Pampanga: Fire in the belly
It has been a season of recognition for me: Ateneo University Service Award, Tanglaw Award for best newspaper columnist, and, just last week, Juan D. Nepomuceno Award for research and scholarship conferred by Holy Angel University. All these within the first quarter of 2015—probably a hint that retirement and a senior citizen card will follow soon.
Contrary to popular belief, awards are double-edged: On the surface these are accepted with pleasure because of the recognition they bring for past work. But these come with a hidden burden because the honoree is bound to continually live up to the honor… for richer or poorer, till death do you part. Worse, it gets to a point when you compete with yourself.
During the Holy Angel University Foundation Day, some people were surprised to learn that I am from Pampanga and know how to speak a bit of Kapampangan. In reality I am a wayward Kapampangan—born in Manila to a father from Minalin and a Tagalog mother who discouraged me from learning the language because she was worried I would pick up the regional accent. My mother made sure English was my first language; Filipino I learned in grade school, and college brought Spanish and French. My mother never learned the language of her adopted province such that, to her dying day, her in-laws could speak freely to her face and she happily understood nothing. But one thing she did learn well was Kapampangan cuisine that, to the horror of her in-laws, she actually improved upon. So it was that I was rooted in Kapampangan in a version of Freud’s “oral stage” because culture was transmitted through my mouth in language and food.
The rediscovery of my roots in the culture of my father began in the summer of 1981, when Doreen Fernandez recommended me as research assistant to an ethnomusicologist doing PhD research on the pasyon in Pampanga. Getting hired to set up and run tape recorders to document an entire pasyon for three days in a barangay deep in Angeles City meant that my spoken Kapampangan would put to the test. The 10-day immersion in the pasyon tradition and the people who chanted it opened my eyes to a world that I had known in bits and pieces from childhood. It was something I saw but did not notice till then.
Kapampangan I learned by osmosis from my relatives during regular Sunday lunches and a memorable childhood summer when my cousins invited the neat, English-speaking city boy to climb the fence of the family compound in San Fernando to get dirty in a nearby rice field. From there we could see majestic Arayat breaking the monotony of the Central Luzon plain, so we planned to hike there. We thought it was close, because it looked so, but hiking there made it seem to move farther such that we never reached it.
We tried more than once, setting off early in the morning with packed lunches prepared from breakfast fare. En route to Arayat we crossed rice fields that looked like Fernando Amorsolo paintings come alive, except that the sunlight was too bright and burned our skin. Amorsolo gave us an idealized view of pastoral life, but there were no pretty dalaga in the fields we passed. An angry farmer, who found us sliding down his haystack, drove us away waving his bolo and hurling colorful Kapampangan words and phrases I am not allowed to repeat here. That experience gave me the idea that Bonifacio shouted similar Tagalog words to inspire the Katipuneros into battle.
All these childhood experiences would have remained pure nostalgia, but I decided to use them when I wrote my undergraduate thesis on “Food in Pampango Culture.” It was a way for me to reconnect, at least academically, with my Kapampangan roots, and there has been no turning back since. Culture is indeed ingested best through the belly.
Kapampangan was put to good use years later, when dealing with Ermita antique dealers and runners or speaking with Randy David. It was also deployed, in the past administration, to catch the then President’s ear and shut off everyone else around who didn’t speak the tongue. The same is true for my father, who turns 90 next month. While we normally communicate in English or Filipino, he definitely responds to his mother tongue in a different way.
In the mid-1980s I made a day trip from Madrid to Valladolid to see the Philippine artifacts in the Museo Oriental, and killed time before my return trip by visiting the Augustinian Library in the same building. There I met the eminent historian Fr. Isacio R. Rodriguez, who brought out some documents that made me miss my train. Father Rodriguez called a nearby hostel where I ended up staying a week, going through friar reports on Pampanga from the 16th-18th centuries. There I not only learned about my father’s province but also experienced first-hand what it was like to work with primary sources and to become the historian I am now.
In retrospect Pampanga has always been in my system, just like Mt. Arayat that I had hoped to reach on foot from San Fernando when I was a boy. It looks near but is actually quite far. The life of a historian is a solitary one: One moves through the unknown fired by the thought that, like many other things in life, history is a journey, not a destination. Since Pampanga contributed much to what I am, I can only hope to repay her by writing on her history someday.
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