Category: books

‘The past is present still’ in Revolutionary Routes

By Sylvia Mayuga

Its “uncharted maps” to “paths of self preservation where there aren’t any,” make Revolutionary Routes the perfect title for Angela Stuart-Santiago’s new book. “No one’s made into a hero” in this story of an old Tayabas clan “finding community in times of revolt and revolution.” Historian Reynaldo Ileto calls it an “alternative history,” with family secrets revealed casting new light on written history.

It began with a curious grandson asking his Lola about her life in bygone eras. Concepcion (a.k.a. Concha) Herrera vda de Umali, 88, first responded with Spanish proverbs, then succumbed to a writing fever. In a year, she filled ten notebooks with the handwritten Fragmentos de mi juventud (Fragments of My Youth).

Only her Spanish-speaking daughters could read it with ease, but with her passing in 1980, they saw what a pity it would be for her English-speaking descendants to miss out on Lola’s life. Her eldest daughter Nena struggled with incipient blindness to do the translation. Blind by the time she finished, she passed on an heirloom of memory to her writer daughter Angela

“I was reading a final draft of 800 pages in one sweep for the first time… and it hit me,” Angela writes. “My great great Lola Paula jailed by a friar in 1891, my great Lolo Isidro jailed by the American military government in 1901, Lolo Tomas forced into exile by pro-Quezon Forces in 1910-1912, my uncle Crisostomo ‘Mitoy’ Salcedo executed by a political rival, a fellow guerrilla during the Japanese Occupation, and finally my uncle the Congressman jailed in 1951-1958 at the height of Magsaysay’s anti-Huk campaign. Lola’s accounts of those dark times are rather bleak and dry but tell enough to indicate that not one of the five deserved punishment. Lola least of all.”

There began this tell-all book set in old Tayabas, Manila, Macau and Hong Kong, spanning the last Spanish decade, Revolution, the Fil-American war, Japanese occupation and early independence. Artfully, Angela threads the narrative like a film, with quotations from Fragmentos, letters, press clippings, court records, family lore and insights on different Philippine periods by first-rate historians.

We meet the story’s first protagonist – the rice-farming peasant landowner in Tiaong, Paula Cerrada-Herrera “in the cholera epidemic of 1890. When a family of her tenants die, all were buried in paupers’ graves, but it falls to Paula to bury the youngest. Refusing to pay Tiaong’s cura parroco “an obscene amount of money” for Catholic rites, she buried the boy outside the cemetery. For that she was arrested and taken on a 30-km march to prison in the cabecera, “elbows tied behind her back,” at age 50. Rizal was away when his own mother was marched to prison on false charges. Paula’s son Isidro was right there for her – walking incognito all over Tayabas, gathering complaints against the cura. Then he did the unthinkable: filed a case against the fraile in Manila. Paula was tried and released six months after her arrest; the erring friar was exiled.

Isidro Herrera’s path was set. This educated son of a wealthy peasant joined the Revolution of 1896. By the summer of 1897, “he was contributing palay to the revolution and buying guns to secure his rice farms.” As hostilities escalated, he moved his family from Sariaya town to a Tiaong barrio, while moving around “in service to our country.” His wife Juliana maintained a place for revolutionaries far from towns where Spanish rule was ending in violence. Alas, American imperialism took over, forcing Isidro and Juliana’s return to town at a new master’s orders. They were adjusting to life in uneasy peace when past support for the revolution got Isidro unjustly arrested. A sympathetic American lawyer and Juliana’s saved-up dollars secured his release, but more troubles awaited.

Things were settling down under American rule when the up-and-coming provincial fiscal Manuel Quezon came into their lives. When their unica hija Concha was engaged to the Batangueño orator, writer, revolutionary and future lawyer, Tomas Umali, Quezon volunteered to be their wedding sponsor. Next governor of Tayabas, Don Manuel asked Tomas to make him a partner in a Tayabas railroad expropriation deal. Consent cost Tomas dearly. Corruption in the deal emerged, leading to his arrest, disbarment and exile, persuaded by his fellow-Masons to save Quezon’s name at the cost of his own.

