Did you know? There was an Ilocano independence war in the 1700s

Paoay Cathedral in Ilocos Norte. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

When I think about what it means to be Ilocano, I cannot separate it from the story of Diego and Gabriela Silang.

They were not rebels for some imagined nation called the Philippines. They were Ilocanos who rose up against Spain for the sovereignty of their own people: an Ilocano nation.

Diego dreamed of an Ilocano-led government, free from the grip of colonial power Spain, and Gabriela carried that dream with fierce defiance after his death.

Their struggle was specific, local, rooted in the valleys and mountains of the north. It was not a borrowed identity—it was ours.

That story has always spoken to me, because it tells me that long before “Filipino” became a national identity, our ancestors knew we were already a people worth fighting for.

Ilocano was not just a language of its own. Ilocano was a nation in its own right, with its own leaders, laws, and destiny.

Gabriela, riding into battle after Diego’s assassination, reminds me that Ilocano identity has always been more than survival—it has been resistance, pride, and vision.

It’s in that spirit that I started my own small project: a little niche on my website that covers Ilocano people and history.

It’s not a revolution in the battlefield sense, but it is a way of refusing silence.

I wanted to create a space that tells our story on our own terms. A place to gather our myths, our gods before colonization, our foodways, our history, our culture.

Too often the narrative of what it means to be Filipino has been flattened into a Tagalog-centered frame, where everything else is treated as a side note.

My project is my way of pushing back. It is a reminder that Ilocano identity is not a footnote—it is a whole story.

I see this happening all over the Philippines now with other ethnolinguistic tribes throughout the archipelago:

Kapampangans reclaiming their literature. Cebuanos writing and publishing in Bisaya. Cordilleran and Lumad peoples insisting that their traditions are not “primitive,” but powerful and alive.

There is a hunger across the thousands of islands to recover what was erased and to imagine who we might have been if our islands had not been bundled together under Spain and America.

Some even wonder what it would look like if we had grown into separate nations, carrying our languages and cosmologies into independence.

I don’t see that as fragmentation. I see it as dignity—remembering what was taken from us and daring to say it still matters.

When I read about Diego and Gabriela, I hear them whisper across centuries:

Remember who you are.

Remember that your people are not less than any other.

Remember that Ilocano blood has always carried defiance, dignity, and pride.

That is the fire I want to carry forward in my own way. My website is only a small offering, but I hope that when an Ilocano visits it, they feel even a spark of what the Silangs carried in their bones—that unshakable belief that Ilocanos are a people with our own story, one that will not be erased.