Tanjayanon Historian : Ron Jacob Calumpang
Philippine National Artist for Film and Broadcast Arts. Eddie Romero was born on 7 July 1924 in Dumaguete, spent time as a wee babe in Bais, and christened on 25 October 1924 in Tanjay.
Dumaguete, the political capital, was the land of birth of his great-great-grandmother Liberata Villamil Teves and his great-grandfather Jose Francisco Teves Muñoz. Bais, the sugar capital, was from where his mothers Maria del Pilar Guzman Sinco and Elisa Zuñiga Villanueva hail from and where his paternal great-grandfather from Sanlúcar de Barrameda Jose Romero conducted business with his astute Ilongga wife Maria Ramona Derecho. Tanjay, the oldest parish of Oriental Negros, was where his great-great-grandfather Leogardo Garcia Calumpang, his great-grandmother Aleja Silva Calumpang, and his grandmother Josefa Calumpang Muñoz were born.
It takes a village to raise a child, and that village goes beyond Dumaguete, Bais, and Tanjay. Eddie Romero was a true child of Negros Oriental. He was a perpetual student of history who sought to understand not just the human condition in general but the Filipino experience in particular. As a writer, a filmmaker, a producer, an advocate, and all the many hats he wore and the pipes he smoked throughout his long life, he sought not just to understand for himself what it means to be a Filipino but to make more people understand for themselves what it is that makes us Filipinos.
Tito Eddie’s films and his legacy will long outlive us all, and that is truly a comfort to know.
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P.S. Of course, being from Tanjay, I have more to say about it. Tanjay in the old days was where they say you’d find filosofos, where smart alecks engaged in discourse for the sake of discourse. It was also in Tanjay where his Calumpang, Muñoz, Barot, and Banogon relations put together plays and orchestras and wrote poems and lyrics and read Dumas and Hugo. It was in Tanjay, in the heart of Negros Oriental, where his great-great-grandfather, great-grandfather, grandfather, and father served as gobernadorcillos, capitanes municipal, mayors—the family’s pre-war bailiwick from where all campaigns began, even all the way to Imperial Manila, be it the rarified halls of Congress or the glamor of the Manila Carnivals. It was in Tanjay where his precedents dared challenge political dynasties and established religions, relying solely on impregnable principles and rarely on material resources—fights often not won as an excess of the latter always trumps security in the former. I think Tito Eddie definitely got something from Tanjay!
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