Salvador Ponce Lopez (May 27, 1911 – October 18, 1993), born in Currimao, Ilocos Norte, was an Ilokano writer, journalist, educator, diplomat, and statesman.
He studied at the University of the Philippines and obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree in English in 1931 and a Master of Arts degree, also in philosophy, in 1933. During his UP days, he became a drama critic for the Philippine Collegian and was a member of the Upsilon Sigma Phi. From 1933 to 1936, he taught literature and journalism at the University of Manila. He also became a daily columnist and magazine editor of the Philippine Herald until World War 2.
In 1940, Lopez' essay "Literature and Society" won in the Commonwealth Literary Awards. This essay posited that art must have substance and that poet Jose Garcia Villa's adherence to "art for art's sake" is decadent. The essay provoked debates, the discussion centered on proletarian literature, i.e., engaged or committed literature versus the art for art’s sake literary orientation.
He was appointed by President Diosdado Macapagal as Secretary of Foreign Affairs and was ambassador to the United Nations for six years before reassigned to France for seven years.
Lopez was the president of the University of the Philippines from 1969 to 1975. And he established a system of democratic consultation in which decisions such as promotions and appointments were made through greater participation by the faculty and administrative personnel; he also reorganized U.P. into the U.P. System. It was during his presidency that U.P. students were politically radicalized, launching mass protests against the Marcos regime, from the so-called "First Quarter Storm" in 1970 to the "Diliman commune" in 1971. During the Diliman Commune, Lopez called the students, faculty, and employees to defend UP and its autonomy from militarization, since the military wanted to occupy the campus, searching for alleged leftists as well as activists opposing them. Many militants, out of his defense of UP's autonomy and democracy, considered him as a progressive and a militant member of the UP academe.
Salvador Ponce Lopez - writer, educator, and diplomat - was a nationalist warrior in war,as well as, in peace. He was born in Currimao, Ilocos Norte on May 27, 1911. His parents were Bernabe Lopez and Segunda Sinang. He graduated from the University of the Philippines with a Bachelor of Arts degree in philosophy in 1931 and Master of Arts degree, also in philosophy in 1933. His colorful journalist’s career began before World War II. From a lowly proofreader of the Sugar News Press in 1931, he became associate editor of The Leader in 1932. In 1933, he became a columnist and deskman for the Philippines Herald. In 1936, he became managing editor of Commonwealth Advocate, writer and co-editor of Herald Midweek Magazine, and editorial writer of the Herald. He also joined the academe beginning in 1933, teaching literature and journalism at the University of Manila.
His first book, Literature and Society: Essays on Life and Letters, which he wrote in 1940, then won the Commonwealth Literary Awards for the essay in 1941 consolidated his view of literature as a mirror of society and expression of a people’s voice. For this he was regarded as a pioneer proponent of what is known as “committed literature”, the anti-thesis to what he called the literature of a “decadent generation”. When the war came, he joined the USAFFE in Corregidor. He was commissioned 1stlieutenant on the staff of General Douglas McArthur, in the public relations section, where he served as copy and scriptwriter. Upon General Carlos P. Romulo’s departure for the United States, Lopez became acting executive officer of the press relations section under Major Kenneth F. Saur, who succeeded Romulo. As chief of that section, Lopez did an excellent job of helping maintain the morale of the Filipino people and the troops on the front. It was his script that announced to the world on April 9, 1942 the fall of Bataan. A few days before enemy troops took over the island bastion, he was ordered to take the last plane out of Corregidor bound for Mindanao, where he served on the staff of then Brigadier-General Manuel Roxas in Malaybalay, Bukidnon. He was also active as a member of Marking’s Guerillas.
After the liberation of the Philippines, he was detailed as chief of the historical section at the Philippine Army headquarters. In 1946, he was tapped for the Foreign Service. He served as deputy chief of the Philippine mission to the United Nations, where he acted as chairman of various bodies, including the Commission on Human Rights. He was also elected to the UN Economic and Social Council as rapporteur on matters relating to freedom of information. He was among those who drafted the UNESCO charter noted for its pioneering declaration on freedom of information.
