Discovering your Roots in a Book

Through Facebook, a climbing acquaintance connected with me not for a climb but for a cultural event, a book launch he authored himself. Romeo Galang Jr. during his PNB mountaineering days has already been keen on history, churches and the visual arts.

This August, decades after, he launched "A Cultural History on the Santo Domingo Church" at the FEU Nicanor Reyes library.

The scholarly book on Santo Domingo is a byproduct of his thesis on art history centered on churches. Writing the book is motivated by his quest for family roots which led him to discover the rich and documented  heritage of Santo Domingo. It is supported with numerous photos and illustrations from the past lifted from archives and private collections of libraries from the all over the world never before perhaps printed on Philippine media. Book is published by the UST Publishing House.

Jun is also a passionate photographer and a professor of Literature and Humanities at FEU.

"A Cultural History of Santo Domingo focuses not solely on the art objects themselves-the buildings, paintings and sculptures and their forms-with the production, the background, and issues arising from those "artistic works." The book unravels the myriad ways by which expressions of a people were manifested in colonial Manila. It uncovers the economics and politics that accompanied the mode of artistic production. The various manifestations of culture, as embodies in the narratives of the book, help build a history that reveals how the ecclesiastical complex of Santo Domingo characterized the intermingling of European, Latin American, Asian and Indigenous cultures." -Lifted from the back cover