For giving dignity and recognition to Philippine Cultural forms by publishing Filipiniana books

distinguished for painstaking research, insight, and artistry.

For conceptualizing, doing research work in the field and in the libraries, editing, as well as
managing the production of every book she publishes.

For emphasizing an important dimension to the concept and business of publishing and editing
— integrity.

For establishing GCF books which aimed to publish illustrated books that are visually appealing
as well as intellectually engaging and for publishing several titles on various topics on Philippine
culture—from social history to the arts.

For editing The Culinary Culture of the Philippines, which was cited as one of the best culinary
books in the International Bookfair of Frankfurt in 1976; Streets of Manila; Turn of the Century
Being Filipino, which won National Book Award in 1981; and Jeepney. Pioneering GCF books
are Philippine Antiques and Heirlooms, Philippine Ancestral Houses and Folk Architecture, which
are used by architecture schools in the Philippines; the bestselling The History of
Burgis; Philippine Food and Life; The Soul Book and The Body Book, which are first two of a
series called The Philippines Reader. She was associate editor of the 10-volume Filipino
Heritage: The Making of a Nation.

For writing stories which won major prizes in the Don Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for
Literature and the Philippine Free Press Literary Contest in the 1950s and 1960s, and for writing
superb children’s stories that were published locally and abroad.

For upgrading the quality of Filipiniana publishing, and her significant contribution to creative
writing, the GAWAD CCP PARA SA SINING (PUBLISHING AND LITERATURE) is given on this 24th
day of February 1994 to GILDA CORDERO-FERNANDO.

Link: https://hanggangsamuli.culturalcenter.gov.ph/obituaries/gilda-cordero-fernando/

Filipino writer, fashion designer, artist, producer, and cultural icon Gilda Cordero-Fernando
passed away on August 27 in Manila, at the age of 90. Her death was announced in a Facebook
post by her son Mol Fernando, who did not disclose details of her passing. 

While Cordero-Fernando is renowned for her literary accomplishments, with her lyrical style
praised for its unique and witty elements, she was also an advocate of Filipino culture. She was
passionately involved with various art sectors by the later years of her career, enjoying
portraiture painting, curatorial work, as well as the production of theater plays and fashion
shows. 

Born in Manila, she graduated in 1951 from St. Theresa’s College before studying for a master’s
degree in English literature at Ateneo de Manila University. She received recognition for her
short stories as early as the late 1950s. Some of her best-known fictional works include titles
such as The Butcher, The Baker, and the Candlestick Maker (1962) and A Wilderness of
Sweets (1973). The later published Story Collection (1994) compiled pieces from both her
earlier books. 

In the 1970s, she ventured into non-fiction, producing volumes such as Streets of
Manila (1977), Being Filipino (1981) and Philippine Food and Life (1992), in which she explores
various aspects of Filipino history, culture, and society. These books were published under her
own publishing house, GCF Books, founded in 1978. In 2000, she produced Luna: An Aswang
Romance, a Palanca Award winning theater production combining melodrama, fashion, and
literature.  

Cordero-Fernando was the recipient of the 1994 Gawad Award for literature and publishing
from the Cultural Center of the Philippines for her cultural contributions. In 2014, she was
conferred the esteemed Palanca Awards Gawad Dangal ng Lahi. 

As a visual artist, Cordero-Fernando exhibited her portrait paintings at Silverlens SLab space
2009 and 2011, and at Silverlens gallery in 2014.

