La Sallites and Lasallians

It was an innocent, run-of-the-mill event in our lives as La Sallites, back in 1960. An announcement came out on campus, on bulletin boards, dubbed as "Name Your Campus Paper Contest." The faculty moderator of the school newspaper, Aurelio Calderon, wanted a new name for the campus paper to further distance itself from the old paper called "The La Sallite."

"The La Sallite" had been published by, for and of the students at De La Salle College in Manila for as long as anyone could remember. The quality of the paper had been under attack by some members of the faculty, including and especially Mr. Aurelio Calderon - later Dr. Calderon after he earned his PhD.

As one of those who organized the new campus paper, I was aware of the entries that were coming in. Some appeared to be good, others were particularly witty, while others just plain stunk.

Then one day, Mr. Calderon opened his mail and found an entry: The La Sallian. "This is it," he exclaimed. "This is what we will call the new newspaper. The La Sallite, after all, is a strange name. People are not called 'ites' anymore, they are 'ians' or 'ans.' Theresians, Paulinians, Ateneans, Bedans, Rizalians, Mapuans, Upians. La Salle students are the only ones who are called 'ites,' La Sallites."

We did not know it then, but Calderon apparently had planned to send us La Sallites prematurely to extinction.

When the first issue of the new campus paper came out in 1960 and it hit the homes of many La Sallite families, a huge throng of mothers visited the campus. They protested the name change. "My sons are not La Sallians," they screamed. "They're La Sallites. They will always be La Sallites."

Our mothers apparently knew what was really going on, while we La Sallites had no idea we were sauntering in, like Agamemnons, to our slaughter.

Over the years, the students at De La Salle College, later De La Salle University, became known as La Sallians. It was, however, an issue that wouldn't quit. It made its way all the way to the world's number one Christian Brother in Rome, and the scholars of the Christian Brothers felt obliged to rule on the question. The students of De La Salle College in Manila would henceforth be known as Lasallians, they ruled, following the tradition of calling students of nearly all schools run by the Christian Brothers worldwide Lasallians.

That ruling effectively made us La Sallites obsolete.

What's in a name? Is a rose a rose by any other name?

To a lot of people in the Philippines, the term "La Sallite" carried a certain cachet. There were very few La Sallites in the Philippines. The La Salle system consisted of De La Salle College in Manila and the La Salle College in Bacolod City in Central Philippines.

The Manila campus consisted of grade school, high school and college, later also Masters. Most people who went to La Salle grew up on that one campus. That was our home away from home, from kindergarten all the way through college.

We knew everyone, and everyone knew us. We were family. We fought like brothers. We had no sisters, not unless you count the obviously homosexual among us, who walked and looked like girls. There were very, very few of those and most of us went to school with torn pockets (from roughhousing) and didn't care if our socks had holes.

We played marbles on the soft muddy grounds, so we walked around with dirt caked in our fingernails. Nobody cared.

We were born into large families, and in every family there was a designated potential public servant, a designated potential priest, Brother or nun, a designated potential doctor, businessman, artist, musician. We were born in an age of heroes, minor and larger-than-life heroes. We assumed that no matter what role we played in nation-building it would be an important role.

Our mothers drilled into us the notion that we were special, that we would grow up to be leaders of the nascent democracy that was truly the Pearl of the Orient Sea.

Our role models were Rizal, Mabini, Bonifacio, Quezon, Magsaysay, Recto, Manglapus and Diokno. We would live our lives in the Philippines and breathe our last breaths there. We would go abroad just to hone our skills - skills that we could then apply to solving the problems in the Philippines - and not live permanently elsewhere, losing the nationality we were born with.

The movies that we saw were all violent - there were no boards yet that rated movies as PG, PG-13, R, etc. We saw all the violent movies of Errol Flynn, Humphrey Bogart, John Wayne. We saw the movie "All the Brothers were Valiant" and when we were in school we looked for fights. We also watched actors and actresses kiss in the mouth and as they un-clinched, we could see a string of saliva connecting the two mouths. That was the trademark of sexually suggested movies in those days - the string of saliva connecting two mouths.

