The Graciano López Jaena book project (working title: Graciano’s Dirty Fingers), headed by Emmanuel Lerona with the assistance of Francisco G. Villanueva and Ma. Luisa Mabunay, aims to confront the vilification of Graciano Lopez Jaena by historians like John Schumacher and Ambeth Ocampo, as well as National Artists Nick Joaquin and Resil Mojares. It also closely examines the claims made by Jose Alejandrino, one of the Filipino propagandists in Spain, whose account seems to be the major basis for the ill repute Lopez Jaena has earned through the years. The project re-examines primary source materials like correspondences and other primary accounts, corroborating them to recreate a fuller and more faithful depiction of López Jaena while avoiding the pitfall of hagiographic writing.

Drawing from archival documents housed both in Spain, the Philippines, as well as from the United States, the project foregrounds Lopez Jaena’s activities, political writings, intellectual and Republican affiliations, Masonic commitments, and evolving relationships with contemporaries like José Rizal and Marcelo del Pilar. By tracing his movements across Iloilo, Madrid, and Barcelona, it locates his life not at the periphery of the reformist movement but at its contested center, navigating tensions of ideology, race, and political strategy.

This work also critiques the historiographic silences that have framed Lopez Jaena as either erratic or inconsequential, even anti-Filipino, challenging these portrayals with evidence of his sustained political engagements, oratory influence, and editorial leadership. In so doing, the project not only rescues López Jaena from caricature but also reframes the Propaganda Movement as a more fractured, polyvocal, and diasporic enterprise, one in which Graciano López Jaena was not a cautionary tale, but a central, if uncomfortable, figure of both the Philippine revolution and its ideological evolution as a nation.