In his Facebook post, Mol Fernando wrote that “we will miss her dearly and love her always,”
also adding that “there will be no need for funeral services” as Cordero-Fernando held her own
wake in 2012. In her article written that year, titled “Dance me to the end of love,” she wrote
about her wake, describing it as a “happy time” and encapsulating the experience with a quote
from her friend Techi Velasquez, saying that “If only people knew what fun old age is, how
could they dread it?”
Link: http://www.artasiapacific.com/News/ObituaryGildaCorderoFernando19302020
Born in Manila on June 4, 1930, Gilda graduated from St. Theresa’s College in 1951 with a BA
and BS in education; she gained a master’s degree in English literature from Ateneo de Manila
University.
She first gained acclaim in the late 1950s as a short story writer in English, inspired by her
father Narciso Cordero who gave her P30 for every short story she published, leading to a body
of work that remains critically acclaimed, and winning Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for
Literature and Philippines Free Press literary awards.
National Artist for Literature Nick Joaquin was an admirer of her prose style and once said of
her: “We have no other writer capable of such sublime nonsense.”
Gilda wrote about the lives of the Filipino urban middle class with a wit and insight not seen
before in Philippine literature.
Her early fiction is collected in books such as “The Butcher, The Baker, The Candlestick Maker”
(1962), “A Wilderness of Sweets” (1973), and her “Story Collection” (1994).
Gilda is perhaps better known as a passionate explorer and advocate of contemporary Filipino
culture. Close friend and writer Mariel Francisco called her a “national cultural visionary… an
outstanding voice in the expression of the evolving Filipino world view.”
The vehicle for this expression was her own publishing house, GCF Books, which she started in
1976. Among the landmark titles that came out under her imprimatur are “The Streets of
Manila” (1977), “Turn of the Century” (1978), “Philippine Ancestral Houses” (1980), “Being
Filipino” (1981), “The History of the Burgis” (1987), “Folk Architecture” (1989) and “The Soul
Book” (1991).

Even in her later years, Gilda retained a curiosity about contemporary life and culture and an
openness to new ideas that kept her outlook fresh and youthful. Projects such as the book-
cum-fashion show “Jamming On an Old Saya” (1995), the play “Luna: An Aswang Romance”
(2000) and the Bench-sponsored book “Pinoy Pop Culture” (2001) bridged the traditional divide
between high and low culture.
Ateneo de Manila University Press director Karina Bolasco, a friend of Gilda’s and her former
publisher at Anvil Publishing, said: “While the air these days is wild with fragility, Gilda didn’t go
because she was fragile. She just knew it was time to go, just as she always knew what next
turn to make, what next road to take. It’s as if she was born with a map in her head, that has
marked her long path to a vibrant life. From writer to publisher to theater producer to fashion
designer to visual artist. A cultural icon, worthy of veneration because she loved all that we are
as Filipinos, perhaps first as instinct, and so she interrogated it with the best minds she worked
with, in all disciplines. Her love for being and becoming Filipino was such an influence on an
entire generation of cultural workers so that now the leading lights of arts and culture were all
her groupies, groupies of this rock star.”

Gilda wrote columns for the Manila Chronicle and Veritas before writing a column for the
Sunday Inquirer Magazine that she called “Occasional Column.”
Later, she started another column for Inquirer Lifestyle called “Forever 80” (later “Forever 81”)
from 2011 to 2017, only stopping when she suffered a stroke a few years ago.
In a rare low moment, she confided to her friend Babeth Lolarga: “What I’ve really lost is the
desire to live. I don’t belong to this world of travels, countries, and restos I’ve not been to. I’m
not part of the techie world, I’m marginalized, I don’t belong anymore, period. Still productive,
but till when? I keep plagiarizing myself from books I’ve written and published.”
Though wheelchair-bound in her last years, Gilda could still be seen attending art fairs and
cultural events until her failing health made it too difficult.
Through the years, she had been a friend to many a writer—female writers in particular. The
last known such group she formed was called 2002, with friends like Lorna Kalaw-Tirol, Chit
Roces, Melinda de Jesus, Francisco, and Lolarga.
Later, a similar group of friends would rechristen themselves the “GCF fan club,” gathering to
see Gilda as often as they could.

In a keynote speech at the 2014 Palanca Awards, she summed up her career: “All the so-called
successes of my professional life were due to ‘tigas ng ulo’ (stubbornness). Because I never
learn. Even that ‘I never learn’ I fought for. I kept forever hitting my head against closed doors
…. Today there are many more closed doors to new things that I know nothing about. But when
you are sure you have a good original idea and convinced that it will work, bang a determined
head against the door. It will split open faster than your head will. And there will be magic
behind that door that you never dreamed possible. An experiment finally gaining respect,
opening a new path for neophytes to follow and improve upon.”
She wrote, in “The Gilda Cordero Fernando Sampler,” published by Anvil: “So what credible
thing can one teach the artist about marketing himself? How to dress up? How to project a
smart image? How to charm a prospective buyer? Surely not. It is ever and always how to be
authentic. And how to devote one’s every talent to the creation of a life molded in honesty and
truth.”

