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Tomorrow the city of Talisay will mark the 64th anniversary of the landing of the Americal Division on the beaches of Cansojong during the early hours of March 26, 1945. To commemorate the event, a monument made of fiberglass statues has been installed by the city government at an appropriate spot where the landings occurred. A historical marker was brought in by the National Historical Institute (NHI) last Tuesday in time for inauguration rites tomorrow. NHI chairman Ambeth Ocampo and executive director Ludovico Badoy will join Talisay City Mayor Socrates Fernandez, Gov. Gwendolyn Garcia and Rep. Eduardo Gullas in this belated but nonetheless welcome offering to the sons and daughters of Cebu as well as the young soldiers and Marines of the Americal Division who fought that fateful day and the weeks that followed as Cebu was gradually reclaimed by the Commonwealth.
The landings at Talisay, which signaled the beginning of the end of the Japanese Occupation of Cebu, was not met with massive resistance from Japanese forces majority of who were by then entrenched up in the hills of Busay, Lahug, Guadalupe, preparing for a long-drawn battle. But the Japanese left land mines and sharpened bamboo stakes along trenches which made the push inland very exacting on the Americal Division were it not for the active guerilla movement that had virtually controlled a large swath of the province.
Incidentally, I received a call the other day from an outfit in Singapore that has reportedly been tasked by The History Channel to do a documentary on the guerillas in the Philippines. I immediately referred the caller to the best source of guerilla lore in Cebu, 90-year-old Col. Manuel Segura who I am sure will be joining tomorrow’s ceremonies. ‘Tis a good time for remembering and I fervently hope that my dream of a war memorial museum will finally become a reality as more and more children and grandchildren of these guerillas and Filipino USAFFE soldiers will come to be proud of the heroism of those who came before them.
While on this topic of remembering, let me invite the public to the National Museum’s traveling exhibition entitled “El Imaginario Colonial” (Colonial Imagery), currently installed at the lobby of the College of Architecture and Fine Arts (CAFA) building at the Talamban Campus of the University of San Carlos. Comprising 136 photographs taken during the earliest years of the invention of photography, many of these have never been seen by the public nor printed before this. The photographs cover the most significant period of the nation’s history under Spain, including execution photos of Filipino patriots at the Luneta and elsewhere, foremost among them being our national hero, Jose Rizal.
The difficult years of the Revolution are deftly chronicled in a select section of the exhibition, which also covers such colonial imaginings as beauty through portrait photography, the idyllic rural scenery of much of the Philippines at the time, and the technological advances afforded Manila through her now long-gone infrastructure of bridges, port facilities and lighthouses. The problem of indigenous identity is also highlighted in photographs that capture Western curiosity with “otherness” and “difference” through photographs of some of the ethnolinguistic groups of the country. The exhibition is a must for all, especially those who want to see the unfolding use of photography to express and to convey what hitherto was only left for the mind to imagine. Admission is free and the exhibition runs till April 7, after which plans are afoot to move the exhibition to the second floor galleries of Museo Sugbo, the Cebu Provincial Museum. Remembering and imagining, two things – both cost-free – that you can do this summer.
