There are now efforts at the national level to revisit the historical legacy of Isabelo delos Reyes – scholar, journalist, labor leader, and revolutionary.
BY LYN V. RAMO
Northern Dispatch
Posted by Bulatlat
Vol. VII, No. 20, June 24-30, 2007
BAGUIO CITY (246 kms north of Manila) – Redeem the interest in the works and life of Isabelo delos Reyes – a revolutionary, a great Ilocano, a patriot and a homegrown intellectual who was among the first to envision the Filipino nation.
This was what the resource speaker seemed to tell students and faculty of the University of the Philippines (UP) here as they remembered the great Ilocano hero during a lecture last week. The lecture served as the inauguration for the centennial lecture series which is being held as part of the university’s 99th Anniversary Week.
Invited to lead the recollection on the patriot’s life and works was Prof. Resil Mojares, himself a distinguished writer and recorder of Philippine culture and history.
Mojares, who flew in from Cebu City, said there is some sort of a rediscovery at present as efforts are being done on the national level to retrieve whatever is left of the archives Isabelo delos Reyes started some 120 years ago. Original manuscripts and published materials at the National Museum are now being re-encoded, and translated for the public.
Mojares described Delos Reyes, among others, as an Ilocano writer and journalist, homegrown intellectual, the father of Filipino folklore, and historian who aspired to write Philippine history independently of his contemporary historians Jose Rizal and Pedro Paterno.
“He is a man of many projects,” Mojares said of Delos Reyes.
As a historian, he first wrote the history of the Visayas, Mojares said.
“In 1885, he referred to himself as the brother of the forest dwellers, referring to the Aetas, Igorots, and Tingguians,” Mojares told his young audience. He envisioned a nation in his aspiration to collect works, knowledge and evidence of folklore, Mojares also said. Mojares noted that his works were then not fully appreciated, much less recognized.
As a journalist, Delos Reyes knew his audience and had a sense of his public, according to Mojares, as evidenced by his multi-lingual writings and journalistic outputs. Delos Reyes wrote mainly in Spanish, but saw to it that he had his work translated in Philippine languages such as Iloco, Cebuano, and Tagalog. He even translated classic works in Iloco for his local readers to appreciate. He wrote comedia, which was then the popular form of literature.
Delos Reyes also founded the first vernacular newspaper, the El Iloco, in 1889.
As a prisoner in 1897, he took pains interviewing Katipuneros among the prisoners and wrote the history of Andres Bonifacio’s Katipunan at the Bilibid prisons. He was later sent to a prison in Barcelona, Spain where he came into contact with European political activists
He returned in 1901 and together with Pascual Poblete, another nationalist, put up a pro-labor newspaper, El Grito del Pueblo, and later became the first president of the first national labor union in the country, the Union Obrero Democratica (UOD).
Mojares did not fail to mention the contribution of the Ilocano revolutionary in the founding of the Iglesia Filipina Independiente (IFI or Philippine Independent Church), or the Aglipayan church in 1902.
“He was also a politician,” Mojares quipped. Delos Reyes was councilor of Manila when he returned from Spain. Later, he was elected senator from Ilocos in 1922, when senators were voted by their respective districts.
Dr. Eleanor Imson, who was among the audience in Mojares’ talk, has been translating the works of Isabelo delos Reyes. “It is hard re-encoding the Spanish text,” she told Nordis, “especially (since) words have evolved through time and that there were a considerable number of typographical errors in the original text.”
Imson, a UP Baguio professor, started working on Delos Reyes’ works in the early 1980s, and was able to finish her first volume of translations in 1984. She stopped for a while when she left the university, and resumed in 2004.
“Technology advance makes the work harder because I had to re-encode what I (had) done before, when I used to work on Wordstar and Wordperfect, she said in jest. Nevertheless, she said the work is worth it.
According to Imson, it takes one who is learned in Spanish to be able to do a Delos Reyes. She said the translation work will help rekindle the people’s interest in the works of the great Ilocano writer, journalist, historian, labor leader, politician, and revolutionary. Northern Dispatch / Posted by(Bulatlat.com)
