Epifanio de los Santos

Biography

The highway that runs through the whole of Metro Manila is known by its initials: EDSA. The letters stand for Epifanio de los Santos Avenue, and few of those sitting in its traffic jams know who the man was.

He was born on 7 April 1871 in Potrero, part of Malabon, then in the Province of Manila. His father, Escolastico de los Santos, came from Nueva Ecija; his mother, Antonina Cristóbal y Tongco, was a musician. He studied at the Ateneo Municipal de Manila, where he took a Bachelor of Arts degree, then read law at the University of Santo Tomas and sat the bar examination in 1898. For a time he painted, but music became part of his daily life, and he was even awarded a professorship in music. He played the guitar well. An anecdote survives about an argument with Clemente Jose Zulueta: Antonio Luna offered his guitar to whoever won, and, as the story goes, it went to de los Santos.

While still a law student he became absorbed in Spanish literature, beginning with Juan Valera’s novel “Pepita Jiménez”; later he met Valera in Spain and became his friend. His home in Intramuros became a meeting place for writers: Cecilio Apóstol, Fernando María Guerrero, José Palma, Rafael Palma, Jaime C. de Veyra and others came there. For Rosa Sevilla he painted an oil portrait and composed a melody dedicated to her.

In 1898, at the height of the revolution, he became a young associate editor of the newspaper “La Independencia” and wrote prose under the pen name G. Solon. By some accounts he had earlier written for “La Libertad”. He later took part in founding “El Renacimiento”, “La Democracia”, “La Patria” and “Malaysia”. In September 1898 he was elected to the Malolos Congress, the revolutionary legislature, as one of three representatives of Nueva Ecija; he sat until November 1899. After the war he entered public service. In 1900 he was appointed district attorney of San Isidro, in 1902 he was elected governor of Nueva Ecija and in 1904 re-elected, remaining in office until 1906; he is regarded as the first elected governor of the province. In 1904, as a member of the Philippine Commission, he represented the country at the World’s Fair in Saint Louis. He then served as provincial fiscal of Bulacan and Bataan, in 1907 wrote for the Philippine Assembly a study of electoral fraud and its remedies, and in 1918 became assistant technical director of the Philippine Census. The historians Teodoro Agoncillo and Rafael Palma were, it seems, right when they said that politics interested him least of all.

His real work was books and papers. “Algo de Prosa” (1909), “Literatura Tagala” (1911), “El Teatro Tagala” (1911), “Nuestra Literatura” (1913), “El Proceso del Dr. José Rizal” (1914), “Folklore Musical de Filipinas” (1920): the list can be extended with collections of stories and a study of crime in the Philippines for 1903–1908. He translated “Florante at Laura” into Spanish. He knew Spanish, English, French, German and several indigenous languages, among them Ita, Tingian and Ibalao. He was considered one of the best Filipino writers in Spanish; he belonged to the Spanish royal academies of language, literature and history in Madrid, and Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo admired his writing. He was an honorary member of the Academia Filipina de la Lengua Española.

He travelled widely in search of rare documents. By the end of his life he owned nearly two hundred paintings and sculptures, musical literature, opera recordings, manuscripts, printed material and historical pictures. On the Philippine revolution alone the collection held 115 printed works and 213 documents. His Rizal material was praised by Wenceslao Retana, James LeRoy and Austin Craig. Part of the collection was destroyed in fires at his house in San Isidro.

In 1925 Governor General Leonard Wood appointed him Director of the Philippine Library and Museum, succeeding Trinidad Pardo de Tavera. He also became the third president of the Philippine Library Association and the first Filipino of native parentage to hold that office. Gabriel Bernardo wrote that, once at the head of the library, he gave up all his other pursuits except music and bibliophilia.

De los Santos died on 18 April 1928 in Manila, still in office as director. The Philippine Legislature bought his library and collections from his heirs.