3 broadcasters and Bisaya advice columnist in Cebu Province Women Trailblazers list
3 broadcasters and Bisaya advice columnist in Cebu Province Women Trailblazers list
3 short story writers/novelists also honored almost a decade ago by Cebu Provincial Government through its Provincial Women’s Commission
Would the project update its second “Sugboanaang Tag-una” list, which reportedly came after the 2006 original list?
Source: 2006 Heritage Cards honoring Cebu’s Women Trailblazers
Box- top image, the cover photo if it were a magazine: that of Ines S. Villa-Gonzalez. The cards, like the standard playing cards, are 2.5 inches by 3.5 inches, each bearing on the face the honoree’s photo and at the back, her brief bio. Villa-Gonzales was the only woman among four winners of Premio Zobel, which recognized excellence in Spanish literary writing, for her book “Filipinas en el Camino de Cultura.”
THE Cebu Provincial Government, through its Provincial Women’s Commission (PWC), since 2006 has listed and honored Cebu’s Women Trailblazers or “Sugboanang Tag-una.”
How? Through “heritage” play cards, which were “crafted to recreate and rekindle a passionate love of our country, our people and people.” Each card bears the photograph of the honoree and, on its back, the name and a brief bio, including the field she pioneered in.
SETS OF “SUGBOANANG TAG-UNA” HONOREES. The compendium, said the first search committee in its March 30, 2006 note on the cards’ box, “hopes to regain the women’s rightful place in Cebu’s Heritage to inspire present and future Cebuanos.”
There were reportedly two sets of honorees and “heritage” cards: the first, in 2006, a panel of nine led by Linda K. Alburo, then director of the USC Cebuano Studies Center.
The second set, “an expanded one,” was led by Esther Balgue-Valasquez. There were 58 honorees in the first list.
CJJ still has to find basic information about the second set, such as names and number of honorees.
The first list, announced in 2006 with the release of the Heritage cards, was 19 years ago, as of this 2025 report.
From top left, clockwise: “Ma’m Ginnie” Vamenta, “Inday Nita” Cortes-Daluz, “Manding Karya” Cabigon, and Melva Java.
4 WERE INTO MEDIA. The first set of Cebuana Trailblazers included three broadcasters and a “Bisaya” magazine columnist:
Virginia Peralta-Vamenta, known to her audience as “Ma’m Ginnie,” was recognized as the first woman radio announcer in Cebu. DYRC — the radio station she worked with, starting 1947– was also “the first radio station to go on air after the Liberation.” She was “known for her cool, soothing voice and near-native command of English.” Ma’m Ginnie was a Smith Mundt Leader grantee in radio and television sponsored by the U.S. state department, which sent her on a three-month tour of American broadcast stations in 1954. After her retirement from DYRC in 1972, she hosted the monthly “Women’s Kapihan” from 1975 to 2001 on DYLA and wrote a column for the print edition of Cebu Daily News. She passed away June 8, 2022 at 99.
Related: “Ginnie Vamenta, Cebu’s first woman radio announcer,” in CJJ, “Women journalists” section
Nenita Cortes-Daluz served various capacities in broadcast work, from regular talent and writer-director of radio drama to announcer to production and program manager and station manager. “Inday Nita” later shifted from entertainment — in such programs as “DYRC Amateur Hour”– to opinion making, which she used to wage her advocacy. During martial law, hers was the voice of victims of human rights abuses, with her program covering such events as the 1980 “Freedom March,” for which she was arrested and detained and her radio station padlocked.
In 1984, she won a seat in the Batasang Pambansa, lone winner in the slate of Partido Panaghiusa that she founded. She was appointed local government undersecretary when the Cory Aquino rose to power in 1986. In 2005, despite health problems, she continued to anchor an afternoon program on DYDD Bantay Radyo from her home. She died Aug. 29, 2007 at 68.
Maria A. Cabigon, better known as “Manding Karya,” wrote an advice column titled “Ang Panid ni Manding Karya” in the national Cebuano-language weekly magazine “Bisaya.”
In her 60-year writing career, she wrote almost 400 serialized novels and and hundreds of poems and articles. She also wrote short stories — with her first, “Ang Gugma sa Inahan” produced at age 16 — numbering more than a hundred, which earned her the title of “most prolific Cebuana writer.” Vicente Sotto encouraged her to write in Cebuano instead of Spanish. It was her advice column in Bisaya magazine that made her name a household word across Visayas and Mindanao and pockets of the populace that spoke or understood Cebuano-Bisaya. She preferred being a free-lance writer to being an editor, except for a short stint at “Babaye sa Sugbo.”
Her writing carried bits of humor. A letter writer in Ormoc asked if he could take to Cebu City three sacks of rice as gift for his girlfriend from their town who was studying at USC. Manding Karya’s advice: Not improper to give the gift and if he’d wish to lighten her load on the way to the girl, Manding Karya quipped, he could drop one sack at 11 Sanciangko St., the widely known Cebu City address of the advice columnist. She was born in 1878 in Carcar, Cebu. No available record of her date of death, only of her well-known and last address at 11 Sanciangko.
Conservaton architect Melva Java, during the July 17, 2018 book launching at the Archdiocesan Museum of Cebu, talks about restoration of historical structures. Java co-authored with German engineer Raimund Becker-Ritterspach the 260-page “Illustrated Manual for the Repair and Maintenance of Spanish Period Structures in the Philippines”
Melva C. Rodriguez-Java, a television anchor whom the 2006 Cebuana Trailblazers search committee called a “multifaceted woman,” being also an architect, anthropologist, and educator, on top of her media practice and “a mother and family matriarch.” The news program she anchored was voted by Camma or the
Cebu Archdiocesan Catholic Mass Media Awards as Best TV News for three consecutive years, the search committee noted. A plum in her ”rich background” is that of being architect, specializing in architectural conservation, which led to, among others, such jobs as USC dean on architecture and fine arts for 12 years and Capitol consultant on heritage, restoration, conservation and preservation.
Novelists, short story writers from Cebu in the Trailblazers list: from left, Lina Espina-Moore; Estrella Alfon-Rivera; and Ines Villa-Gonzales, whose photo fills the Heritage cards’ box top.
THREE PIONEERS IN WOMEN’S WRITING are in the 2006 Cebuana Trailblazers list.
Lina Espina-Moore — born of Cebuano parents in Cagayan de Oro in 1919 and grew up and was educated in Cebu schools — wrote 11 novels in Cebuano-Bisaya and two novels in English. War interrupted her law schooling at FEU in Manila. Postwar, she studied foreign service there while working at Malacanang Press Office and writing for Manila-based magazines.
Estrella Alfon-Rivera — born in San Nicolas, Cebu City in 1917 and finished high school in Cebu and and associate in arts at U.P. Diliman — was hailed as “one of the important pioneers in women’s writing” in the country. Graphic magazine published her first short story in 1935. She contributed stories, essays and plays to magazines, including Philippine Free Press, many of which won literary competition prizes. Her favorite setting in her English stories: Espeleta St. in San Nicolas.
Ines S. Villa-Gonzalez was the only woman among four awardees of Premio Zobel for excellence in Spanish writing, for her book published in 1932. She was among the earliest advocates for women’s suffrage, fighting for that right in her book in English, “Philippine Epic of Democracy.” 
PAS