He served as ambassador to France from 1955 to 1962, when he was appointed undersecretary of Foreign Affairs. He also served as an ambassador to Belgium, the Netherlands, and Switzerland. He assumed the post of Foreign Affairs Secretary from 1963 to 1964. As such, he was one of the architects of the regional accord, better known as Maphilindo, which were Malaysia, the Philippines and Indonesia. It would be the springboard for the founding, years later, of the Association of South East Asian Nations, or ASEAN.
For four years, from 1964 to 1968, he was the country’s permanent representative to the United Nations. In 1968, he served concurrently as ambassador to the United States. “S.P.” Lopez, as friends and associates fondly called him, was elected as the 11thpresident of the University of the Philippines on January 23, 1969. It was during his presidency that UP students were politically radicalized, launching mass protests, from the so-called “First Quarter Storm” in 1970 to the “Diliman commune” in 1971, during which classes were suspended for nine days. It can be said that in those tumultuous times, Lopez succeeded in keeping the university together with his leadership. For his principal stand on academic freedom and UP’s autonomy, he earned the admiration of student activists. Stretching this freedom a little more, he dared criticize President Marcos’ martial law regime in a public forum held in Hawaii in 1974. Allegedly because of this, his term as UP President was not extended. He was UP president until 1975, when he retired to write his memoirs while teaching part-time and growing orchids. He once said that being UP president was the job he loved most. From 1980 to 1991, Lopez served as chairman of the Asian Institute of Journalism’s board of trustees. On October 8, 1993, the AIJ paid him tribute by awarding him the Go Puan Sent professorial chair in development journalism. After the assassination of President Marcos’ main opponent former senator Benigno Aquino Jr., Lopez became an active “street parliamentarian”, joining protest rallies and marches.
In 1986, he was recalled to the Foreign Service to represent the Philippines in the UN once more. He returned in 1988 to serve concurrently as ambassador in the Department of Foreign Affairs and consultant in the Office of the Vice President of the Philippines. He resigned as ambassador in 1989, but continued as consultant in the OVP.
His writing career did not lag behind his diplomatic career. His published works include: Freedom of Information (1953); Human Rights and the Constitution (1970); The Philippines Under Martial Law (1974); New Directions in Philippine Foreign Policy (1975); The Philippines in the 21st century- a future studies symposium (1978), which he edited; Aspects of International Intellectual Cooperation, prepared at the behest of the UN University in Tokyo (1980); Isles of gold- a history of mining in the Philippines (1990); and The U.S.-Philippine Colonial Relationship.
Lopez was married on March 24, 1936 to Maria Luna of Manila. He died of a heart attack on October 19, 1993. He was survived by his second wife, Adelaida Escobar Lopez, and his daughters by his first wife- Rosemary Lopez Rocha and Laura Lopez-Lising, and stepdaughter, Eternity Dizon.

The literary Lopez
Last year marked the birth centennial of another formidable Filipino man of letters — writer, diplomat, and University of the Philippines President Salvador P. Lopez. Among his fellow writers, “SP,” as many would call him, was best known for two things — his running debate with poet Jose Garcia Villa over the artist’s social responsibility, and his essays espousing precisely that idea. He was a complex person caught in difficult times.
Last week, UP paid homage to SP’s memory by holding a day-long symposium covering every important aspect of Lopez’s work and concerns, from academic governance and foreign affairs to human rights and, of course, literature. I was asked to respond to a paper presented by National Artist Bien Lumbera on Lopez’s literary legacy, and what follows is drawn from my notes.
I spoke that afternoon as one of those noisy undergraduates who gave President Lopez a hard time at the barricades during the Diliman Commune of February 1971. I was newly 17 then, and he was a few months short of 60. I’ve just turned 58, and having spent some time myself in university administration, I can now better appreciate the quandary of the classic liberal caught between two opposing tides.
While he may have been something of a firebrand in his own time, particularly with the publication of his seminal essay on literature and society in 1940 when he was 29, you could say that by the time of the First Quarter Storm in the early 1970s, he was seen to be no longer Left enough — which, to be fair, could have been said of many others, including the old Left. The “proletarian literature” he espoused would be superseded by the more exacting standards of social realism as contemplated by the cultural ideologues of the new Party.
