Wednesday, April 18, 2007 Vicente Sotto: Cebu’s ‘restless intellectual’ By Bejay Villaflores STC Media Comm Intern
WHEN he asked her what course she wanted to take up in college, she asserted wanting to be a journalist. She had written essays in her high school days, some of which she submitted and saw print in Graphic Magazine.
But her father disapproved of the idea saying, “Lisod ang mag-journalist ‘Day’, kay makatunob ka og mga tiil (It would be difficult if you become a journalist because you will be stepping on people’s toes.”) At that time, says Dr. Suga Sotto Yuvienco, her father had already been through many cases of libel for which he was convicted.
Prominent are the works and ideals of the late Vicente Sotto (1877-1950), carved in law, politics and government. These stoked the fire of a creative Cebuano culture.
Nyor Inting, as Sotto was called, broke new grounds.
He published “the first Filipino newspaper in Cebu (La Justicia, 1899) and the first newspaper in Cebuano (Ang Suga, 1901).
He wrote “the first modern Cebuano short story (“Mameng,” 1901), produced the “first modern realist play in Cebuano (“Ang Paghigugma sa Yutang Natawhan,” 1902), founded periodicals, wrote other plays and authored six books, and journalistic pieces.
Many of his works, which defied American rule and defended down-trodden Filipinos, won him not awards but 54 cases of libel and sedition.
Revered as the “father of Cebuano language, journalism and literature,” he is described by historian Dr. Resil B. Mojares as “a prolific intellectual…a pioneering labor leader, a tireless human rights advocate, a fearless criminal lawyer, and an energetic politician who was elected councilor, then mayor of Cebu, congressman, Constitutional Convention delegate, and senator.”
But Dr. Yuvienco, youngest among Nyor Inting’s six children and named after “Ang Suga,” recalls her father as a family man.
“He was an authoritative disciplinarian but an affectionate father, a Chinese mestizo in figure, Cebuano in principles and Filipino in heart,” Yuvienco said in an interview.
He was a man who made political matters and serious battles daily tales on the family dinner table, a man who with his creative affluence, not only made marks on the “Bisdak” spirit, but on his family as well.
“From childhood and younger days with my father, we were trained to possess the value of humility so we never had opportunities to boast,” Yuvienco recalled.
She said that if her father were present today, he would take “elections not as a way to public office but as a forum on political education.”
She is certain that Nyor Inting would be frowning on the materialistic attitudes of voters, for “being easily bribed.”
Sotto joined five elections in his lifetime but “only three of those he won.”
Yuvienco said that winning wasn’t what was important to him but “the principles on which he fought his battles.”
On the 130th birth anniversary of her father and senatorial candidate Tito Sotto’s grandfather, Yuvienco quotes two “notable highly respected historians,” Professors Mojares and Michael Cullinane of Chicago.
In a letter Cullinane wrote to Attorney Nazario Pacquiao on Sept. 12, 1975, he said: “Both Vicente Sotto’s first short story ‘Mameng’ and his first Cebuano drama ‘Gugma sa Yutang Natawhan’ were greatly inspired by Rizal’s ideals, especially in the intense nationalism and love of country expressed in them…”
Mojares wrote: “A restless intellectual. He took literature not for his own sake but as a way of engaging in the public life. He was not the anti specialist, but the enlightened individual, who, because he was free, could work to make that freedom general in his society. As a politician he could expose the ills of his time and espouse ideals on which he believed Philippine politics should be founded.”
