This writer originally wrote in Spanish this illustrated novel about the common Locsin ancestor Sin Loc because this language, Spanish, happens to be the original language of the Locsin family and clan, until its new generations were educated in English with the imposition of U.S. WASP colonialism over these Islands. Were it not for this genocidal colonialism, there is no doubt that Spanish would have continued to be the language of all the Locsins along with the entire Filipino people of today.

Don Aurelio Locsin y Lacson, Tío Iyo to us, clearly told us this fact along with Tía Chóleng, his wife, who’s letter to this writer follows in its English translation.

Also included in this book is the article of Don Aurelio about the relevance of Spanish to the national Filipino identity and the destruction that would be wrought upon the new generations of Filipinos if its unnecessary suppression were carried out, as, indeed, it has been carried out so senselessly. The Philippines of our days, as a result of that destruction is the Asian basket case, to say the least.

Here is the letter to this writer from Doña Soledad Lacson de Locsin, or Tía Chóleng to us, just after Tío Iyo passed away. This letter was published in our magazine EL MAESTRO in Manila in its number corresponding to May, June, July of 1974. The original Spanish of this letter is reproduced at the latter part of this article.

“Dear Guillermo: My children and I neither expected that your Tío Aurelio was going to leave us so soon and so suddenly, even if it is true that he was already unwell in his health since last November due to his last stroke brought about by mental stress from his work. Of this he had recovered totally after one month of hospitalization and rest. Until two days before his death he would daily report to his office, —- he was very insistent in working and he begged to be left with his work because it made him feel better, —- attending with dilligence to his usual chores as the Chairman of the Historical Commission of Negros Oriental.”

“He suffered a lot during the 48 hours that preceded his death. And when the end caught up with him, he was in full possession of his faculties. He was serene, dignified and brave in his acceptance of the inevitable. “

“Your Tío Aurelio also felt a great affection for you, a sincere admiration, a high regard. This is so because aside from those mysterious ties that are demanded by the voice of blood, he saw in you the prototype and the fruit of what he had forged in his mind about the reality of a chosen generation, formed from the best of what is the Malayan, the Latin and the Anglo-Saxon elements in us. He admired the multifaceted manifestations of your attractive personality as a man of culture and spirituality, your idealism, your healthy and progressive ideas, your love for study and work… Like a father he was overseeing with pride over the son that carries the same blood as his… perhaps, who knows, with certain sadness due to the premonition that the final leg of his journey would soon come and that he would not be able to see what he had so dreamed about, so much.”

“His young colleagues in the Police Advisory Council in the Historical Commission now remember with emotion his words during the last days of his existence: ‘We the elderly will not always be here; it is now your turn… I am in a hurry to put everything in order and complete them all so that, tomorrow, you, the young people, shall be able to take charge of everything. “

“This is so because your Tío Aurelio placed his hopes for the Fatherland in young people like you: disciplined, with healthy ideals, capable and ready to get themselves involved in the service of the community. (Sgd) SOLEDAD L. LOCSIN, P.O. Box 27, Silay City, Negros Occidental.”

In response to this message, this writer wrote the novel about Sin Loc in Spanish in order to primarily dedicate it to the memory of Don Aurelio, Doña Soledad and even to Doña Dolores L. Consing, (Tía Lolita) with whom this writer would always communicate in Spanish during his short visits to Bacolod and Silay Cities. And, of course to her son, Lope, a good friend and an active organizer of the Locsin Clan Reunion under the auspices of the Locsin Foundation with a house in 5 de noviembre, Silay City.

Don Aurelio Locsin y Lacson was the publisher of at least two newspapers in Spanish in Negros Occidental: El Centinela de Negros and later on, Civismo, which the undersigned used to read during his sojourn in Iloilo City. Let all Locsins, nay all Filipinos, read his thoughts about Spain and the Spanish language in the Philippines.  //GGR

“CIVISMO” IN THE SERVICE OF THE (SPANISH) LANGUAGE

By D. AURELIO L. LOCSIN
(Bacolod City)

The greatness of Spain lies in her Faith, in her Catholic Religion. In the words of one of her most eloquent writers in prose, Menéndez Pelayo, “in it’s divine scheme of things, it assigned Spain with the highest destiny among all the highests of destinies of human history, to complement the planet by erasing all the old boundaries of the world… Spain was, or believed to be, the people of God, assigned to echo the words of Christ over the peoples she conquered… and each Spaniard, like Joshua, felt in him enough faith and strength to bring down walls… or to detain the Sun in its race… Of Spain was the Faith that would move mountains from their place.”

The propagation of the Faith of Christ was the magnificent obsession of Felipe IV who said” I would give all the treasures of the Indies for the conversion of but one soul.” To all those peoples that were brought within her sphere of influence and her leadership, Spain made the generous gift of her Faith and her language, giving, so to speak, all her soul. And with these, She bequeathed upon them the spiritual and cultural accretions of the centuries, the positive achievements of her works.