When Quezon was Commonwealth President, Concha and Tomas Umali had come to terms enough to ask him to sign appointment papers for their son-in-law, Crisostomo “Mitoy” Salcedo, as local justice of the peace. World War II changed the game, plunging the clan into successive evacuations, zona for the men and harassment from all sides, guerrillas included. Tragedy approached when Vicente Umali (no relation to Tomas), Mitoy’s old college rival jealous of his position, became both a Japanese-collaborating mayor and a general of Quezon’s guerrillas. Vicente ordered the burning of the town hall, framed Mitoy with terrorized witnesses, then ended it all by stabbing him to death. Insult to injury, he was exonerated under a new law pardoning guerrilla murders in wartime.

Justice delayed, denied, and aborted also visited the life of the fifth clan protagonist in the Huk era of American-led Cold War. The efforts of the Umalis’ eldest son Narciso to win back Huks terrorizing and freezing commerce in the countryside helped him win a Tayabas congressional seat in 1949. In 1951 Huks burned the home of the Tiaong mayor, Marcial Punzalan, who called it a communist plot and accused Naning as ringleader. This canard of a landowning “communist big fish” fit nicely with the CIA’s anti-communist campaign led by Ramon Magsaysay. Tried and convicted for rebellion, murder and arson, Naning Umali spent nearly seven years in prison.

Malacañang ignored the congressional majority’s appeals. The Supreme Court stood pat despite recantation by the main witness against him, followed by captured Huk documents claiming the deed. (Naning Umali was on their hit list, in fact.) Only with Magsaysay’s death did President Carlos Garcia pardon an innocent man. If alternative history disturbs you, it must be because “the past is present still.”

Revolutionary Routes: Elias wrestling the crocodile

By Elmer Ordonez

IN the center of Tiaong, Quezon, stands a run-down mansion with a sculpture of Elias, the rebel in Rizal’s Noli , wrestling a crocodile. Both house and sculpture were designed by Tomas Mapua for the Herrera-Umali family in 1928 in a period of growing radicalism. The Elias sculpture may well be the “objective correlative” of Angela Stuart Santiago’ s Revolutionary Routes, a family saga dating back to early people’s struggles during the colonial/post-colonial periods.

As Nita Umali-Berthelsen (the author’s aunt) notes: “The crocodile was a symbol of greed. The struggle between Elias and the monster gave rise to many suppositions, some flattering, others not at all.” (Tayabas Chronicles, The Early Years, 1886-1907, 2002). Revolutionary Routes (2011) sheds new light on the context and meaning of the sculpture.

Creative non-fiction is a relatively new term for biography/autobiography, family chronicles, memoirs, and other literary forms that hew closely to fact but may be written in a style akin to fiction, modern or post-modern, with an eye for detail. As family history, Revolutionary Routes focuses on five characters, forebears of the author, starting with Paula, a peasant woman from Bina-ngonan. who marries Julio Herrera of Tiaong. For refusing to pay the exorbitant fee for the church burial of a child cholera victim, and burying instead the remains outside the church, Paula is jailed and then forced to walk with four guardia civiles from Tiaong to Tayabas. This recalls the experience of Rizal’s mother who was accused wrongly and made to walk from Calamba to Sta. Cruz, Laguna to be jailed.

Paula’s husband, Julio Her-rera, is also a peasant who manages to acquire land which produce enables them to send their son, Isidro, to school. He works as personal secretary of the commissioner of religious affairs, escribano, and notary. Through diligence Isidro Her-rera becomes a landowner who actively takes part in the revolution, and is jailed by the Americans.

A rising young politician Manuel Quezon befriends the Herreras and plays a role in the misfortune of Isidro’s son-in-law, Tomas Umali of Lipa, Batangas.

