Doc Prudente: Nationalist Educator

By Nelson A. Navarro

This book was how Nemesio E. Prudente came to be known from 1962, when Pres. Diosdado Macapagal appointed him president of Philippine College of Commerce, a school so obscure he did not know where it was. 

The 35-year-old Doc said PIC had been “treated like a street child” neglected and poor.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anvil Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Nov 2, 2017
• ISBN: 9789712729218

Book preview

DOC PRUDENTE

NATIONALIST EDUCATOR

By Nelson A. Navarro

ANVILLOGOBLACK2

DOC PRUDENTE

Nationalist Educator

Copyright to this digital edition © 2011 by

Heirs of Nemesio E. Prudente

Anvil Publishing, Inc.

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in

any form or by any means without the

written permission from the copyright owners.

Published and exclusively distributed by

ANVIL PUBLISHING, INC.

7th Floor, Quad Alpha Centrum

125 Pioneer Street, Mandaluyong City

1550 Philippines

Sales & Marketing: (632) 4774752, 4774755 to 57

Fax: [phone]

[e-mail]

www.anvilpublishing.com

Book design by Ibarra Crisostomo

ISBN 9789712729218 (e-book)

Version 1.0.1

FOREWORD

Dr. Nemesio E. Prudente was a man who deeply loved and unfailingly served his country all his life. What makes him an exemplary person and a role model for the youth is that he always reserved a special place in his heart for the poor and the underprivileged, and he believed that for democracy to be truly human and meaningful, all citizens must have access to quality education, which he called the essential equalizing factor in an oppressive and deeply divided society. The Polytechnic University of the Philippines (formerly Philippine College of Commerce) is living proof of and a proud monument to the man’s life-long devotion to the cause of popular education and freedom.

I first met the man we all affectionately call Doc in 1967, when I was a struggling young lawyer fresh out of the University of the Philippines College of Law. He gave me a part-time teaching job at the old PCC on Lepanto Street, which helped me make ends meet and allowed me to be in the frontlines of student activism in Manila’s University Belt. PCC under the leadership of Doc was, in many ways, an extension of the student politics of my UP days. Filipino nationalism was in flower and we were crusading against American imperialism, the war in Vietnam, the presence of Clark and Subic bases in the country and the U.S. stranglehold over our economy. I fought for all these causes as a university councillor of the UP Student Council, my initiation into the rough and tumble world of Philippine politics.

Doc Prudente was a staunch and fearless leader who did not hesitate to take on the Marcos regime. Activists of all kinds and causes were welcome at his office and it was there that we spent many hours after school discussing social change and reform, dreaming of Filipino greatness and prosperity.

Doc Prudente was more than my employer; he was a personal adviser and true friend. When Dr. Elenita Sombillo and I were married on July 4, 1972, on the eve of martial law, Doc and Ruth Prudente were our sponsors in a hastily arranged ceremony. I was detained when Marcos seized power, but Doc eluded capture. For the next 14 years, as Doc alternately fought in the underground and was twice thrown into Marcos’ jails, we were comrades-in-arms, sharing moments of struggle and disappointment, and never giving up the fight.

With the triumph of People Power at Edsa, we resumed the open political work that had been brutally interrupted by the dictatorship. Doc went back to his beloved school, raising it to even greater heights; I turned my attention to Makati politics. Twice, in 1987 and 1988, Doc was the object of assassination attempts by right-wing death squads; this was at the time when the Cory administration itself was in constant danger of being overthrown. Doc and I joined our countrymen and women in rallying to the cause of President Aquino and democracy.

Doc Prudente spent most of his post-Edsa as well as his early retirement years in Makati, just a short walk from where my family lived and still lives. We had many occasions to share ideas and talk about old times. To this day, I am president of the PUP’s Bagong Katipunan Foundation, which Doc had set up for the benefit of poor but deserving students.

There are many lessons to be learned from the life of Doc Prudente, a Filipino patriot, lover of freedom and dedicated family man. I am glad that this biography has been written to celebrate and preserve the timeless legacy of a great man.

Honorable Jejomar C. Binay

Vice President

Republic of the Philippines

TABLE OF CONTENTS

The opinions expressed are those solely of the author.

A portion of the proceeds from sale of this book will help bright and economically compromised students acquire their university degrees.

The Boy from Cavite

Be as scientific as possible in your study, discussions, decision-making and implementation. Be broadminded, analytical, undogmatic. But as human beings with a mission, you also must have discernment and compassion.

THE REVOLUTIONISTS

2002

Between the Philippine Revolution of 1896 (with its impact on the Spanish-American War and the subsequent American Conquest of these islands in 1899) and the Japanese invasion of 1941, the Philippines enjoyed four decades of relative prosperity and peace never before experienced by Filipinos.

