La Academia Filipina / The Filipino Academy

By Pepe Alas on July 25, 2024

THE FILIPINO ACADEMY
^{(Guillermo Gómez Rivera, translated from the Spanish original by Pepe Alas)}

^{To my colleagues}

When our Academy was incorporated,
it was Magistrate Claro Recto y Mayo
who registered it under our laws to give it
legal personality. Don Enrique Zóbel de Ayala
gave it a home and the wherewithal
to function properly.

Among its members, the Filipino Academy
had Guillermo Gómez Wyndham,
Manuel Rávago, Juan Alegre,
Torres Florentino, Teodoro Kálaw,
and Manuel Briones...

Great scholars! Great defenders of Spanish
were the Filipino academics!
Their motto was "to clean, to fix, to give splendor"
as well as "to guard, to spread, to ennoble" its
use in these Islands in spite of the genocide
that was upon them, perpetrated by
the New Master* of the English language.

But as a corporation, our
Filipino Academy had regular meetings:
frequent soirées; the annual Zóbel Prize;
with Excelsior Magazine, it had its own bulletin
and its prestige...

Today, our Academy languishes
awaiting the hero who will infuse it
with new light
by restoring its great charter
before the Filipino statutes
and from there deploy activities
pertinent to its raison d'être.

_{Manila, 12 October 2008}

^{* United States of América}