Provenance: : Don Pedro Alejandro Paterno (1857– 1911) and
Doña Luisa Piñeyro de Lugo y Merino (Sra de Paterno, d. 1897)

ABOUT THE WORK

José Ma. Basa y Enriquez (1839- 1907) was a generation ahead of National Hero José but the two men would be life-long friends. A wealthy merchant and a staunch liberal, Basa’s first brush with political activism was as the clandestine distributor of the newspaper El Eco Filipino. Published in Madrid by his brother-in-law, Frederico First page Lerena, it was Basa who used his network to bring the paper into Manila. It was a skill that he would later use to smuggle in copies of the Noli and Fili, written by his friend Rizal. (Possession of these incendiary works was reason enough to clap you into jail — or worse — by the Spanish secret police.) Basa’s reputation as an agitator and reformist put him squarely in the sights of the Spanish colonial government. In the reign of terror after the Cavite Mutiny of 1872, he was rounded up along with the legendary Fathers Gomez, Burgos and Zamora. He would escape execution unlike GomBurZa, but the governor-general was adamant on setting an example and meted out the harshest sentence of banishment of ten years to him. (Basa was exiled along with Pedro Paterno’s father, Maximo, to the Marianas.) (Lisa Guerrero Nakpil)