Today in Philippine history and my own

Still exhilarated, a feeling innate in being freed from foreign rule, Spain and then the United States, in this case, Filipinos 69 years ago today, welcomed back with mourning, the “mortal remains” of Manuel Luis Quezon, who fought for and won the Philippines’ independence with sheer stature and brilliance. 

To review: Two years earlier, Quezon had died of TB in Lake Saranac, New York, just a breath short of flinging open windows for the risen dawn, as promised in the 1944 Tydings-McDuffie Act that he pushed unrelenting, but World War II intervened; he had fled to the US with his government-in-exile as its first Commonwealth president, while he served as member of the Pacific War Council until he was taken ill.

Perhaps, more than the 18,000 who witnessed the raising of the Philippines’ tricolor while retiring the Star-Spangled Banner on the Fourth, signaling our nation’s birth, The Official Gazette of July 1946 mentions a throng, which lined the passage of his funeral cortege from the Pier of Manila, where the USS Princeton  bearing his body anchored, to Malacañang.

How grandly detailed the necrological services, eulogies, and funeral led by then-newly sworn-in first Philippine Republic President Manuel Roxas, his Vice President Elpidio Quirino, and Cabinet luminaries that school children would idealize for generations.

Possibly about the same time the funeral cortege streamed through then-Dewey Boulevard toward Malacañang, a family far north in Bacarra, Ilocos Norte, just recovering from war wounds and just getting used to independence, whirled about an opposite event—the birth of the first baby in their clan.

My mother would attach Aurora, as a second name  in what I had wondered as a grownup about its truth long after I learned that she borrowed it from “the great Quezon’s widow.” Had not my father dropped it for Alegria, the first of my two names, who knows, it might have pulled me along the same path of service to charity, and a flawless life of faith and piety, which the self-effacing widow led.

Though my fate took quite a fork, the spirit of the day when I bawled my birth has hovered in my life. To begin with, tattered vestiges of my father’s family, included a life-sized portrait of an old man in dark Americana, who I had claimed appeared as a ghost, watching me play as a toddler; he turned out to be my paternal grandfather, Rafael Albano, who served as presidente municipal  (mayor) under Quezon’s Commonwealth government.

While politics as a family pursuit ended with him, it had fed intense discussions among uncles and older cousins, all Nacionalistas of Quezon’s party, which swirled in my growing-up years; my father sustained it on his own later with Letters to the Editor on political affairs.

Could such passion have dented my consciousness? While my sister and I carry on so like Papa these days of murky Philippine politics that we gather from TFC, I have toned down my activism to heritage and culture especially—had it not been for Quezon— our Wikang Pambansa.

But in truth, I owe more fuel to such passion to a Letranite like Quezon. Unknown to Felix N. Imperial II, his casual telling of how aspiring lawyers like him once, jostled on Letran Day to trace Quezon’s own carving of his name on his student’s desk, gifted me with the hero’s palpable presence.

I also learned from Felix, who later became restoration architect of Intramuros, that the walls fronting Letran had to be breached when Quezon, bursting with triumph after the passing of the Tydings McDuffie Act, wished to offer it to his alma mater.

That afternoon, he led me through the Quezon Gap, as it has been called since, I felt I had really met Quezon, and driven by romance though still puzzled by its significance, I revealed to him, my then-future husband, my hidden name, Aurora