EARLY LIFE
Amador T. Daguio was born on the 8th of January in 1912 at Laoag, Ilocos Norte. He moved with his constabulario father, who helped restore order to the non-Christian Kalinga tribes in the material regions of the Mountain Province in northern Luzon. His passion, though, was for an adventure of a different kind. And at the age of four, he "ran away to school" to dream of the youthful idylls that he later featured in his unpublished novel, The Cradle of Summer.
EDUCATION
Amador Daguio studied primary education in Lubuagan Elementary School and graduated as the class valedictorian in 1924. Daguio has started writing poems ever since elementary, according to his account. When he was in Grade 6, he even wrote a farewell verse on a chalkboard at least once for a departing teacher. He moved to Pasig in his secondary level to attend Rizal High School while residing with his uncle at Fort William McKinley.
Due to poverty, he failed to enroll for the first semester in college in 1928. He also fell short at qualifying for a scholarship, which forced him to work as a houseboy, waiter, and caddy at Fort McKinley to afford studying for the next semester at the University of the Philippines. During his academic life, he has been mentored in writing by an Australian professor named Tom Inglis Moore. He then graduated from UP in 1932 as one of the top ten honorary graduates. After World War II, he went to Stanford University as a Fulbright scholar to study for his master's degree in English, which he earned in 1952. And in the year 1954, he obtained a degree in law in Romualdez Law College in Leyte.
CAREER
Amador Daguio established a notable teaching career. He served at prominent universities such as the University of the East, the University of the Philippines, and the Philippine Women’s University. But during the Great Depression in the Philippines, Daguio returned to the Mountain Province to acquire medication for Tubercular Lesions. After recovering from the disease, he started to teach at Bukidnon Agricultural High School. He then transferred to Zamboanga Normal School in 1937.
During World War II in the Philippines, Daguio persistently upheld his responsibilities as an educator and writer in an oppressed country. In 1941, he became a professor at Leyte Normal School. He also established the Tacloban Theatre Guild where his plays, Prodigal Son and Filipinas, were performed. The latter became a controversial play due to the exposure and raising of the Philippine flag—an act initially prohibited by Japanese conquerors.
In 1951, Daguio studied abroad at the Creating Writing Center Stanford University as a government pensionado. There, he translated the epic harvest songs of the Kalingas for his Master’s thesis; and wrote his famous short story, The Wedding Dance.
Daguio successively accomplished different achievements upon his return to the Philippines. He worked as the Chief of the Editorial Board of the Public Affairs Office in the Department of National Defense, Public Relations Officer for the Huk resettlement commission, and assistant to the director of the Bureau of Budget. Amidst governmental obligations, Daguio continued delivering lectures at state universities. However, he failed to publish another poetry book aside from Bataan Harvest and The Flaming Lyre (1959) because of his job as a ghost-writer of political speeches. Hence, most of his works are either undiscovered or unpublished. Fortunately, some of his poems were featured at the Beloit Poetry Journal, Pacific Spectator, and Leonardo Casper’s Six Filipino Poets. Furthermore, his short story “The Wedding Dance” appeared in Stanford Short Stories 1953 by the deemed “Dean of Western Writers” Wallace Stegner and American writer Richard Scowcroft. In 1958, Daguio became the Chief Editor for the Philippine House of Representatives. Six years after his demise, he received the Republic Cultural Heritage Award to honor his contribution to the Philippine literature.
WORKS
During his college days, he worked as a printer’s devil during weekends at the University of the Philippines and served as a Philippine Collegian reporter. There he learned the art of writing from Tom Inglis Moore, an Australian professor teaching in the university. His stories and poems appeared in almost all the Manila papers at the time. He returned shortly to Manila as a textbook writer under the Bureau of Education. Then, he went to Zamboanga in 1937 to teach at Zamboanga Normal School. Daguio joined the resistance after the war broke out and wrote poems in secret. Later, it was named the Bataan Harvest. He also wrote a novel entitled The House of My Spirit, and he had published another volume of poetry called The Flaming Lyre. Some of the other notable poems he created are To Those of Other Lands, The Hordes, Mountain People, and Man of Earth. And he was still considerably young when he wrote some of the works mentioned. But even though Daguio was recognized in writing stupendous poems, he was not confined to poetry only. Daguio also wrote fictional stories, like the Wedding Dance, which he is excellently known for. Most of his works are still left unpublished and some, unwritten. One group of poems he wrote appeared in Six Filipino Poets while others appeared in the Pacific Spectator and The Beloit Poetry Journal.
Here are other several published works of Amador Daguio:
Huhud hi aliguyon (a translation of an Ifugao harvest song, Stanford, 1952)
The Flaming Lyre (a collection of poems, Craftsman House, 1959)
The Thrilling Poetical Jousts of Balagtasan (1960)
Bataan Harvest (war poems, A.S Florentino, 1973)
The Woman Who Looked Out the Window (a collection of short stories, A.S Florentino, 1973)
The Fall of Bataan and Corregidor (1975)
Death
He died of liver cancer in 1967.
Article written by:
Tricia Pat Clemor
John Lorenz Calusor
Xena Cristine Mae Bulledo
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