Los Ilocanos honran a su poetisa Leona Florentino con un monumento

Los Ilocanos honran a su poetisa Leona Florentino con un monumento

1930-10-18

Leona Florentino (1849-1884) was an Ilocano poetess who apparently composed works in Spanish and Ilocano. She was the mother of the intellectual Isabelo de los Reyes (1864-1938), who in his work El folklore filipino (1889) included as an appendix some of his mother's poems originally written in Ilocano and translated into Spanish by himself. The poems collected by her son are divided into festive compositions and erotic compositions. The whereabouts of most of Leona Florentino's work and all that was written in Spanish are unknown.

Leona Florentino left her husband, to whom she had been married at the age of 14, and went to live alone. This unusual attitude for the 19th century earned her, together with the poetic work she was known for, recognition and exaltation as a feminist symbol in the Philippines. Hence, these articles report on the unveiling of a statue in her honor in Vigan in 1930, in the midst of the public discussion on women's suffrage in the Philippines.

Reyes y Florentino, Isabelo de los. 1889. El folk-lore Filipino. Manila: Imp. de Sta. Cruz.

Santiago, Luciano P. R. 2003. “The Flowering Pen: Filipino Women Writers and Publishers during the Spanish Period, 1590-1898, A Preliminary Survey.” Philippine Studies 51, num. 4, pp. 558-598.

Blanton, Sarah. 2016. A Threshold of Flowers: Public and Private Eroticism In the Poems of Leona Florentino.

Digitized and stored at the section on Southeast Asian Newspapers of the Global Press Archive of the Center for Research Libraries.

Rocío Ortuño Casanova and Annelies Diels

Spanish