There were four of us Lumbas in school all at once. The bravest among us was the youngest, Oscar, who was known on campus as "Bulldog." Oscar feared no one. The other guy could be a foot taller with a reach at least a foot longer, but Oscar would be unfazed. He was a bleeder - in the tradition of the boxer known as the Bayonne Bleeder. Every time Oscar got into a fight his nose bled.

One memorable fight he had was with the late Jaime Jose. The guy was just a regular La Sallite, decent-looking like everybody else on campus, and none of us had any idea that he would someday gain the ultimate notoriety of being sent to the electric chair - by Judge Lourdes San Diego for the rape and sexual mutilation of Maggie de la Riva, a beautiful actress in the 60s whose angelic face made her desirable to all Filipino men and pimpled teenagers.

One of my brothers, Amado, saw that Oscar was suffering a beating at the hands of Jaime Jose, so Amado wrapped his arms around Jaime Jose's arms and body and told Oscar to just keep punching. Oscar obliged and by the time he was done, Jaime Jose had tasted a horrible Lumba beating.

The oldest Lumba, Jose, was lean and easy to underestimate. So he got into a lot of fights. I never knew anyone with quicker fists than my brother and every time I saw him fight, the other kid got bloodied. And that brother of mine had a temper - he still does.

I was always big boned and, being a basketball player, I was muscular. Not too many wanted a part of me, and as a consequence I did not get into many fights. I did get into a lot of fights in my neighborhood in Santa Ana, Manila, however, and those were nasty.

Fighting at La Salle was part of growing up. We were all boys and we settled our differences as boys - with our fists. After we fought, we took our lumps, made up and acted like nothing had happened. We were all La Sallites, we were brothers who settled our differences bravely and without rancor. No one kept a grudge for longer than a week.

UNIFORMS. Our grade school uniform was a white short-sleeved shirt with one pocket on the left breast. On that pocket was sewed in a green "Religio-Mores-Cultura" insignia, the patch that identified a grade schooler at La Salle. Our pants were short khakis or long khakis. Most wore short khakis because it was hot in the Philippines and there was no air-conditioning in the classrooms. The short pants were cheaper; plus, we couldn't tear our short pants at the knees.

In high school, we wore grey military uniforms. La Salle High School was a quasi-military school and students were disciplined to the core. We respected our teachers - generally - and treated them like they were military officers.

One distinguishing trait of La Salle High School students was that we stood out in parties. We were well-behaved - generally - and gallant towards the girls. We were military officers and gentlemen. We were also dancers, as opposed to the standers - the Ateneans who preferred to stand in corners and philosophized, in Latin - among themselves while the La Sallites got to dance with all the girls.

In college, we wore white shirts and ties to school.

Everyone who went to college at La Salle had a younger brother or cousin in high school and/or grade school on the same campus. We all knew each other. We didn't know each other's names, but we saw each other on campus and we could recognize each other everywhere.

La Sallite was not just a brand, it was a way of life.

TEACHERS. Growing up in La Salle, nearly half of our teachers were Christian Brothers, all of them coming from the U.S. We grew up under the tutelage of Americans who taught us English, Religion, Math, Science and Sports - lots of sports.

In grade school we were not allowed to speak Tagalog; we had to use English. We were fined if we were caught speaking in Tagalog. The rationale was simple: we spoke Tagalog at home and everywhere, we had to speak English in school because the only way to learn a language is by using it.

The Christian Brothers education that we got at La Salle - in the minds of our parents - was one of the best that could be had in the Philippines at the time. The American Brothers had Masters amd PhD's in Education and were some of the best-qualified teachers that the Christian Brothers organization in California could send abroad.

My mother told me that when she was going to public schools in the early 20th century, they also had excellent teachers, some of them from the U.S. I never bothered to ask my mother if the American teachers she had were the Thomasites. We all know about the Thomasites from our history books, those American teachers who went to the Philippines to staff the public schools that were modeled after the public school system in the U.S.

The students of La Salle these days (now known as Lasallians, not La Sallites) are not growing up under the American Christian Brothers. They are not growing up under the Filipino Christian Brothers either because the Filipino Brothers rarely teach nowadays. They are busy with administrative concerns. There are 18 La Salle campuses now and a few years ago I was told there were not enough Brothers to staff all the schools.

The ideal set-up is three Brothers on each campus, so there is always a tie-breaker. A few of the campuses have less than three Brothers.