It was in this idyllic period between two world wars that Nemesio Encarnacion Prudente was born on December 1, 1926 in Rosario, Cavite, and raised in a serene provincial childhood marred only by the untimely death of his mother when he was nine. Four years later, his family’s peaceful existence would be shattered by the outbreak of World War II in the Philippines in December 1941.

Mensing, as he was known, spent his teenage years as a courier for guerrilla forces during the three years of the Japanese occupation. He wanted to be a soldier in the service of his country, like Dante Prudente, an older brother he idolized, an idealistic Philippine Military Academy cadet who fought in the war.

Nemesio belonged to the second generation of Filipinos that was educated in English and looked up to the United States as its mother country, much like previous generations were beholden to Spain and the language of Cervantes. When Mensing was growing up, the bitter memories of the failed revolution and American betrayal had been largely forgotten. American rule seemed permanent, if benevolent, and any thought of Philippine independence was regarded as an exercise in futility.

Although Mensing was well-behaved and a model pupil, he displayed unusual pride in being Filipino and a dash of skepticism about America’s overwhelming presence and real intentions in his country. This could be attributed to the primary and lasting influence of his paternal grandfather, Florencio or Enciong, who had fought the Spaniards and the Americans as a teenage soldier in the wars of 1896 to1902, a most turbulent and passionate period in the struggling nation’s history. Enciong could never shake off the patriotic ardor of his youth; he would never reconcile with the American regime and, in an act of poetic vengeance, he imbued his adoring grandsons with unmistakable anti-colonial passion.

Enciong’s anti-American advocacy skipped a generation because his only son, Mamerto or Entong, Mensing’s often-absentee father, was among the first Brown Americans—young children herded into schools right after the conquest. A gifted musician, Entong would join the U.S. Navy sometime in 1920, where he chose to play the clarinet and the oboe in the band instead of being a kitchen steward, the only other position in the service open to Filipinos until the 1960s. The rebellious streak in Entong would come out when, on one of his rare home leaves, he announced that he had converted to Protestantism and had become a member of Freemasonry International. This was viewed with consternation in his devoutly Catholic family whose women trekked to church daily and sought to turn their young wards into good Catholics. But it would put Entong back in line with the ideals of the revolution that his father never abandoned and made a point of inculcating in his grandsons.

Entong and his wife, Felicidad Encarnacion or Chidang, led what amounted to separate lives. Soon after their marriage in 1919, Entong, who held a high school diploma from a correspondence school, joined the U.S. Navy. The U.S. Navy was the employer of choice of his and the following generations of Cavite men who were attracted to adventure, a dollar income and the opportunity to emigrate with their families to the United States. Entong was seldom home, and this was reflected in the widely staggered birth years of his three children—Dante (1920), Nemesio (1926), and Florencia (1932). Chidang was beset by difficult pregnancies after her husband’s infrequent visits, but she kept house and helped out in her family’s flourishing fishing business. She died early, in 1936, of childbirth.

The two older Prudente boys with the six-year age gap between them, took turns bonding with their Lolo Enciong. Their paternal grandfather, Celestino Encarnacion or Tino, a fishing magnate with far-flung operations in the Visayas islands, spent most of his time in his small farm in Tejeros, a nearby barrio away from the seashore.

The farm where Lolo Enciong planted rice and raised cattle had a vital historical connection that only dawned on Dante and Mensing when they entered college.

As innocent children, says Felice Prudente Sta. Maria, Mensing’s eldest daughter, of her father and uncle some 80 years later in 2010, the little boys didn’t realize they were playing in the very fields where the revolution Lolo Enciong glorified began to fall apart.

On March 22, 1897, Tejeros, or more specifically, Casa Hacienda, the administrative house of the vast Hacienda de San Francisco de Malabon of the Augustinian friars, was the setting of the brutal power struggle between the Katipunan Supremo Andres Bonifacio, a Manila warehouse man who worked for a foreign trading firm, and his arch-rival, Emilio Aguinaldo of the landed gentry of Kawit, Cavite.

Tejeros and its mother town of Rosario were deep in Magdiwang territory, which was pro-Bonifacio, but the Magdalos of the neighboring Hacienda de Imus of the Recollect friars, who were fiercely loyal to Aguinaldo of Kawit, outvoted the Magdiwang. Bonifacio denounced the Magdalos’ alleged rigging of the vote and left in a huff, declaring the results invalid; the Magdalos averred that he was just a poor loser.

Bonifacio was pursued, arrested, tried for treason, and subsequently executed by the triumphant Magdalos. This fratricidal horror, followed by the retaking by Spain of Cavite, until then the rebels’ iron bastion, doomed the revolution. Aguinaldo and his men were sent fleeing northwards to Biak-na-Bato in the mountains of Bulacan, where they eventually surrendered to the Spanish forces. Aguinaldo would go into exile in Hong Kong at the end of 1897.

