The best of Quezon

First, I admit my ignorance. I knew very little of Manuel L. Quezon, other than a name I had to memorize as the president of the Philippine Commonwealth when I was a student. I also did not know that Senator Edgardo Angara was now into writing and publishing books. So Monday’s launch of Quezon, the book at Sofitel was a double treat.

Quezon is remembered for saying “I would prefer a government run like hell by Filipinos to one run like heaven by Americans”. It may be exaggerated but it drove his point for self-determination. It has since been used to mock American pretensions of teaching us how to govern ourselves.

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Like Rizal, he also believed in cultivating a national language to unite the country. We have learned belatedly that Filipinos belong to two classes: the rich and middle class who speak and think in English (I am no exception) and the poor who speak Pilipino (my driver and helpers at home). And that division has stayed making us a perpetually colonized and divided country. It has been argued that it would be backward to make the national language the lingua franca. Too difficult even it would strengthen our national identity. Instead we are learning English because it is the universally acceptable language for jobs. And since we send millions of Filipinos to look for jobs outside the Philippines, then English should be our language.

Critics also add that people of other nations ie Koreans, Chinese, Arabs come here to learn English. Their quest for English fluency is different. They know who they are and to learn English is an adjunct, a skill, not the language of their souI. Quezon understood this so he pushed for it in the 1935 Constitution and became known at the “Father of the National Language.”

But for all his dedication to independence for the Philippines, he could not alter the American agenda of manifest destiny, bent as they were in making Filipinos their wards. He submitted a petition for Philippine sovereignty as one of his first acts in Congress. “I came with a mandate to work for the immediate independence of the Philippine Islands…to the best of my ability, I have done everything I could to carry out that mandate.”

But he was soon to grow weary of the struggle although he hid it from the public because he was a true leader. He would not show to Filipinos any weakness of resolve. “I wondered in my own mind, if the freedom which we lost by fighting America could not be won by cooperating with her” he wrote in his autobiography “The Good Fight.” It will take another book whether he was justified in thinking that.

But for all that was said and written in this book, I was struck most by what he said in a letter he wrote to Teodoro M. Kalaw on October 26, 1908:

“I think I shall throw all politics out of the window as soon as I finish my present political commitment. A politician’s road is strewn with thorns and thistles. This is not the kind of life I long for. I want tranquility, the calm of body and spirit. I would even as, if it could only be had for a life of blissful unconsciousness. (CNP: premonitions of death?)

“I am tired of this world. It is ugly both outwardly and inwardly. It contains no attractions whatsoever, unless these be the solitude of the country, the beauty of the mountain slopes and the riverbanks. You will say I am turning (into a) poet. No. I am only seeing too clearly the realities of life and, what is worse, am already tasting it.”

For all his ambition and successes, he understood life’s follies. To me, this is the best of Quezon. It was the measure of the man and the lesson that should be passed on to the next generations of Filipinos.

Quezon is lucky that another son of Baler would bring out his love of a simple but meaningful life.

In his introduction to the book, Senator Edgardo Angara writes: “People visiting Baler these days still wonder why the province has remained generally isolated, despite its having produced the first Philippine president. The truth is that Quezon was reluctant to open up Baler to unrestrained modernization. He wanted to preserve its natural beauty, to keep it unspoiled by the aggravations of development.”

Of course.. he wanted a home to go to after he was through with politics.

Now for the small ad — buy the book. It is a coffee table book, too big to read in bed but as co-author Sonia Pinto Ner said, we would not have been able to reproduce the beautiful pictures if we had a printed it in pocketbook size, with more words than pictures. She is probably right because the pictures did bring out a by-gone era alive especially the sartorial elegance of both Filipinos and Americans (cutaway suits, shirts and tie [the Americana?] etc.), when they discussed the future of the Philippines.

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It is part of our family lore that my father, Raymundo F. Navarro (a poor boy from Paete, Laguna), who became one of the first Filipinos in motion pictures, made a documentary of the family life of the Quezons. His movie company, the Parlatone-Hispano Filipino, typified the cultural struggle in the transition from Spanish to American periods. The Quezon family documentary is now lost but we often hear people telling us to look for it in Hawaii because a copy was sent there.

Quezon’s time was a transition period and Filipinos in other fields were coping with the new circumstances. It was through Mexican entrepreneurs that Filipinos sought to reach other countries about films on the Philippines. Nick de Ocampo in his book Cine: Spanish influence in Early Cinema in the Philippines writes on these efforts of Parlatone Hispano Filipino. He said my father used the Spanish language as the means to get at the foreign market.

“My company’s ambition is to invade the foreign market and overcome the obstacle that hinder our films from circulating the vast cities of America and Europe,” Navarro said.

The first Filipino film to be exported by Parlatone was Diwa ng Karagatan (Goddess of the Sea) directed by Carlos Vander Tolosa and starred Rogelio de la Rosa and Mari Velez.