Aglipayan church

There are now efforts at the national level to revisit the historical legacy of Isabelo delos Reyes — scholar, journalist, labor leader, and revolutionary.

Iglesia filipina independiente

VII, No. This was what the resource speaker seemed to tell students and faculty of the University of the Philippines UP here as they remembered the great Ilocano hero during a lecture last week. Resil Mojares, himself a distinguished writer and recorder of Philippine culture and history. Mojares, who flew in from Cebu City, said there is some sort of a rediscovery at present as efforts are being done on the national level to retrieve whatever is left of the archives Isabelo delos Reyes started some years ago.

Original manuscripts and published materials at the National Museum are now being re-encoded, and translated for the public. Mojares described Delos Reyes, among others, as an Ilocano writer and journalist, homegrown intellectual, the father of Filipino folklore, and historian who aspired to write Philippine history independently of his contemporary historians Jose Rizal and Pedro Paterno.

He envisioned a nation in his aspiration to collect works, knowledge and evidence of folklore, Mojares also said. Mojares noted that his works were then not fully appreciated, much less recognized. As a journalist, Delos Reyes knew his audience and had a sense of his public, according to Mojares, as evidenced by his multi-lingual writings and journalistic outputs.

Delos Reyes wrote mainly in Spanish, but saw to it that he had his work translated in Philippine languages such as Iloco, Cebuano, and Tagalog. He even translated classic works in Iloco for his local readers to appreciate. He wrote comedia, which was then the popular form of literature. He was later sent to a prison in Barcelona, Spain where he came into contact with European political activists.

He returned in and together with Pascual Poblete, another nationalist, put up a pro-labor newspaper, El Grito del Pueblo, and later became the first president of the first national labor union in the country, the Union Obrero Democratica UOD. Mojares did not fail to mention the contribution of the Ilocano revolutionary in the founding of the Iglesia Filipina Independiente IFI or Philippine Independent Church , or the Aglipayan church in Delos Reyes was councilor of Manila when he returned from Spain.