Displaced today from her leadership among the nations of the world, Spain continues to reign spiritually in her Christian Faith that is professed by three fourths of humanity. And in the deep universality of her language spoken by twenty countries, Spain forms, with the Philippines, what we know today as Hispanidad (Hispanity).

The preservation of the Spanish language in the Philippines is a challenge which we, Filipinos, cannot evade with honor.

A lot of honor is involved in the wide vision and statesmanship of some of our legislators who have achieved in getting both our Legislative chambers to pass laws enforcing the teaching of Spanish in our educational institutions. But such teaching has much to be desired. Yet inspite of this, the first steps have been taken for the study of Spanish by the Solidaridad Filipino-Hispana, the colleges and schools administered by Spanish priests. And we who love with fervor this language have high hopes that these measures already taken will mean the happy and vigorous renaissance of Spanish here.

With regard Spain, She continues with her concurrence, the establishment of the Academia Filipina, a correspondent of the Royal Spanish Academy, with the offering of twenty scholarships for especial yearly studies in Madrid for Filipino professors of Spanish, with the profuse distribution of books, magazines and informative pamphlets and with the decided support for the Hispanic Clubs of this country.

There are, however, some hidden tendencies of prejudices and hatred against the propagation of Spanish coming from an aggressive minority of Filipinos in the education field for our youth. This is due, in part, to their lack of knowledge on the intrinsic and cultural value of Spanish and of its universal dimensions. On the other hand there appears to be a narrow regionalism that confuses principles for facts.

All countries that deem themselves as cultured should cultivate other languages aside from their own. Charles the Fifth used to say that the more languages are possessed by one man, he multiplies himself as a man. And Goeth, the distinguished German poet, considers ignorant of his own language, any person who ignores foreign languages.

What better other language to cultivate aside from our own? Spanish in its opulent maturity responds to our intimate aspirations as a people who believe in imperishable values. Moreover, Spanish is so closely linked to our four-century history and to our culture, that to eliminate or suppress it, is to entirely uproot our own roots, renege on our own history, squander our precious patrimony, and be like a castrated and maddened race, without any tradition nor past to guide us toward the future, annul our own identity as a people.

The imperatives that should move us to cultivate and preserve Spain go beyond sentimental compulsions: the ties that unite us with Spain, the enchantment of the sonorous and musical accents and the dexterous grace and majesty of the Spanish language. For our own sake, for our own instinct of conservation, for reasons of nationalism, we have to preserve this language.

In Spanish is poured the ideas and patriotic desire and the dreams of unity of our early leaders. In Spanish wrote our greatest poets and prose writers immortal pieces that can be counted among the precious gems of human thought. Spanish is the ardent vehicle of expression of our great thinkers, among these Graciano López Jaena who was spontaneously acclaimed in Spain by the Spaniards themselves. Our libertarian struggles was made history in Spanish through the works of Rizal, del Pilar and Mabini, in the deliberations of the constituents of Malolos, in the revolutionary proclamations, in the speeches of our parlamentarians and statesmen.

The future generations who shall be deprived of Spanish will have to search for basic orientation and incentives for nationalism from indirect sources such as the translations of their words which may be good in form but defective in their fidelity. What was created and enriched in Spanish by our heroic writers will hardly be repeated in both English and Tagalog.

Could there be a greater heresy than a Filipino reading and declaiming the Último Adios in a language which is not the same as the one used by Rizal himself in his thoughts and in his writings? This was a question raised by the illustrious Senator Claro M. Recto.

And as he had already said it with accuracy and gentlemanliness when he spoke of Spain and her spiritual legacy, Claro M. Recto said that: “Spanish is something that is ours, us, consubstantial, due to the laws of history and the national soul, due to reasons given by our present and our future as a people. Without Spanish, our inventory of values in our national patrimony and culture shall be greatly damaged and the future prefiguration of our nationality shall be in tatters. This is so because the language of Cervantes has profound roots in the history of our nationality that cannot be pulled out without falsifying its reason for being; it has profound roots in our national soul that cannot be pulled out without reducing to nothing our sense of being, and it also has profound roots in our soul that cannot be pulled out so long as there stands a temple in our cities and towns and in each one of those temples a holy cross, crowning them with a perennial splendor, with the divine promise that at the other side of Calvary are resurrection, glory and eternity.”

Before ending, permit me gentlemen, to explain as corollary to this act, my own fervent wishes that Spanish must not only become a mere footnote to the historic past of our Islands, but the language of the future of the Filipino people. If due to adverse circumstances this wish can not be fulfilled in the present, we can still hope for as the poet (Manuel Bernabé) wrote “in the course of time, Spain shall return for love always comes back.”

Speaking of dignity, self-respect, the instinct of national preservation through the defense of one’s own national language and national sovereignty, we need to point out as an example the recent rejection of U.S. Statehood with all its publicized “dollar benefits” on the part of the majority of  Puerto Ricans in a recent national plebiscite they held on December 13, 1998.

Like Cuba and the Philippines, Puerto Rico was grabbed by the U.S.A. from Spain in 1898 which explains the common Hispanic language and culture shared by these three former Spanish oversea provinces.

