Nick Joaquin's The Woman Who Had Two Navels contains several references to General Emilio Aguinaldo, with whose revolutionary forces Pepe Monson's father fights during the Philippine Revolution (1896–1898).
Born in 1869 in Cavite el Viejo (now Kawit), Aguinaldo was the Chinese-Tagalog son of a wealthy municipal governor in the Spanish colonial administration. In 1895, Aguinaldo joined the Katipunan organization, whose aim was to use armed insurrection to oust Spanish colonial rulers and achieve independence for the Philippines.
In 1896, Aguinaldo led four hundred rebels to Kawit city hall and stripped the Spanish Empire's Guardia Civil of their weapons. After many more skirmishes and power shifts, Aguinaldo in 1897 signed a pact with the Spanish governor-general of the Philippines to remain in exile in Hong Kong; in exchange, Aguinaldo would receive $800,000 Mexican dollars. While in exile, Aguinaldo arranged for his revolutionary forces, allied with the United States, to return to the Philippines in 1898.
Aguinaldo became the first president of the provisional republic of the Philippines declared in June 1898. Later that year, Spain signed the Treaty of Paris, ceding the Philippines to the United States, along with Guam and Puerto Rico. With worsening relations between Filipinos and Americans, the Philippine-American War began in February 1899, with the General Aguinaldo's forces resorting within months to guerilla warfare in the jungle. After three years of fighting, the U.S. captured Aguinaldo in Luzon.
Upon capture, Aguinaldo pledged allegiance to the United States, was granted a government pension, and retired from life as a public figure until he ran an unsuccessful campaign for president of the Philippines in 1935. Aguinaldo later collaborated with Japan during the Japanese occupation of the Philippines in WWII, for which he was charged with treason. The charges were later dropped. In 1950, Aguinaldo became a member of the Philippine Council of the State in the newly independent Philippines.