The Christian Gentleman. I may have given you the impression that La Sallites all came out of the cookie cutter. Of course there were many variations, many gradations of Christian Gentlemanliness.

Every time the Ateneo basketball teams played the La Salle teams on the La Salle campus on Taft Avenue in Manila, many Ateneans went home with shiners and bloodied noses. And every time La Salle visited Ateneo at Loyola Heights, La Sallites went home like they had been through a meat grinder.

It was a part of the culture, part of the fun. I personally did not join in the melees but I knew the kids who were regulars in those NCAA fights and I enjoyed vicariously all the stark details of those fights.

We had goons on campus, just like everywhere else in the Philippines. But we never strayed too far from the norm. Many of the campus goons became doctors, bank presidents and businessmen and are now some of the wealthiest Filipinos.

The La Sallite brand was, deservedly, elitist. For that reason alone, it was understandable that people would want to change it. This, however, should have been done through attrition, not by fiat.

La Sallites are unavoidably on their way to extinction. The De La Salle University campus in Manila is just a college campus now. Grade school is either La Salle-Zobel in Alabang or in any of the other campuses on the island of Luzon.

High School is primarily on the Green Hills campus and other campuses all over the islands.

Today's Lasallians grew up on different campuses and do not have the benefit of being classmates and schoolmates for fifteen to sixteen straight years on the same campus. And, since DLSU is now co-educational, the camaraderie is different. It's no longer a "boys will be boys" culture but rather a "Is she looking at me because she finds me attractive, or do I have food stuck on my cheek?"

Every time you throw girls in the mix, you change the culture. Girls are always welcome, of course, and very desirable. But you change the culture. The guys become more aware of their appearance because they are dressing up for their schoolmates now. We La Sallites could care less what we looked like, as long as we had a tie on when we were on campus.

Today's Lasallian is into appearance and being cool. The girls like being ogled at as they saunter past the Bench Boys who regularly sit on the benches lining up the walkways. Girl-watching is the rage, since many of Metro Manila's pretty lasses choose to go to La Salle.

La Salle is also trimestral now and a lot of students go through college in three years. It's like Lasallians are being mass-produced by a long factory line.

I visited the La Salle campus last year and the year before that and each time I saw a sea of faces. La Salle has so many college students now the campus looks like what FEU (Far Eastern University) looked like in the old days.

With so many students on campus, it's impossible to know everybody. Cliques are inevitable. Clique identities are far more important, with the Lasallian brand now a much watered down version of the old La Sallite.

Like most young people all over the world, Lasallians practically live on the Internet. It's where they learn, lecture, debate and sometimes fight. It is virtual fighting now, not the traditional mano a mano that La Sallites used to engage in.

And because it is all happening in cyberspace where people are in no danger of getting their noses bloodied, except figuratively, the protagonists can be very vicious or brave, depending on one's point of view. The Lasallian community is becoming divided, just as divided as the Philippine society at large.

Ideologies are hardening, just as they are hardening in the country and the world. The great philosopher, Plato, introduced the dialectical method of advancing knowledge, which is thesis, antithesis and synthesis. In between the first two steps - thesis and antithesis - there usually is conflict.

In Philippine society at large, and in Lasallian society as well, debates and discussions get stuck in the conflict stage. Rarely do national as well as private conversations progress to the synthesis stage: consensus or compromise.

I think that is why it is very difficult for the Philippines to make transformational changes. That is also why it is difficult for Lasallians to form a consensus on anything. National politicians simply stop talking meaningfully, they instead posture and play political games. Lasallians avoid talking about serious issues altogether.

We La Sallites did not grow up under a culture of permanent impasse and conflict. Many of us were born in the age of heroes and nationalists, people who could get things done.

We believe that it is possible to arrive at consensus and so we do not always avoid serious issues. We also get along well with each other because we settle our differences and move on. None of us carry grudges long term, with a few exceptions of course. Certainly not like some Lasallians who carry grudges that persist for decades.

My high school class (La Salle High School Class of 1959) held a Golden Jubilee reunion last year and it was a blast. It was like we were time travelers reliving our past.

For one brief moment, a fleeting moment it seemed though it lasted two weeks, we were all La Sallites. We seemingly had no idea we were going the way of the dinosaur.