Of these three countries, it is the Philippines that should be fervently invited by the U.S.A. to become one of its States, possibly the 51st U.S. State, because unlike Cuba and Puerto Rico it is the Philippines that has odiously and foolishly discarded the Spanish language as an official language, inspite of purportedly honoring a national hero like José Rizal who wrote his nationalistic MESSAGE in Spanish.

And, it is also a slavishly neocolonial  Philippines that is even destroying its own native languages, primarily Tagalog, by officially ramming into them the English-Taglish Alphabet.

Choosing the wrong country

But, vile humiliation of vile humiliations, it is Puerto Rico, and not the Philippines, that is being benevolently retained by the U.S.A. as “a free Associate State” with the expectation that it may freely accept U.S. Statehood as evidenced by the latest “non-binding” plebiscite it held with the result that the Puerto Ricans have unbelievably rejected U.S. Statehood.

We say “unbelievably rejected” because as one of the nearly 80 million Filipinos by birth, this writer is almost sure that if a similar plebiscite were held today in the Philippines, the possibility of accepting and voting for U.S. Statehood on the part of Filipinos can be overwhelming.

That overwhelming vote for U.S. Statehood can be clearly discerned by the daily long line of Filipinos applying to immigrate to the U.S. mainland as well as the likewise long line  (pila or fila) to go to any part of the vast U.S. territory, like Guam or the former Hawaii, (now the 50th State), and stay there even as one more TNT (Tago-ng-Tago) or overstaying alien with the hope of at last becoming a U.S. citizen even if  a fourth class one because of skin, color and face.

Then, there is the case of the Filipino veterans that fought America’s war in Asia in the 1940s. These Filipino veterans are still waiting for  a magnanimous grant of  U.S. citizenship, which they can not pass on to their descendants. They are also waiting, and literally dying, for whatever pension crumbs that have been promised them since over fifty years ago.  Many of them have really died in their old age while waiting in vain.

7.  Was the Filipino State mortgaged and hocked? Was it gross betrayed? Will the Filipinos remain to be stateless even in their own country?

Thus, because of the confusion wrought upon the national psyche of the Filipino people through the implacable requirement of the English language,  —-over Tagalog-Filipino and Spanish—-  the Filipino State has ended up being a virtually lost property to the Filipino people.

The confusion and chaos wrought upon the Filipino language and compulsory English has somehow resulted in  the virtual mortgage of the Filipino State to the U.S. WASP banks and to whatever they may deign dictate over the destiny of Filipinos.

The solution to this betrayal could, perhaps,  be the out-right rejection of the use of the English language on the part of a more respectable Filipino people,——-unless the U.S. government and people take in the Philippines as a State of their Union and assume all the debts, which they themselves did impose upon the Filipino State through slavish Filipino politicians in the first place.

If the U.S. chooses not  take in the Philippines as a State,—-even as a Free Associate state like Puerto Rico—-, the rejection of English must be immediately started by the Filipino people themselves to give way to their own national language as their tool of education, and real freedom and independence, (at least in language and culture) so that the Filipino State will at last acquire a better share of that attribute called “national sovereignty”.

The present ruin of the Philippine economy, and the doormat situation of the Filipino State, —-threatened as it is into becoming a narco-tate—, calls for a  solution such as the one  recommended even if our politicians may still remain as incurably pro-American at their own risk, of course.

Filipinos in general have nothng to lose after all. Anyway, with compulsory English, it is only a few Filipino betrayers and scalawags who can get rich through corruption (i.e. political power) in order to somehow avoid the moral suffering, the actual poverty and the miserable penury imposed upon the majority.

The rest of the Filipino people, as it is now seen and known, are simply being condemned to abject poverty, and stultifying ignorance due to the frequent miseries of over-expensive electricity, over expensive and scarce food, no medical attention, lack of potable water and a deadly environmental destruction through pollution.

In the end, the majority of Filipinos must ask themselves what economic relief, what social benefit can they really get from talking in a mostly fractured English now known as Taglish? Employment as over-sea domestic maids, drivers, entertainers, prostitutes, —-including the child and male varieties?

This degradation upon which the ordinary Filipino job-seeker is forced into, has even turned the name ‘Filipino’ and ‘Filipina’ to mean ‘domestic help’ or servant in the English language.

Is this the reserved place for Filipinos in the English speaking world?

Can the Filipino people ever recover the national honor they once had when they were still a predominantly Spanish-speaking people? Or, will Filipinos need to become totally Chinese in order to recover some honor for themselves?

In time, will Filipinos ever be able to recover their State from its U.S. WASP mortgagees that come as foreign banks and neocolonizing impositions and conditions? Or, will Filipinos just go on being stateless even in their own country because economically marginalized through a whimsical globalization in un-phonetic English?

*** Webmaster’s Note: Guillermo Gomez Rivera is a Premio Zobel awardee, a member of the Academia Filipina and former National Language Committee Secretary, Philippine Constitutional Convention 1971-73.