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Esteemed colleagues at De La Salle
Beloved relatives and friends
Welcome to the blessing of the Museo De La Salle, which took place yesterday and the dedication of the museum this morning.
Thank you for gracing this memorable occasion and for joining the La Sallian academic community, inspired by Saint John Baptist de la Salle, on this important event on our communal life and our journey through this period of our history.
I would like to share with you the genesis of this Museo De La Salle for then you will understand better why this event is so meaningful to us.
De La Salle assumed control and management of this institution then known as General Emilio Aguinaldo College in 1987. It is an institution named after the General of the Philippine Army, which confronted Spain in 1896; our First President, who proclaimed the independence of our country on June 12, 1898, and led the first Philippine Republic. While the revolution of 1896 under Andres Bonifacio was a Manila and later a Bulacan phenomenon, it was in the South in this province of Cavite, where a real army was organized and proved itself victorious against the Spanish forces and it was Cavite that became the first seat of Government, the site of independence, and really the cradle of Revolution.
For De La Salle’s purposes, however, the acquisition of a twenty-eight hectare campus and with it another campus of one hectare and a half for a medical campus was dictated by the need for more living space, what the German’s call Lebensraum. We were looking at another site for the university as a second site to help the congested campus on Taft Avenue. It also meant our foray into the health sciences, a field we ad hitherto not tried to develop on the De La Salle Taft campus. Our unexpressed and yet unpublicized desire was to go into the sciences and needed a pre-medical program as well as a guaranteed school for our would-be doctors. For we thought that it was through practical field such as medicine that we would be able to build up a good undergraduate program in the sciences. This was a unique and perhaps unorthodox way of marketing science.
At the time of the acquisition, there were only about 1,500 undergraduates in pre-Medicine, Midwifery, Nursing, Physical Therapy, X-ray Technology, Dietetics, Technician Education, Education, a simplified Liberal Arts program, and the beginnings of the Business program, as well as a College of Criminology. Today it is a campus of 10,000 undergraduates, with graduate program of Business and Management in addition to Education already existing in 1987. We have added Engineering, expanded the undergraduate Business program, gone into Agri-business, added majors to the Liberal Arts program, and moved the Health Sciences gradually to the medical campus.
The architecture was contemporary, rather stark and unadorned, except for the administration building, which had a modernistic twentieth century look. The motto of the college was learning through Community Resources, stressing its practical down-to-earth orientation.
My first project as President was to give the school a coat of paint to make it look new and to attract students. In the second year, we did something equally unorthodox, for which we were misunderstood and criticized; we built a gymnasium, the present Palaruang De La Salle, without walls. Why, people criticized, should we put priority on sports rather than academics? Ours was a marketing strategy. We wanted to be the site of games and competitions in Cavite, take a lead position, and through this attract more students for we needed an optimum number to make school operations viable. It was the same reason that has made us give emphasis to other sports facilities subsequently; the Olympic-size swimming pool and the oval, which meets international standards. We also wanted a symbol of our Christian character and needed a church, not the small chapel we had in the administration building. We also needed an auditorium for speech events for this way we would build our reputation, through a good extra curricular program in speech and drama.
Thinking of the old medieval tradition of building a cathedral across centuries, with the entire community participating, we plunged into the church project and came up with the first simple covered area, thanks to the generosity and economics of architect cum contractor Limpin. We collected small donations from faculty, staff, and parents, including generous faculty at the mother unit of Taft Avenue, asking for donations of the altar, pews, and windows.
Even then, however, the notion of a campus characterized and linked to the history of the province began to gestate, and we decided to imitate the front of the Maragondon Church, where Bonifacio was sentenced to death. The belfry came later and because of other buildings planned in the area it had to be located to the right rather that to the original left in Maragondon.
As this notion of using a twentieth – century motif took shape, in addition to classrooms built with green reddish roofs, balustrades, and Spanish verandas which tried to capture some of the features of the 19th century architecture, we decided to build a library patterned after the Kawit house of General Emilio Aguinaldo together with its carabao and balcony. Our architect, other than Architect Limpin, did not quite do a replica of Kawit but was inspired by its motifs, when the library needed enhancement and expansion, we built the second larger structure to its right and built the tower as a passage way from the second building to the first, thus drawing closer to the Aguinaldo model in Kawit.
In the meantime, we decided to pattern the twenty-eight hectare property as a pueblo in the style of Vigan and Intramuros; this explains the puertas along the old Aguinaldo Highway, still needing completion along University Avenue and adobe fencing in the style of Intramuros.
