ART PATRON and literary writer Aida Rivera Ford celebrated her 92nd birthday last week, in a celebration participated in by the students and administrators of Ford Academy of the Arts.
Ford was born on January 22, 1926, in storied Jolo, Sulu. Her father, the late Judge Pablo Rivera, was assigned there. Later the family lived in other parts of the country from Vigan in the Ilocos Region, to Samar, Dumaguete, Sorsogon then, to Bacolod where the war overtook them. She was married in 1958 to Donald Ford, then Director of the United States Information Service, with whom she had a son.
She graduated Cum Laude from Silliman University, where she was the first editor of Sands and Coral, the school’s literary magazine. In 1997 Rivera-Ford put together the five stories in her collection and added thirteen new ones, most of them written in the 1990s. This second collection is titled Born in the Year 1900 (her mother’s birthyear) and Other Stories (1997). Thirteen Stories by the author of “Love in the Cornhusks” and The Chieftest Mourner” covering years lived by a wide spectrum of characters all over the islands written in humorous quasi-historical-biographical inter-twinings with fiction in her unique style. “The Chieftest Mourner” which has been a staple in many Philippine literature books, was written as a requirement for her baccalaureate.
She pursued further studies abroad on a Fulbright grant and graduated with a master’s degree in English Language and Literature at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor in 1954. Her short story, “Love in the Cornhusks”, included in many anthologies here and abroad was written during this period. She received the Jules and Avery Hopwood Award for fiction in 1954. In 1958, Benipayo Press published her “Now and at the Hour and other Stories.” Her other published works include poems, essays, operettas, plays and other short stories. In 1978, she received an East-West Cultural Center grant at the University of Hawaii.
In 1980, she founded the Learning Center of the Arts in Davao City - the first college of Fine Arts in Mindanao. It was renamed Ford Academy of the Arts, Inc. in 1993. Mrs. Ford chaired two Creative Writing Workshops in Mindanao for the NCCA (National Commission of Culture and the Arts).
She received the Datu Bago Award in 1982, the highest honor that the city of Davao bestows on the citizen who has contributed to its development and prestige. In 1984, she was also the recipient of the Philippine Government’s Parangal for Post War Writers award. In 1993, she was named an Outstanding Sillimanian by her alma mater. That same year she was named National Fellow for Fiction by the UP Creative Writing Center.
Aida is one of the few Filipinos included in the Asia Pacific Who’s Who Vol. 4 published by Refacinento International, page 126, New Delhi India in 2003, and is also included in the 2000 Outstanding Intellectuals of the 20th Century, page 304, published by the Cambridge Biographical Centre, 2000.
Her most recent book “Oyanguren – The Forgotten Founder of Davao” published in 2010 was historically researched at the National Archives in archaic Spanish. Don Jose Oyanguren was a Basque Espanol who was granted three gunships by Governor General Claveria to defeat Datu Bago who lorded it over Mindanao. (He would kill anyone from Luzon or Visayas who would enter Mindanao.)
On January 29, 1848, Oyanguren vanquished Datu Bago and named the locality Nueva Vergara (after his home town) and Nueva Guipozcoa (after his province) in Spain.
Aida Rivera Ford’s greatest dream is to make Dabawenyos remember Don Jose Oyanguren, which she regards as the city's founder.