We fondly call him Sir Ed or Prof. Edilberto N. Alegre to most of his students. I met him in my sophomore year in UP Tacloban through Prof. Joycie Alegre, my professor in the Humanities and Theater Arts. In my junior year, I was invited by this professor to join An Balangaw Theater Arts Group, the resident theater group of UP Tacloban as researcher and technical director, which she directs. When Sir Ed and Ma’am Joycie married a few years after, the whole group traveled to Manila to perform as Church choir singing Visayan gospel songs and later perform Kuratsa at the reception. Their marriage capped a romance that started when he was still teaching in UP Diliman and she was one of his brightest students. Almost 20 years after, he found her again when he was backpacking as a full time cultural researcher when he dropped by Tacloban City from Mindanao. She now teaches Humanities and Theater Arts at UP College where I was one of her students while he was then writing books about his field works in Mindanao about local lore, indigenous and indigenized food, language, rituals, performing arts, etc.

Sir Ed’s Legacy

I was fortunate to be one of his students in his numerous lectures on local culture. His theories are based on his fieldworks and he writes them in his weekly columns; first at the Philippine Daily Inquirer Sunday Inquirer Magazine and then at the Businessworld where he writes until that fateful early morning of January 11, 2009. The daily reported in its January 12, 2009 issue that Sir Ed died of congestive heart failure according to the information sent by Ma’am Joycie. He also left behind his adorable 8-year-old son Lakan Uhay and other children from his first marriage. I wish I were there to comfort Ma’am Joycie.

Sir Ed opened my mind to cultural studies and made me feel prouder to be Pinoy. In his weekly column entitled “Pinoy Na Pinoy” he asserted that we Filipinos were never completely colonized by any of Colonizers who came. In one of his last entries he said:

“At any rate, one of the problems that has obsessed me for about two decades is our indigenization of foreign or borrowed culture. The how of it. We take in a foreign cultural element and we remain Pinoy. We are invigorated by such borrowings. There has been no threat of our cultural waning, much less destruction, due to such borrowings.”