https://lifestyle.inquirer.net/369496/writer-artist-gilda-cordero-fernando-90/
I don’t know at which point we became friends and met each other regularly to talk and eat. I
think it was in the 1980s, at the height of the Middle Forces’ opposition to (President
Ferdinand) Marcos.
With help from Mita Pardo de Tavera, Odette Alcantara, Maita Gomez, Nikki Coseteng, Gigi
Dueñas, she dreamed up unique protest forms for Women Against Marcos and for Boycott
(WOMB).
One was a procession-rally, a pasyon, from Intramuros to the US Embassy. Only Gilda could get
away with dressing CB Garrucho as the First Lady Imelda R. Marcos, Nikki as a Blue Lady, Joji
Ravina as a bully RAM boy, Odette as Inangbayan.
A most memorable production was the State of the Nation Fashion Show at The Plaza dining
hall in Makati. Gilda drafted the script read by CB and Behn Cervantes, while models like Maita,
Gigi, Joji, Nelia Sancho sashayed down a ramp in deconstructed clothes and gowns that
reflected the deterioration of society under the dictatorship.
The show’s ambience was electric. Gilda feared that anytime, the Constabulary or military
would swoop down on the organizers and stellar models. Nothing of the sort happened.
Instead, the event was well covered by the “mosquito” and foreign press.
I would lose touch with Gilda when my babies arrived and I became a breastfeeding mother for
six straight years. One time we ran into each other, and she invited me to go with her on a trip
to a Rizal town. I begged off. She remarked, “What are you doing aside from being a cow?”
Well, that was Gilda. She didn’t like it if her friends turned into drudges. When I was settled in
Baguio, she once called long distance to ask what I was doing. When I answered that I was
laundering my family’s clothes, she said, “Huwag iiyak! Hindi bubula ang sabon.” It was enough
to snap me out of my self-pitying reverie.
When she first met my husband, Rolly Fernandez, she whispered to me, “Macho pala!” Later,
she found that he was a diligent provider who did the marketing, the groceries, even the
occasional cooking, the gardening, the upkeep of the house. Maybe she saw a little of her
husband Marcelo in him.
That’s when she proclaimed to all and sundry that she loved Rolly more than me. Almost every
time I visited her, she ensured that there was pasalubong for him. Later on, the pasalubong
took the form of her watercolor paintings. She even did a portrait of him called “Rolly’s
Morphing Tower of Hearts.”
But there’s eeriness to this generosity, a bit of the aswang in her. Once she insisted that I bring
home another painting. Seeing how fragile the watercolor paper was, she reached into her
drawer and pulled out a work on canvas to serve as wrapper.
Back in Baguio, Rolly unrolled the package and saw that the artwork was by young painter Don
Salubayba. At the moment Gilda was handing the two paintings to me and unknown to us, Don
was dying of an aneurysm.
A source of personal pride was when she tapped me in the 1990s to copy-read her and Mariel
N. Francisco’s essays that went into the joint autobiographies: “Ladies’ Lunch and Other Ways
to Wholeness” and “A Spiritual Pillow Book.” Manny Chaves, who eventually replaced Mariel as
Gilda’s BFF, was the designer. She trusted me enough to abide with the titles I chose for the
books and for some of the articles.
Like any GCF jamming project, the working day began with breakfast of pancakes made from
scratch by Marcelo and ended in a merienda of mashed avocados in ice, milk and sugar.
The last two times I saw her were at the wake of writer Sylvia Mayuga and in the New Year get-
together in her house of the GCF Fan Club (the name approved by her last year at a lunch at Fat
Russel’s Kitchen to celebrate her 89th birthday). Little did we know the latter occasion would
serve as farewell party, too.
By then, I could barely have a conversation with her, much less hear her. She spoke in a soft,
raspy voice. It seemed she had retreated to the deep, contemplative silence of those advanced
in years and illness. The spark in her eyes was still there. So were the stylish garb and makeup.
We were a noisy gaggle of women, except for Rolly and photographer Wig Tysmans, another of
her anak-anakan.

https://lifestyle.inquirer.net/369710/gilda-cordero-fernando-an-exit-triumphant/