This column celebrates the vibrant literary culture and heritage of Dumaguete City, in anticipation of its bid to be designated as UNESCO City of Literature under the Creative Cities Network. It is produced by the Buglas Writers Guild, a network of literary artists from Negros Oriental, Negros Occidental, and Siquijor. Each week, we will focus on the work of one local writer.
Right up to the very end, the historian Tranquilino Valentino S. Sitoy Jr., who passed away last 8 June 2025, was conscious about finishing some of the many historiographic projects he had meant to accomplish in his lifetime, an indefatigable figure of scholarship and local history. But for what he had already accomplished, his work is already more than enough, a lot of which have contributed to a greater understanding of not just local history but also church history.
Bill to friends and family, Dr. Sitoy was a theologian, a teacher, and a historian who wrote extensively about church history in the Philippines. He was born on 5 July 1939 in Claveria, Misamis Oriental, where he graduated valedictorian from Misamis Oriental National High School in 1954. He soon attended the University of the Philippines in Diliman, earning a degree in electrical engineering in 1957.
He was, however, fascinated with theology, and soon moved to Dumaguete and studied at the Divinity School of Silliman University, graduating in 1963. He began teaching at Silliman University, but pursued further studied abroad. He would eventually earn his M.A. in Religion from the Andover Newton Theological School in 1965, and his Ph.D. at The University of Edinburgh, graduating in 1972.
Between 1963 to 1991, he would become Dean of the Divinity School at Silliman University, and also OIC Vice President for Academic Affairs—a period of time in his life that was of extraordinary ferment, a time when he would manage to churn out important books on church history, including British Evangelical Missions to Spain in the Ninetheenth Century [1972], A History of Christianity in the Philippines: The Initial Encounter [1985], and Comity and Unity: Ardent Aspirations of Six Decades of Protestantism in the Philippines (1901-1961) [1989], becoming an important voice chronicling Protestantism in the country. He would also write, together with fellow literary giants Crispin Maslog and Edilberto K. Tiempo, a new history of their alma mater, Silliman University 1901-1976 [published in 1977], in celebration of the university’s diamond jubilee.
In 1996, after leaving Silliman University, he began teaching at Trinity Theological College in Singapore. He would also become visiting professor/scholar to Overseas Ministries Study Center in Ventnor, New Jersey.; International Christian University in Tokyo; Parkin-Wesley Theological College in Adelaide; and the Union Theological Seminary in New York, as well as Calvin College and Theological Seminary in Seoul. He was Area Dean for the Philippines of the South East Asia Graduate School of Theology. Then, after his Singapore stint, he became Graduate School Dean and Vice President for Academic Affairs at Negros Oriental State University in 1999-2004, until his retirement. He was Metrobank Foundation Inc. Outstanding Teacher of the Philippines (College Division) Awardee in 2002.
Other books include Several Springs, One Stream: The United Church of Christ in the Philippines [1992], and an unpublished history of the Silliman University Divinity School, which he finished in 2022. These works clearly show that the bulk of his scholarship was on church history, but he actually also made a name for himself as a passionate historiographer of Dumaguete City and Negros Oriental. For the publication of Kabilin: Legacies of a Hundred Years of Negros Oriental, edited by Merlie Alunan and Bobby Flores-Villasis in 1993, he contributed a long history of the province from the pre-colonial period until the 1990s. For the Hugkat Journal, he contributed another long piece, this time on the history of Dumaguete, where his assertions about how Dumaguete got its name is probably most interesting, as it differs from the more popular version.
Below is an excerpt from that article, titled “Dumaguete in Historical Perspective”:
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It is the general assumption that Dumaguete derived its name from the Visayan verb dagit, meaning “to snatch,” or better yet, to “swoop down and seize,” as when a hawk swoops down and seizes a prey. This same line of thought assumes that “Dumaguete” was derived from the presumed fact that it was where Moro raiding parties used to seize local inhabitants into slavery. The common belief is that its original name was Dumaguit, which the Spaniards transformed into “Dumaguete.”
There are at least three reasons, however, which pose serious difficulties with this idea.
Firstly, according to Spanish records, there were only three villages in Dumaguete in 1565, two along the shore, one with about 25 houses, and another with 50. The third was situated on an elevation visible from the sea and had another 50 houses. With about 100 houses in the area and about 400 or at most 500 inhabitants, who were so situated as to easily escape into the interior, the area did not seem a likely place for habitual seizure of captives. In any case, if it was a place where raiders were wont to snatch local inhabitants, why was it not rather more appropriately called dalagitan or dagitanan.
Secondly, the term dumaguit is an admiring ascription to the actor of the verb dagit. Was it in honor then of the valiant Moro commander, whoever he was, whose process his Christianized victims decided to celebrate with a glowing epithet? At best, this is unconscionably inappropriate; at worst, it is unfathomably absurd.
Thirdly, there is the presumption that there were frequent recurrent raids, so that in time the place came to be given this name as a result. But a Spanish Augustinian record says that one of their members, a Fray Francisco Oliva de Santa Maria, O.S.A., was assigned in “1599” to “Dumaguete,” though later that year he was transferred to the Augustinian’s Panay missions when Negros was handed over to the secular clergy from the cathedral of Cebu.
Yet the Moro raids against Christian settlements in the Visayas and Luzon began only that very same year, 1599, when a Maguindanaon force—3,000 strong—in more than 50 large vessels, attacked the Visayas in revenge for Spanish incursions into Islamic territory in Mindanao. The same marauders returned in 1600, and again in 1602. In annotating Morga’s Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas, Jose Rizal stated that the 1599 raid was “the first piracy of the inhabitants of the South recorded in Philippine history.”1 How can Dumaguete be named as a result of Moro raids, when the Moro raids began in 1599, and in 1599 Dumaguete was already known by the Spaniards as “Dumaguit” or “Dumaguete”?
But there is a Spanish document of 1582, the Relación de las yslas Filipinas written by Captain Miguel de Loarca,2 the Spanish encomendero of Oton, Panay, which mentions the personal name of “Dumaguet.” The pertinent passage reads: “[Q]uando los prinçipales desçendientes de dumaguet … muere El principal de aquella mesma muerte matan a un esclauo el mas desuenturado qe pueden allar para qe los sirua en el otro mundo y siempre procuran, que sea este esclauo estranjero y no natural porqe Realmente no son nada crueles.”3
In English, this 16-century Spanish passage reads: “When the chiefs descended from Dumaguet die, a slave is made to die by the same death. They chose the most wretched slave they can find to serve the chief in the other world. They always chose a foreign, not a native, slave, for they are really not at all cruel.”
The phrase prinçipales descendientes de dumaguet (“chiefs descended from Dumaguet”) seems to imply that Dumaguet himself was a great Visayan chief, who seems to have been a folk-hero honored by the epithet “Dumaguit,” and this perhaps because of his prowess in attack with such fury and swiftness that he always succeeded in seizing hapless captives for slavery.
Moreover, he must have lived several generations before 1582 for Loarca to be able to speak of los prinçipales descendientes de dumaguet. If so, then “Dumaguete” does not then carry with it a sense of weakness, ignominy, and defeat. Rather, it is a tribute to the might, valor, and greatness of an ancient Visayan chief who continued and deserved to be long remembered despite the passage of generations.
If so, then Dumagueteños can regard the name of their city with lively disposition and even with justifiable pride, and do not have to paradoxically celebrate the prowess of an enemy chieftain, whoever he was, who had in fact inflicted painful and ignominious defeat on early Dumagueteños.