But this Spanish victory, which was widely celebrated in Manila and Madrid, was not meant to last. Four months later, American forces invaded the colony and, in the Battle of Manila Bay of May 1, 1898, obliterated the Spanish naval fleet. Aguinaldo, in alliance with the Americans, returned from exile and resumed the revolution, proclaiming Philippine independence on June 12, 1898.

The beleaguered Spanish forces in Manila, however, surrendered to the Americans, not to Aguinaldo’s forces. Before the year was over, Spain would transfer sovereignty over the Philippines to the United States, locking out the Aguinaldo government, which by then had established its new capital in Malolos, Bulacan. The American betrayal of its erstwhile Filipino ally set the stage for the Philippine-American War that culminated in America’s annexation of the Philippines.

Nemesio Prudente, in the legal parlance of the day, belonged to the generation born as Philippine nationals under the protection of the United States.

Nemesio’s coastal town of Rosario in Cavite was the Augustinian hacienda’s opening to Manila Bay near the point where the waterway spills out to the mighty South China Sea. It was through these shores that the adventurous Malays from Borneo sailed in ancient times to establish themselves around the bay and, through the rivers that flowed into it, to settle in the interior jungles and empty territories of Luzon, the main island of the Philippine archipelago.

The original settlers would be known as the Tagalogs (river people) and Pampangos (of the river banks), the dominant tribes of the archipelago, along with the Ilocanos of the far north and the Visayans of the south, all of whom the Spaniards colonized in the 16th century. They would form the nucleus of the new Filipino nation, the first republic in Asia, at the end of the 19th century.

It was in nearby Cavite town, the capital of the province to which it gave its name, that the Spaniards and the Americans established their principal naval base, until the U.S. made Subic, farther up the western coast of Luzon, the headquarters of its fleet in the Far East.

Traditionally dependent on fishing and farming, Rosario is today a bustling industrial town. Not too long ago, it was the site of the Filipino Oil Corporation (Filoil), the first Filipino-owned oil refinery before it was displaced in the 1970s by an export processing zone devoted to the light manufacture of plastics and resins.

When the young Nemesio Prudente was growing up in the 1930s during the high summer of American rule, the long-suppressed memories of stolen revolution were starting to capture the people’s imagination with a vengeance. This would soon ignite nationalist fervor theretofore unseen and unfelt since the triumph of American guns at the beginning of the 20th century. Manuel L. Quezon’s Nacionalista Party dominated political life and its platform called for absolute, real and immediate independence from America. A master politician, Quezon appeared every inch an aspiring strongman in the Latin American tradition and this caused widespread concern in America about the future of Philippine democracy after independence.

Shaken by the Great Depression of 1929, the Americans had wearied of holding on to their only colonial possession and agreed, after much debate from 1930 to1935, to give the Filipinos back their freedom in 1946. A ten-year transition period, in British fashion, known as the Commonwealth of the Philippines, would precede the birth of the republic. Inaugurated in 1935, the Philippine Commonwealth was established with Quezon as president. The promised independence would be complicated by three years of Japanese occupation (1942-45) during World War II.

For all these grand ideas and events and their political overtones, Mensing’s boyhood was the stuff of provincial gentility and grace. Following the custom of the day, the matriarchal tradition prevailed in the Prudente household, even more so after the death of Mensing’s mother, Chidang, who was second in line in the Encarnacion matriarchy after her mother, the formidable Dorotea or Tayang.

Tayang belonged to the Pugeda clan, one of the first Rosario families to achieve prominence after the revolution. The Pugedas intermarried with the Abuegs, another powerful clan. Tayang’s brother, Fabian Pugeda, was one of the first governors of Cavite under the Americans. Her husband, Florentino Encarnacion, was the town’s fishing magnate. She herself engaged in the smoked fish business, for which the town was famous. In fact, smoked fish in the markets of Manila was often referred to as Salinas smoked fish (tinapa), after Rosario’s old name, even when it came from somewhere else. Sometime in the late 19th century, Salinas was renamed Rosario, in honor of the Virgin of the Rosary, its patron saint.

"Lola Tayang had all these boats along the aplaya (seashore), recalls Lily Encarnacion-Sison, a retired dietician at the University of the Philippines, one of Tayang’s many grandchildren and a first cousin of Mensing. There were fishing nets all over the place, people bringing in the catch. There were the huts where fish was smoked. That was where we swam and played."

Tayang had been widowed early and, with her sharp business sense, she expanded her holdings from fishing boats and salt beds to farmlands in Tejeros. The old friar lands were being parcelled out and sold by the American regime and the Pugedas, Encarnacions and Abuegs were among those in a position to invest in land. It was also when Florencio Prudente, a former Katipunero, bought his small farm.

