The misunderstood Remedios Trinidad Romualdez

This week, on May 1, 1954, Imelda Romualdez married Ferdinand E. Marcos in a church ceremony. This was the religious side of the marriage, as they already had a civil one where a judge married them on April 17, 1954. But this week is also the birth week of Imelda's mother, Remedios Trinidad, a woman misunderstood and maligned by many. Throughout the lives of Imelda’s parents, Vicente Orestes Romualdez and Maria Remedios Trinidad, many details about them and their families have been embellished, exaggerated, or even wrongly told over the years. Admittedly, Remedios Trinidad’s story and that of her family are not as well-known as that of her husband. Those that display her birth information all say that Remedios Trinidad was born on April 5, 1902, in Baliuag, Bulacan. Her baptismal record, however, shows that she was born on May 5, 1901, not April 5, 1902, and she was born in Santa Cruz, Manila. She was the first-born child of Leoncio Trinidad (from Baliuag) and Marciana de Guzman (from Barasoain, Bulacan).

A popular book on Imelda Marcos claims that Remedios’s family was from Capiz, which we know is not true. The Bulakenyo website says that Marciana was from Capiz and that Trinidad’s father was “unknown” and that “there have been suggestions that her father was a priest”. This clearly is not true since both Remedios Trinidad’s baptismal and marriage records clearly indicate her father’s name as well as her mother’s roots in Bulacan. She had two siblings: Ricardo and Regina. It has also been written that Remedios’s parents had an ambulant kind of business. Due to their ambulant nature of work, Leoncio and Marciana were probably always on the road. At some point in her life, Remedios started living in the Asilo de San Vicente de Paul in Paco, Manila. The Asilo, while primarily an orphanage, was also an institution dedicated to “educate poor girls”. The girls in the Asilo followed a regular schedule of schooling and learned some kind of craft, particularly embroidery, and needlework.

Remedios was probably left by her parents in the convent so she could have some sort of education. It is most likely her stay at the convent that later led many writers to assume that she was of humble origin. And it could not be denied that her parents’ source of income was not exactly considered a blue-blooded profession. Nevertheless, despite staying in an orphanage and despite her parents’ source of income, her Trinidad lineage and many more ancestors can be traced to a long line of capitanes and cabezas de barangay in Baliuag, Bulacan.

When she married Vicente Orestes, he was a widower at 43 while Trinidad was 27 --theirs was truly a whirlwind relationship. Perhaps similarities can be drawn with their eldest daughter’s 11-day courtship with Ferdinand Marcos years later, but their daughter would be a willing participant in her relationship with the future president of the Philippines, while Vicente Orestes and Remedios were thrown together without their hearts being into it. Her marriage to Vicente Orestes has been described in not-so-flattering terms, and some have indicated that she never got along with her husband. However, for a marriage that was not a happy one, having six children seems a little contradictory. Their six children were: Imelda Remedios Visitacion, Carlos Benjamin Orestes, Alita, Alfredo, Armando, and Conchita Esperanza. When her youngest child was not yet even one year old, Remedios Trinidad passed away, due to pneumonia in San Miguel, Manila, on April 7, 1938, and was buried at the La Loma Catholic cemetery two days later, on April 9, 1938, the same cemetery where Vicente Orestes’s first wife, Juanita Acereda, was buried.

She was most misunderstood and maligned even after death, mainly because of what her daughter and son-in-law later became. But Remedios Trinidad Romualdez had her own story to tell which deserves to be told.