There’s an excellent paper on S. P. Lopez’s position as a so-called secular critic, written by Rafael Acuña and published in Ateneo’s Kritika Kultura, that discusses the many Lopezes, if you will, in S. P. Lopez, from the champion of proletarian literature he has been widely hailed as, to the “American bootlicker” that one critic made him out to be.
The literary Lopez was also a man of seeming contradictions. His famous run-ins with Villa tended to paint them as irreconcilable antagonists, and yet he, at one point, had high praise for Villa’s artistry. According to Villa himself, it was Villa’s refusal to consciously mix art and politics that Lopez couldn’t take. Few can remember Lopez’s poetry, but his prose was sharp and supple — and clearly influential, despite the opinions of such as Nick Joaquin to the effect that Lopez’s influence was overblown.
That influence certainly extended to my generation, and it was profound, up to a point. His essay on literature and society — like the writings of Renato Constantino and Hernando Abaya — was what you might call a basic pre-Marxist text for the young cultural activist, although I’m sure many of its literary references would have been lost on us. Later, we would “outgrow” Lopez and move on to Mao and his Talks at the Yenan Forum on Literature and Art, tossing aside Lopez’s terminal admonition to distinguish between art and propaganda. For us, art was propaganda. By 1971, we were impatient to move beyond Lopez.
Since then, of course, many if not most of those FQS writers that I refer to have moved closer back to Lopez than to Mao — particularly the Lopez who was once quoted to have said that there were really only two things worth writing about: love and politics. Many writers of my generation will agree that everything is political, but that politics isn’t or is no longer everything, and that politics can mean something other than the class struggle. Call it a retreat into cautious individualism, but at least for me it’s a reasonable and workable, even liberative, compromise.
But does S. P. Lopez still have something to say to and even about Philippine literature today? He most certainly does. To return to that famous essay, S. P. Lopez envisages the writer as the avatar of progress, and writing itself as “an endeavor of hope.” He himself is optimistic, and cautions against what he calls “indifferentism” or apathy, an “amorphous idealism,” and a “precocious cynicism.”
These, sad to say, are back in vogue, perhaps even more ironically at a time when young writers have all the means to say what they want to whoever, on the Internet. Too much of the new writing I come across today is marked by a troubling cultural and political illiteracy, an absence of engagement with social reality, even on a new generation’s own terms.
The “precocious cynicism” that Lopez bemoaned is all over the Internet, the beguiling anonymity of which has encouraged slash-and-burn ranting, a kind of generalized complaint about the state of everything without the slightest acknowledgment of complicity, culpability, or responsibility. Instead of engagement, we find a sense of entitlement, a puerile demand to be bathed and fed without any personal investment in the messy processes of growth and change.
This, of course, goes beyond literature. But speaking of literature, I have more than once expressed my concern over what I perceive to be the denial or erasure of a sense of nation in the work of some of our writers enamored of what they may imagine to be supranational fantasy, but which on closer inspection is merely another import from elsewhere, particularly the West. We dream of a borderless world and delude ourselves into thinking that the Internet has created precisely that, forgetting that the terms of discourse on the Internet, literary or otherwise, are still largely established in and by the West.
On a more hopeful note, the best of our new writing reflects a maturity of form and content that Lopez would have appreciated—not only in English but in other languages as well. Whether the work be realist, fantastic, or anything in between, our best writers are producing stories and novels demonstrating a firm grasp of our social and political realities and their complex nuances, dealing with such contemporary topics as the diaspora, the digital age, corruption, gender issues, the environment, and the fantastic as a means by which to apprehend the real.
Salvador P. Lopez’s urgings for writers to be grounded in the society that provides them there material and their sustenance cannot be lost on us teachers of literature and writing, who are in a position to remind our students that, aside from artistic expression, writers serve a goal “none more worthy than the improvement of the condition of man and the defense of his freedom.

Bulacan State University
Malolos, Bulacan
S.Y. 2014-2015

Philippine Literature
(Salvador Ponce Lopez)

Submitted by:
Ureta, Pearl Trisa D.
ECE 2D