Tomas Umali, lawyer/writer running a school in Manila, meets Conchita Herrera, and doesn’t relent his courtship which leads to their union in marriage. He gives up his school and law practice in the city, and settles with Conchita in Tiaong. Quezon and Tomas are partners in a railroad expropriation case in the province. Later Umali is charged with estafa but Quezon, on his way to become resident commissioner in the US Congress, is not. Tomas flees to Macau where he joins the revolutionary council made up of political exiles Artemio Ricarte, Vicente Sotto, Macario Adriatico, and others. In time no less than US president William Howard Taft intervenes toward Umali’s exoneration in the railroad expropriation case. Who was behind this? The author speculates it was Quezon himself or his fellow masons who had earlier abandoned him.

Tomas’s son-in-law Crisos-tomo Salcedo’s run-in with Vicente Umali in UP law school yet and later over the job of justice of the peace in Tiaong is said to be at the root of his tragedy. Both are members of the PQOG (President Quezon’s Own Guerrillas); their rift ends with the brutal murder of Crisostomo.

Narciso Umali, Tomas’s son, also a guerrilla officer, enters post-war politics marked by electoral fraud in 1949 when Elpidio Quirino won over Jose P. Laurel in what was then said to be the dirtiest election ever. Narciso wins as Nacionalista congressman but is later falsely charged with rebellion complex with murder and arson over the Huk raid and burning of the house of the town mayor and the death of some policemen. This is the most trying ordeal of the Herrera-Umali family who struggle, Sisyphus-like, to win justice for Narciso. In 1958 Narciso is pardoned by President Carlos Garcia, and outlives all his tormentors.

The above summary does not do justice to the rich but somber tapestry that the author weaves from family memoirs, testimonies, letters, newspaper clippings, published historical material, court orders, petitions and interviews. It catalogues the friar abuses, corruption, double dealing in patronage politics, insurrections, and colonial /neocolonial greed as well as the customs, mores and cuisine at the turn of the century. In parts the book reads like a Jacobean play full of intrigue, betrayal, violence, and retribution.

The Narciso Umali case occurred during the height of the anti-communist drive involving President Magsaysay and his CIA adviser Col Lansdale in the early 50s. (My older brother, a scout ranger, was killed in action in 1953. As student and later instructor in UP I saw and became a victim of McCarthyite witch-hunting on campus.)

Revolutionary Routes is not only a social history of Tayabas but of a feudal/colonial country marked by rebellions and oligarchic politics. Historian Reynaldo Ileto says the book could well be an alternative history of the Philippines.

The author admits to an “anti-colonial bias” in writing the book. But aren’t histories written from the “perspective” of victors in the war or those who were vanquished and exploited by colonialism? Who else will express the racial memory and struggles of a people but writers and artists bearing witness.

Revolutionary Routes is indeed creative non-fiction at its best.

Revolutionary Routes @ ManilArt 2011

will be at ManilArt 2011, the 3rd Philippine International Art Fair, today at 4 p.m. onwards (ehem :)

Book signing of “Revolutionary Routes” by Angela Stuart Santiago with guest National Artist for Literature Bienvenido Lumbera

August 26, 2011
NBC Tent, Bonifacio Global City
Taguig, Philippines

book’s still at launch price of P300, ManilArt entrance P200.  see you!

the path for Revolutionary Routes

by katrina stuart santiago

it was daunting more than anything else, though at some point all that operated was an amount of yabang: i’ve seen friends do this before, i’ve seen wonderful beautiful local books happen without a big publisher behind it, without press releases coming out in papers. and this book, i knew, deserved the major major effort of blood/sweat/tears because it is about family and history. because it is unconventional in form, an almost refusal to fall within the genres that are familiar, a straddling among creative non-fiction/historical essay/memoir. because it demanded a freedom from the standard limitations of publishing, given its refusal as well to deal with the ways in which things are usually written, how they usually look, what can usually be said.

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