Provenance: Jose P. Santos, son of Epifanio de los Santos

ABOUT THE WORK

“Lakanbini” has various meanings, including ‘guiding light’ and ‘wife of a nobleman.” For Gregoria de Jesus, it was the code name of the first woman of the Katipunan, and also an honorific as the wife of the Supreme Leader of the Katipunan. Gregoria de Jesus presents in broad strokes her life as a girl, who sacrificed her own education in typical Filipino fashion, so that her two brothers may go to school. Instead, she took her place managing the family farm and household. At 18, she married Andres Bonifacio, a widower. He would draw her into his secret activities in the KKK and she would be the steward of the most important — and dangerous— records of the Katipunan. Carrying them hidden in her clothes and on her person, evading arrest night after night, finally living under an alias for over a month until she could escape to the northern precincts outside Manila to join Bonifacio. In this biography she skirts the fateful events in Cavite, sayni g she has written elsewhere about them. Gregoria de Jesus does write about her days as a woman-soldier in the Revolution — Adrian Cristobal note that she was never captured by the Spanish. All in all, it is a riveting account of the Katipunan’s true gender equality. — Lisa Guerrero Nakpil