In the late 1950s, the Filoil refinery would be built in Tejeros and the Rosario residents, among them Tayang Encarnacion and her heirs, would sell their lands in exchange for stocks in the corporation.

In 1935, Tayang Encarnacion moved from the aplaya, away from her boats, salt beds and smoke houses, to a newly–built house along Rizal Street, in the town proper, which started from the church and extended northward to the sea. It was one of the stately houses in town, built of hardwood and decorated with ornate metal panels that were fashionable in the early Commonwealth period. Although Chidang and Entong Prudente had built their own big house in 1925, presumably from the latter’s Navy savings, it was located a kilometer outside town, along Calle Real that began in the naval town of Cavite and extended southward through Noveleta, Rosario, Naic, Tanza, and Maragondon.

We always converged in the Encarnacion house, says Felice Sta. Maria of family reunions in the 1960s. It was like moving from the barrio to the town, the provincial Prudentes going to the poblacion of the Encarnacions.

The Prudente house, built a decade earlier and known among the clan as the Silangan house was just as impressive, if a bit smaller than the house in town. (Silangan was the barrio of Rosario where it was located). Today, it stands as one of Rosario’s few remaining architectural survivors of wars, fires, floods and neglect. The Encarnacion house was torn down years ago, and was replaced by a modern structure of no charm or distinction.

Many years ago, says Florencia Prudente-Cabana, Mensing’s only surviving sibling, now pushing 90 but in good health, of her now densely populated neighborhood, our house stood out along the road. It was surrounded on all sides by salt beds and empty lots. You could see the sea from our window. There was a river nearby where my brothers loved to swim.

Once wide enough for horse-drawn carriages, Calle Real appears to have shrunk into a tiny road hemmed in by houses and buildings with no pavement for pedestrians who have to walk alongside huge buses, tricycles and cars that are often snarled in traffic. The river has become a narrow fetid canal.

Upon Chidang’s death, Mensing fell into the joint care of two aunts: Gorgonia Prudente or Gonyang, who lived with her brother, the widowed Entong, and Leonila Encarnacion or Oning, Chidang’s younger sister who lived with her brother Jose Gonyang, who married late, made and sold patis (fish sauce) under her name (Gorgonia’s Patis). Oning, who never married, operated a sari-sari store on the ground floor of the Encarnacion house. The two women were determined to make a good Catholic of their ward, the grandson of a Katipunero and the son of a protestant convert and dedicated freemason, both of who were sworn critics of Holy Mother Church. Entong, alone among his fellow band members, of which he was the leader and principal recruiter for the Navy, would refuse to play with the church orchestra.

Just how much Entong would influence his younger son despite his absentee status, would be reflected in the fact that he taught Mensing to play the clarinet and become a jazz enthusiast. Entering college just before he sailed for America as a merchant marine candidate, Mensing joined the Order of DeMolay, the junior division of International Free Masonry. Mensing would move farther away from Catholicism, although not from the Christian faith, by marrying a Methodist and raising their own three children in the Methodist church.

Still, religion and the family business were farthest from Mensing’s mind. His hero was Lolo Enciong, who never tired of recounting his revolutionary exploits and was well known for his agimat or lucky charm against all evil. Cavite lore has long been suffused with such tales of gallantry amidst lawlessness. Present-day movie stars like the Revillas of Cavite, father and son, have made a fortune making film after film of this genre. At one point in Enciong’s life, it was said, the old man was attacked by cattle thieves in his lonely farm. He fought them off bravely and was hacked with a bolo (sharp knife), but he was not wounded and the thieves fled.

Florencia Cabana says her aunt Gonyang had recounted many times how, as Enciong lay dying, an agitated Mensing pleaded: "Iluwa mo, ibigay mo sa akin." (Spit it out and give it to me.) Presumably, Enciong acquiesced and gave the charm to his favorite grandson. Mensing, confronted in later years with this incredulous story, would only give a bemused smile and never comment. In his memoirs on his brutal imprisonment during the martial law years, he would allude to a kind of agimat that could have protected him from more harm.

Because Dante was the oldest of the Encarnacion cousins, he was the natural leader of their generation. Their Prudente cousins were younger or lived far away.

Apart from Mensing’s closeness to Lolo Enciong, Entong’s children would be practically raised as Encarnacions, since Chidang was the matriarch figure, even after her death. Two of her brothers, Fidel and Jose, who would go into the professions and set high standards for the next generation, would produce children closer in age and interest to the boys.

Fidel, the most outgoing of the Encarnacions, tried his luck in America during the first decade of American rule. From a plain laborer working in a salmon factory in Alaska, he worked his way through college and came back an engineer, in time to become Mensing’s godfather at baptism in 1927.