Then & Now: More Family Roots

#131: More Family Roots, Art, Leny Strobel, Elsa Valmidiano, Henrik Karllson, Bianca Bagatourian, the Atacama's Fast-Fashion Dump (Shipley and Alarcón), Evan Nicole Bell, and Fog Chaser.

Jan 21, 2024

THEN & NOW

My parents—and especially my father—were very sparing in providing information to me about their lives. They met when they were middle-aged, just after the liberation of Manila at the end of World War II. Mom was in her mid-forties when I was born, and Dad was in his early 50s. Both had done a lot of living by then, and my father had been living and working in the US since the mid-1920s. I never met my grandparents.

I’m still going through my parents’ letters. I also want to fill in some gaps in my knowledge about where and how they were raised. Having written a bit about the indigenous roots in my father’s family in Issue #130, I thought I would also delve into the tribal roots of Zambales, where my mother and grandmother were born and raised, and Sorsogon, where my grandfather Ignacio (my mother’s father) was from.

I’m no expert on indigenous Filipinos; I’m getting this information from the internet and books, and sometimes from relatives. I have no doubt that my mother—a self-styled, thoroughly “modern woman”—would be critical of my inquiry into tribal knowledge. But she is long gone, as I sit here wondering.

I was born in the U.S. and have only been to the Philippines twice. While there, I noted a closeness to tribal tradition that may be hard to comprehend in the urban and suburban U.S. In the Philippines, it’s not unusual, if you are ailing while visiting staunchly Catholic relatives, to be offered herbal remedies culled from the old knowledge and combined with a brief syncretic ritual.

Yet, indigenous people are often looked down upon, exploited, and categorized as ignorant, all of which is a legacy of the Catholic missions and centuries of colonization that have been imposed upon the population. