objects just as products to be sold.” She smiles, remembering when a Manila institution, the Philippine Design Center, sent a so-called expert to teach weaving to the residents of one nearby village—a folly akin to sending a diving instructor to the Badjaos, sea gypsies and pearl divers of the southern Philippines! Such misplaced earnestness concerned her; she wondered about the durability of native traditions.
But it was really in the introduction of a cash economy where Christina believed the real threat, the danger of subversion, lay; she particularly feared for the disappearance of age-old rituals involved in the planting and harvesting of rice. Rice itself would live on, but would that sense of sacredness with which it was regarded, the almost-mystical aura about it, vanish? Would the rice deity, the bulol, continue to exist, stern and powerful as a totem, or would it simply become a relic? She shakes her head; tradition nowadays was an endangered species.
Some of the most eloquent manifestations of folkways on the verge of disappearing were eloquently expressed as black and white ghosts in the remarkable stills of Edward Masferré, a renowned Spanish Igorot photographer. Masferré, who had lived into his eighties, had, over the decades, documented facets of highland culture. On the walls of the Sagada studio run by his family are prints of village scenes, tribal elders, tattooed women, warriors posing with their spears, and vertigo-inducing shots of rice terraces. Masferré’s works have a simple, intimate, expressive power—expressive because of the photographs’ very naïveté, and powerful, because of the power in the subjects themselves. They look at the camera, at us, unblinking, recognizing us for what we are: their sons and daughters adrift in a rudderless world.
My Manhattan eye, accustomed to edifices that disengage themselves from the landscape, has a hard time spotting the clumps of houses that, with their earthen tones, are set among bamboo, limestone rocks, and pine trees. Along with three companions, I am at a wedding feast, in a bare room overlooking some rice terraces. We have been invited inside by district elders, wizened men clad in loincloths and jackets. Outside, the newly married bride and groom sit quietly on a bench, graciously receiving visitors.
Inside the room, we squat on the edges; some of the men are smoking pipes, and some of the pipes have lighted cigars inserted into them. A single glass and a bottle of tapuey, rice wine, is passed around. We take handfuls from bowls of steamed rice and salted pork. The tapuey makes me smile beatifically at the elders. Noel and Angel, Filipino American brother and sister from New York, studiously take everything in, the voluble Angel uncharacteristically subdued, clicking away with her camera. The elders are aware of the mechanical eye but carry on, as indifferent as the landscape is to an outsider’s gaze. Only Jaime, the goateed Manila painter who had travelled with me to Banahaw, speaks Ilokano, the dominant regional tongue, and engages the men in animated conversation.
In another part of Sagada, another wedding—that of Tom’s cousin—is also being celebrated. The feasting will go on for several days, with the whole town shuttling happily back and forth between the two celebrations. Later, an inebriated, ebullient, sated quartet treks through gleaming rice terraces to the other feast, just across the road from Tom’s house. Pigs and chickens have been slaughtered, vast quantities of mountain rice, vegetables, tapuey, and basi set out. When we arrive, men and women of varying ages are doing a stately circling dance with intricate, hand-and-foot patterns, to the steady rhythm of gangsa, or gongs. We join Tom and his sister Lita at a table and drink basi steadily. At one point, five freshly severed hogs’ heads heave into view. A drunken hallucination? Not at all. Two men walk close by, carrying an enormous basin. There they lie in pig-death, snout to snout; some of them are in me. I am a pig, a bowl of wine, a stick of hash, a pot of rice, coffee. All these petty deaths I call me, I of mud and divinity. I get up to join the dance. Delirious, I’m never as sane or as delighted as at that moment when I crook my arms and stick my right foot out, waiting for the beat, waiting to propitiate the gods behind the gongs.
No uprising fails. Each one is a step in the right direction.
—Salud Algabre
organizer in the Sakdal peasant uprising, 1935
“PEOPLE POWER,” THE DEFINING PHRASE of a government that in 1986 had taken over when the enfeebled dictator, Ferdinand Marcos, and his wife Imelda fled for the balmy seclusion of an expensive Honolulu villa, had held out the promise of a more equitable life and the end of a feudal system that had been so much a part of life for so long. It was a promise that, for a year at least, seemed vibrant, real.
During that unprecedented bloodless uprising, about a million people from all walks of life had taken to the streets surrounding the military camps where officers and their soldiers who had turned against Marcos were under threat of attack from pro-government units. The massive crowds acted as a buffer between the two forces, importuning, pleading with heavily armed soldiers who were poised for an assault on the camps to join the revolution. Images on television of middle-aged housewives, street vendors, students, shopkeepers, senior citizens, and nuns standing in front of tanks, praying the rosary, gripped the world’s imagination. (I often wonder if that daring Chinese man barring a tank’s movement in Tiananmen Square in 1989 had been inspired by these images.) In Manhattan, I was, like everyone else, transfixed by this drama of Corazón Aquino, the righteous widow of a man who had opposed the Marcoses, standing up to a desperate regime. That it ended with virtually no blood spilled gave it the trappings of a latter-day fairy tale. And, like any fairy tale, it was too good to be true: the strain of disaffection that had always been part of the Philippine psyche grew even stronger in the years of nominally democratic rule under Aquino’s reluctant leadership.
The cynics, of course, were not surprised. One night, at a dinner in Baguio several months after Aquino had been sworn in as president, a friend of mine described the weekend-long People Power uprising in Manila as a coup d’etat. Most people then would have disagreed, as I did initially. My friend wasn’t a loyalist, as those who never broke faith with the Marcoses were called—but she was from the upper class and knew enough of herself and her peers to distrust their sudden discovery of egalitarianism. Yet it was a concept this friend took seriously, all the more reason for the acuteness of her realization that the idea of achieving it without bloodshed was quixotic. After the parties, the self-congratulatory spirit, the euphoria in which everyone basked, what then? Expressing a feeling that was still muted among most people I knew, she explained that the country had merely postponed the bloodshed. “We’re so good at that, always putting off the day of reckoning.”
In terms of the Philippines’ history, that statement isn’t accurate. Before the 1896 revolution against Spain, there had been at least two hundred recorded uprisings over the course of more than three centuries of colonial rule, precisely because people had grown tired of “putting off the day of reckoning.” The problem was, either such revolts were put down by force of arms, or their leaders were coopted. But the fever of resistance never died out. In the nearly fifty-year American colonial occupation that followed the bitter 1899 Philippine-American War, the colonial authorities had to suppress a dozen revolts, mostly due to agrarian unrest. In 1930, the Partidong Komunista ng Pilipinas (PKP) was founded. When the Japanese invaded the archipelago during World War II, the PKP, sometimes in collaboration and sometimes at odds with pro-U.S. underground units, fought the Japanese with its Hukbo ng Bayan Laban sa Hapon, or the Anti-Japanese People’s Army. The Soviet-leaning Huks, as these guerrillas were known, remained a disruptive opposition to the U.S.-backed government after the war, in 1946, when the United States formally relinquished its hold on the country. In the first postwar elections, two PKP candidates from Central Luzon, the country’s heartland, were elected to the national legislature. When they were prevented by the government from taking their seats, the Huks took up arms once again. After an initial string of victories that enabled them to come perilously close to capturing Manila, the Huks suffered defeat in the early 1950s.
Seeing the handwriting on the wall, the PKP leadership decided to abandon armed struggle in favor of the political arena. There, blocked at every turn by a pro-U.S. government, it made no gains whatsoever.
