Ubiquitous Sampaguita

This chapter situates readers in the political foment of the late nineteenth century when native intellectuals, workers, and peasants amplified critiques against the Spanish colonial state toward political self-determination. These years were also a time of heightened cultural and intellectual activity among intellectuals living in the Philippines and abroad in Europe. Their writings and creative works advanced gendered, everyday renderings of the sampaguita, also known as Jasminum sambac, which is currently the national flower of the Philippines. The chapter demonstrates, among other things, how Manila-based intellectuals used botany’s vocabulary but cast aside its other specifying elements to position the sampaguita as an emblem of widespread cultural bearing. At the same time, the sampaguita’s elevation to its “national status” was but a US colonial decision to cultivate a brand of civic nationalism, as Resil B. Mojares has characterized it, at the expense of the flower’s previous political and intellectual valences.