much Christopher Columbus, were called ”Indios” — i.e., “Indians.”
The dry academic prose can be a problem for some readers. But the book is interesting — if you’re interested. It’s not a page-turner, mainly because it is about real life in a remote time that can only be glimpsed in records that are neither complete nor detailed. Hence, and this is another weakness of his book, Madrid sometimes has to offer his own speculation about certain events in the Marianas. Educated and reasonable guesswork, to be sure, but still guesswork.
It is an ambitious work. In the preface, Madrid says he wanted “to determine to what extent the presence of political deportees may have affected the political and social consciousness of the residents of these islands.” He failed to achieve this goal, but not because of his own fault as a historian, but because, and despite the obviously extensive research behind this book, he can only work on the available records. It is as if a farmer announced that he intended to plant cactus in clay. Or rice in sand.
After reading “Beyond Distances,” the events in the Marianas that it recounted still appear quite beyond us, but at least now we have an idea of how it was then. We have gained a better appreciation for the history of these islands. We want to know more. And this is why this book should be considered seminal and valuable and deserving of our bravo.

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