Subversive Lives. Susan F. Quimpo
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read Mao, Jan was far ahead of me in understanding his ideas. While I was reading as an academic, he undertook a “living reading” of Mao. He always tried to confirm the correctness of his ideas from experience and to apply the principles he learned to his activist work. When tackling an essay such as “On Contradiction,” more often than not he would be the speaker and I the listener. “On Contradiction” was Mao’s philosophical essay that counseled activists “to observe and analyze the movement of opposites or ‘contradictions’ in such things as the development of a society and, on the basis of such analysis, to see the correct method for resolving these contradictions.”
In early 1970, Jan joined the UP-based Kabataang Makabayan while keeping his ties with MKK, which had become a sort of junior version of KM. This was a step up in his radicalization. KM was considered the leading organization in the radical student movement. Students who considered themselves NatDems, or were attracted to Sison’s ideas of liberating the country by conducting a people’s war, were natural recruits. KM counted among its ranks not only students but also working-class and poor urban youth. Student activists came to know and admire its earlier work with the labor movement. It was seen as the stepping stone to the CPP and the guerrillas in the countryside.
DURING THE LAST WEEK of January 1971, an oil price increase of three centavos per liter triggered demonstrations by students and transport workers. One such demonstration was held in UP Diliman. Hundreds of students formed a human barricade blocking University Avenue, the main UP road leading to the administration building, to prevent vehicles from entering the campus. The success of the blockade inspired transport workers throughout Metro Manila to continue to strike and led to a second blockade on February 1. More students joined the human barricade that once again closed University Avenue. During the demonstration, a UP professor, Inocente Campos, a Marcos loyalist known for his strong antipathy toward student activists, insisted on driving through to the campus. Stopped by the barricade, he remonstrated with the activists. Then, frustrated, he fetched a gun from his car and fired at the students, hitting Pastor (Sonny) Mesina Jr. A college freshman and a member of the NatDem-influenced Samahang Demokratiko ng Kabataan (SDK) or Democratic Youth Movement, Sonny was a 1970 graduate of PSHS whom Jan knew well. He was rushed to the hospital but died three days later. The UP Security Force arrested Campos, and police later forced their way through the barricade and arrested students.
UP students use benches, desks, and chairs to barricade buildings in the UP campus (1971). (Photo from the Lopez Memorial Museum Collection)
“What started as protests against an [oil] price hike soon grew into a student revolt against [the] violation of academic freedom and police brutality,” recalled Dr. Jeepy Perez, an activist during the 1970s. Stronger and larger human barricades were formed, isolating the campus. Students, faculty, staff, and residents remained within the university premises despite persistent harassment by the military and police. The activists on campus declared the establishment of the “Diliman Commune” inspired by thoughts of the Paris Commune of 1871.
Jan, though at that time still technically a high school senior at PSHS, stayed on the Diliman campus for most of the siege. He joined the human barricades, teamed up with the other radicals who ran it like an activist camp, and remained to defend the area from the police. He would return home just to eat and get a change of clothes. He was part of the Diliman Commune until February 9, when the police and military came in force to remove the barricades and disperse the Communards.
AT ABOUT THIS TIME Jan asked if he could live with us. He felt Bernie and I would understand his predicament because of our strong sympathies for the activist movement, shown by our faithful attendance at rallies. We knew that Jan had nowhere else to stay. His relationship with Dad had long been strained, and going home to 1783-H Concepción Aguila was not an option. Since we had a spare room, we readily agreed to take him in.
Having a room to himself was a novel experience for Jan, as none of the unmarried Quimpo children had ever had this luxury in all the places where we had lived. However, Jan’s room was hardly ideal. Our apartment was the innermost unit, and the sunlight did not penetrate to the back of the apartment where his room was. During the rainy season, it was always damp, and it was soon infested with bedbugs, but he didn’t seem to mind the discomfort.
A car burns on the entrance road to UP as protests continue after the killing of Pastor Mesina at a barricade (1971). (Photo from the Lopez Memorial Museum Collection)
Jan often visited the KM regional headquarters, which used to be in one of the three-story units in this building on Kamias Street, a short jeepney ride from Norman and Bernie’s apartment in Cubao.
By the time Jan was a high school senior, the PSHS was in complete chaos. A studentry already radicalized by the shooting of Mesina at the UP barricades was further enraged by the death of Francis Sontillano, a senior killed in the violence at a protest rally in December 1970. With daily protests and walkouts from class, it became futile to hold any classes. It was unclear what would happen to the students, especially those supposed to graduate in March 1971. Then, in an unprecedented decision, PSHS decided to allow the “graduation en masse” of students who had begun their freshman year in 1966 and 1967. Jan got the benefit of this mass graduation.
He took the entrance exam at UP, listing B.S. Geology as his course of choice, and passed. He stuck around UP for a semester, but with the growing political turmoil, I could see that his heart was no longer in his studies. One could say that he was in UP only to meet other activists, recruit more converts to the cause, and act in concert with his comrades to maintain UP as a thorn in the side of the regime.
Hardly was his freshman year at UP over when he revealed to me that he had dropped out of school and gone “full-time.” I believe he told me this only when he had already become a full-time activist for some time. From then on, he would usually say, as he was leaving our apartment, that he was going to “HQ,” meaning the KM national headquarters on Quezon Avenue or the KM regional headquarters in a three-story apartment unit near the intersection of Kamias and Anonas Streets. At times he would be gone for days, but I never questioned him on his whereabouts.
If I didn’t see him at home much, I continued to see him at rallies. Once he led a contingent of poor urban youth. He was so light-skinned compared to the sunburned and scruffy youths he led, that he was obviously a student from one of the “better” schools. He wore the same large plastic glasses as in his high school days, giving him an owlish, intellectual look.
But this Jan was no longer the innocent schoolboy excited about entering high school, whose bedding and clothes I had carried with Dad and Mom to his dorm. Once, just back from a demonstration, he pulled out from his pocket the very first “pillbox” bomb I had ever seen, a tinfoil packet with gunpowder and pieces of rock, nails, and shards of glass that fit snugly in his hand. Was bringing an explosive to a rally just a sign of youthful bravado, or was Jan really steeling himself for an anticipated confrontation with the state, in particular with its instruments of coercion, the policeman and the soldier? I didn’t realize that I was seeing then the transformation of the Manila youth of the 1970s, embodied in my brother.
NOTE
1 Katipunan is a Tagalog word for gathering or society. It was shorthand for the organization, whose full name was Kataastaasang, Kagalanggalangang Katipunan ng mga Anak ng Bayan (Supreme and Venerable Society of the Children of the Nation).
2 Mao Tse-tung was later respelled Mao Zedong.
Watching the Storm
5
NATHAN GILBERT QUIMPO
HIGH SCHOOL GRADUATION, San Beda College, March 1970. The master of ceremonies called out my name and announced, “Class valedictorian.” Amid warm applause, Fr. Isidoro Otazu, the rector, handed me a small box with a