reception even during their lifetime. According to Rocío Ortuño, the failure of their literary endeavours can be seen in the fact that some of their works were either left unpublished or, in case of their works published in periodicals, never compiled in volumes. Decline of Spanish Spanish flourished in the first two decades of the 20th century because of the partial freedom of the press and as an act of defiance against the new rulers. Spanish soon declined afterwards as the U.S. administration began a heavier imposition of English as the official language and medium of instruction in schools and universities. Editorials and newspapers were increasingly forced to switch to English, leaving Spanish in a marginal position and so Enrique Zóbel de Ayala founded the Academia Filipina de la Lengua Española and the Premio Zóbel in 1924 to help maintain and develop the use of Spanish by the Filipino people. It did not help that some Filipino nationalists and nationalist historiographers during the American colonial period took their liberal ideas from the writings of the 19th-century Filipino propaganda, which portrayed Spain and all things Spanish as negative or evil. Therefore, Spanish as a language was demonized as a sad reminder of the past. Those ideas gradually inculcated into the minds of the young generation of Filipinos (during and after the U.S. administration), which used those history textbooks at school that tended to generalize all Spaniards as villains because of lack of emphasis on Filipino people of Spanish ancestry, who were also against the local Spanish government and clergy and also fought and died for the sake of freedom during the 19th-century revolts during the Philippine Revolution, the Philippine–American War, and the Second World War. By the 1940s, as children educated in English became adults, Spanish started to decline rapidly. Still, a very significant community of Spanish-speakers lived in the largest cities, with a total population of roughly 300,000. However, with the destruction of Manila during the Japanese occupation in the Second World War, the heart of Spanish in the Philippines had been dismantled. Many Spanish-speaking Filipino families perished during the massacre and the bombing of the cities and municipalities between 1942 and 1945. By the end of the war, an estimated 1 million Filipinos had died. Some of the Spanish-speakers who survived were forced to migrate in the later years. After the war, Spanish became increasingly marginalized at an official