Muñoz, Ador Ronald Angelo K.

The Achievements of Paz M. Latorena, one of the

foremost writers of the first generation of Filipino English writers, in both
literary writing and education, were remembered in a day-long conference and
festival at UST last February 11.
The academic homage was organized by the UST Department of
Humanities, Faculty of Arts and Letters, UST Literary Society and the
Varsitarian to mark the death centenary of the literary pioneer and
pedagogue.
In her opening remarks, Department of Humanities chair Joyce Arriola said
Latorena’s works and teaching legacy to the University must be properly
acknowledged.“To celebrate the life of a great mentor is to celebrate the life of
the University,” she said.For Latorena’s former student, UST Professor
Emeritus, Milagros Tanlayco, “[Latorena] was a voracious reader and a
dynamic teacher. There was little place for restlessness in her class because
her lectures, aside from literature, manifested religion, current events, history,
philosophy and human nature.”

Writer’s roots
Paz Latorena, the youngest among the four children of Florencia
Manguera and Valentin Latorena, was born on Jan. 19, 1908 in Boac,
Marinduque. She finished basic schooling at St. Scholastica’s College in
Manila and the Manila South High School (now the Araullo High School). In
1926, she took up Education at the University of the Philippines (UP) in
Manila where she also attended a short story writing class under a key figure
in Filipino literature in English, Paz Marquez Benitez of “Dead Stars” fame.
In 1927, Latorena received an invitation from Benitez to write a column for the
Philippines Herald Magazine, of which Benitez was the literary editor. That
same year, Latorena, along with other campus writers, founded the UP
Writers’ Club. The Literary Apprentice, the UP Writers’ Club’s publication, then
ran a short story by Latorena, “A Christmas Tale.”
Latorena also wrote poetry under the pseudonym, Mina Lys, which, according
to Tanlayco, had a “romantic significance,” for the then young writer.
Before the year ended, the Marinduque native won the third prize in Jose
Garcia Villa’s Roll of Honor for the Best Stories of 1927 for her story, “The
Small Key.”
For her final year of college in 1927, Latorena transferred to UST to finish her
Education degree. She became the literary editor of the Varsitarian and
published her poems, “Insight” and “My Last Song,” under her nom de plume
Mina Lys
She shortly earned her master’s and doctorate degree while teaching
literature courses in UST. In 1934, her doctoral dissertation, “Philippine
Literature in English: Old Voices and New,” received the highest rating of
sobresaliente.
Latorena’s former students are now giants in Philippine letters: F. Sionil Jose,
Nita Umali, Genoveva Edroza Matute, Zeneida Amador, Ophelia Dimalanta
and Alice Colet-Villadolid, to name a few.
“She was a delight to listen to and was one of the writers of the most beautiful
short stories in her period,” F. Sionil Jose said of Latorena in a video
presentation.
“We explored the characters of Shakespeare’s stories. She was a formidable
presence. We waited for the words of wisdom to fall from her lips and we were
never the same after that,” Luisa Zumel, a student who was eventually
inspired to be a teacher herself, said in an open forum.
In 1943, Latorena authored her last story, “Miguel Comes Home.” She died a
decade later, on October 19, 1953, of cerebral hemorrhage.

Literary matriarch
Latorena’s works, as seen through the eyes of literary scholars, were
thoroughly discussed through paper presentations.
For Prof. Florentino Hornedo of the UST Graduate School and Faculty of Arts
and Letters, much of the American may be seen in Latorena’s works as well
as shades of the Great War. “The issues of World War I were the standard
readings in the classrooms of Latorena.”
In her paper, “Paz Latorena: The Quintessential Woman Writer,” UST writer-
in-residence Ophelia Dimalanta gave testimony to the full-blooded characters
and well-defined structure in Latorena’s stories. According to Dimalanta,
“Latorena did not go by the modern plot standard,” but her stories are not to
be considered inferior “because both pre-war and post-war stories have to be
studied in a different light.”
The different personas of women as portrayed in the stories of
Latorena were also comprehensively discussed by Eva Kalaw. She explained
that the traditional images of women—the woman as martyr, who has a free
choice used for a cause or principle, and the woman as wife and mother, who
lives the unarticulated life of her sex—are both dominant in Latorena’s stories.
Finally, in “The Gay Self as Myth: Confessionalism and Personal Myth-
making in Gay Lyric Poetry” by UP Professor J. Neil Garcia, confessionalism,
just like in Latorena’s feminist poems, was described as the “unbosoming of a
painful personal experience, interweaving of public and private knowledge
and the use of an intimate and conversational tone.”
Three short stories, which, according to critics and educators, established
Latorena as a “matriarch” of Filipino writers in English, were “Desire,” “The
Small Key,” and “Sunset.”
In teaching demonstrations conducted by UST professors, Latorena’s short
stories were given new life in a classroom setting. Asst. Prof. Jack Wigley of
the College of Rehabilitation Sciences dissected a Latorena piece in his “The
Body as Discourse in Paz Latorena’s ‘Desire.’”
“Desire” is about a lady with no beauty of countenance, but whose voluptuous
body is the object of the desire of men. According to Wigley, the female body,
which is often exalted by poets, painters, and sculptors, is subjected to
judgment, ridicule, aesthetic alteration and violent abuse.
Wigley said the short story portrays the concept of desire” as “not only as a
site of oppression and exploitation, but also a source of female power and the
perceptually emerging voice of women.”
Aside from the feminist theme as a vital element of Latorena’s works, setting,
as an element of narration, is just as significant, according to Asst. Prof.
Ferdinand Lopez of the Faculty of Arts and Letters, in “Tropical Solitude: The
Setting as Invincible Intangible Force in Paz Latorena’s ‘Small Key.’” “The
Small Key” depicts the jealousy of a woman of her husband’s dead first wife
and the impossibility of her being forgiven and forgotten.
“Sounds and Silences as Auditory Device in Paz Latorena’s ‘Sunset’” was
then explored by Faculty of Arts and Letters Asst. Prof. Ralph Semino Galan.
In “Sunset,” a lady leaves a man and his offer of marriage. Galan said that
Latorena used poetic and metaphorical language. But, sounds may be used
as effectively in speech as in music, Galan said. “Sometimes, silence is more
eloquent than speech,” he said. According to him, there is a silence as a form
of submission, self-repression, resignation, and gesture, all of which appear in
Latorena’s works.

Source:
http://www.varsitarian.net/literary/ust_pays_homage_to_paz_latoren
a_lady_of_letters_and_beloved_mentor

http://rizal.lib.admu.edu.ph/aliww/english_platorena.html