In the meantime God blessed our fund raising efforts at the mother unit; a network of friends was established, friends whose interest varied. Not all were interested in business, in chairs, in science; others were more religiously inclined and were interested in places of worship. Banking on the generosity of Imelda Ongsiako Cojuangco and the heirs of her late husband, Ramon Cojuangco, and their family head, the late Antonio Cojuangco and his wife Victoria, I took the occasion of the 50th anniversary of their death with the Brothers at De La Salle to help us complete the chapel. Smaller donations came including the Credit Union of De La Salle, thanks to the initiative of Terry B. Farrell; the group donated the large bell for the belfry and different members of the faculty including the late Luis Zaide donated pews. We now have a jewel of a church built in the 19th century Philippine baroque style popularized by the frailes and the Jesuits, a fitting witness to our faith, thanks not only to the generosity of the Cojuangco family but to the numerous parents, faculty, students who have contributed to the shrine in honor of Nuestra Señora del Rosario de Dasmariñas.
God works in mysterious ways. We need to discern the signs of the times, see His finger writing on the wall, and in faith and trust take the plunge. The museum we are dedicating is a product of boldness, chance, risk-taking, but likewise vision and faith.
Lahar had destroyed the Athens of Pampanga, the beloved town of Bacolor, home of many distinguished Kapampangans including my paternal great grandmother, Matea Rodriguez. Although my family had moved to Apalit, a result of the marriage of a Baliuag mestizo, Joaquin Gonzalez, and a Chinese-Filipino lady from Bacolor and Apalit, Florencia Sioco, we kept our contacts with the family in Bacolor. When lahar spewed out from Mount Pinatubo it literally buried the Athens of Pampanga, the home of culture and the Crissotan (the Kapampangan version of verbal debate popularized by the poet Jose Crisostomo Soto), the provincial capital of the Philippines during the British occupation of Manila from 1762-1764. There lived the Panlilio family represented by Jose Ricardo Panlilio who had been building up the collection of 19th century Philippine Hispanic life in their ancestral home in Bacolor with painstaking and generous efforts and great expense. All was buried in lahar. I suggested to him my dream of building a nineteenth century Philippine Spanish house on the Cavite Campus in line with the motif of the entire campus. I knew that if I did not do it, it would never get done since most college administrators prioritize needs and these needs are usually for sports and academic (science) facilities, rarely for the arts. My idea was to retrieve the work in Bacolor, dig up what could be spared, provide the Panlilio family a repository of their collection, and in turn contribute what little remained of the Gonzalez and Arnedo families Apalit heirlooms to the museum.
My original concept was a simple structure of no more than 10 million pesos, to be amortized over the years through the donations and gifts that I received from friends and through my work with the Manila Bulletin and my membership on different boards of corporations, an arrangement that had the blessings of my superiors, for I was allowed to donate these extra funds to charitable causes.
Joey took up the idea with great enthusiasm, built up plans initially with the help of an engineer and an architect from the Intramuros Administration, and subsequently with the technical staff of Oscar Mapua, Jr. and after my transfer to DECS, thanks to the understanding and vision of Brother Roly Dizon who found merit in the project and contributed to support it. After Joey, however, the person who should be given credit for this project is our Vice-President for Finance, Teresita B. Farrell, who managed our meager funds well, helped us acquired loans, pointed out areas for savings, and has been the support of Joey all these years of construction as the project grew from its modest plans to the present imposing structure we have now. Thanks too to EVP Hermie Torres, who has bought the idea of what we are trying to do here in Cavite, now De La Salle University-Dasmariñas by mutual agreement with the former owner, and with the alumni. There are many more, who have contributed to this project, but they are far too many names, but I must single out Dr. Jaime Laya who was one of our first donors outside the original families which sponsored this project.
There is still work to be done; to set up an endowment for the maintenance of the collection, a program of learning activities for our students and any other students in the area to make the museum a genuine resource for learning, the growth of the Cavite Studies Center which will provide the research needed if this university campus will truly fulfill its commitment as both a generator and producer of new learning, and as a magnet for cultural activities in this province. My dream is likewise to make it a center not only of Cavite Studies but all Tagalog Studies to provide the research necessary to discover ourselves, to provide a usable past for Filipino (in the words of the American philosopher Santayana), and to provide the stimulus for an academic environment that will make the De La Salle student proud of his heritage and proud of his nation’s past so as to build its future.
My dream is to make this corner of Cavite and of the province a place where the Christian heritage will be maintained to give the present and the future generations of students a feel for the rich past that Joey and I experienced as young people growing up in the Post-War; the living of the liturgical cycle of the calendar with its observance of Advent, Christmas, Lent, and Easter done with traditional processions and celebrations; the renewal of the Flores de Mayo in May with its Zagalas and its devotion to Mary and the Holy Cross of Saint Helena and Constantine; the La Naval in October. I would like our chapel be the seat of fine liturgical celebrations including the revival of 19th century music and culture, and the Plaza Complex with its tertulias and teatro. We must build a Teatro next, for zarzuelas and different events, like the Teatro Zorilla in Binondo, for while the University must be second to none in the modern and contemporary knowledge especially in science (pure and applied) and in information technology, it must be a community of faculty, administrators, parents, friends, and above all students who are proud of being a Filipino, perpetuate our traditions, and above all imbibe through an exemplary community life what it is to be a contemporary and modern Filipino Christian in this century, modern but rooted in his past.