Name: Amado Vera Hernandez
Birthdate-Death: 1903- 1970
Year awarded: In 1939 he won the Philippine Commonwealth
Award for a nationalist historical epic, Pilipinas; in 1940 his
collection of mainly traditional poems, Kayumanggi, won a
Commonwealth Award. His numerous honors culminated in the
Republic Cultural Heritage Award (1962) and National Artist
Award given posthumously in 1973, a recognition of his life-
long service to the cause of liberatory poetics and social justice.
Category: writing
Place of birth: Tondo manila, philippines
Biography
By general consensus, Amado V. Hernandez (1903-1970) is the most serviceable Filipino revolutionary artist of
the twentieth-century whose poetry, fiction, and plays in Filipino (the national language of 80 million Filipinos)
continue to inspire the popular struggle for national democracy and genuine independence against U.S.
imperialism.
Born in Tondo, Manila, on September 13, 1903, Hernandez began his career in journalism in the twenties when
the initial massive Filipino resistance against U.S. military rule had declined. He became editor of the Manila
daily Mabuhay from 1932 to 1934. During the Japanese occupation of the Philippines (1942-45), Hernandez
served as an intelligence officer for the underground guerilla resistance, an experience reflected in his major
novel of neocolonial dependency and revolt, Mga Ibong Mandaragit.
After the war, Hernandez assumed the role of public intellectual: he organized the Philippine Newspaper Guild
in 1945; and he spoke out on national issues as an elected councilor of Manila in 1945-46 and 1948-51. It was
during his presidency of the Congress of Labor Organizations (1947), the largest federation of militant trade
unions in the country, that Hernandez graduated from the romantic reformism of his early years to become a
national-democratic militant. Meanwhile, the establishment of a U.S. neocolony in the Republic of the
Philippines in 1946 extended the Cold War in the repression of local nationalist, progressive movements. It
intensified the feudal landlord exploitation of the peasantry and reinforced the impoverishment of workers and
middle strata, leading to the Huk uprising in the late forties and early fifties. An allegorical representation of the
sociopolitical crisis of the country from the thirties up to the fifties can be found in Hernandez’s realistic novel,
Luha ng Buwaya, and the epic poem of class struggle, Bayang Malaya, for which he received the prestigious
Balagtas Memorial Award.
Owing to his anti-imperialist work, Hernandez was arrested on January 26, 1951 and accused of complicity with
the Communist-led uprising. During the time in which he was imprisoned in various military camps for five
years and six months, Hernandez wrote most of the satiric, agitational poems in Isang Dipang Langit and the
pedagogical drama, Muntinlupa. His singular achievement is what I would call the invention of the Filipino
“concrete universal,” the dialectical representation of socially typical situations that project the contradictions of
ordinary life in a neocolonial formation, with its peculiar idioms and idiosyncratic nuances. Stories like
“Langaw Sa Isang Basong Gatas” and poems like “Mga Muog ng Uri,” “Bartolina,” “Ang Dalaw,” and “Kung
Tuyo na ang Luha Mo” exemplify this dialectical poetics in the service of what Mao calls in the Yenan Forum
the twin tasks of partisan art: the uplifting of standards and the popularization of revolutionary ideas.
From 1956 to 1960, Hernandez wrote countless stories under various pseudonyms for the leading weekly,
Liwayway; he also wrote columns for the daily Taliba, and edited the radical newspapers Ang Makabayan
(1956-58) and Ang Masa (1967-70). But it was his participation in the Afro-Asian Writers’ Emergency
Conference in Beijing, China, in June-July 1966, followed by his active intervention in the International War
Crimes Tribunal (organized by Bertrand Russell, Jean Paul Sartre, and others) in November 1966, that
demonstrated Hernandez’s renewed commitment to the advance of the internationalist struggle against global
capitalism. Up to the day (March 24, 1970) he died, Hernandez was involved as a leading protagonist in mass
rallies against imperialism, feudalism, and bureaucrat-capitalism, for democratic socialism and national
independence.
Major works
(1969)
(1963) (1961)
(2000)
