Christina H. Lee _"Pre-Hispanic Signatures and Women’s Social Status in the Philippines Under Early Spanish Colonialism.”

The arrival of Spanish missionaries in the Philippines in 1565 marked the beginning of a significant effort to convert its indigenous population to Roman Catholicism, along with the transformation of pre-Hispanic indigenous scripts, known as baybayin, into the Spanish writing system. Although indigenous women were literate in baybayin before Spanish colonization, they were often excluded from learning literacy in both Spanish and the hispanized Tagalog. As a result, few were literate in any language by the eighteenth century. This paper explores how elite indigenous women, known as principalas, signed documents in baybayin, demonstrating their persistence in preserving this cultural heritage despite over a century of gradual decline in literacy following the Hispanization of the indigenous script. Moreover, it illustrates how principalas used baybayin to express their sense of identity and social rank within colonial systems that often overlooked their personhood and their distinguished ranks.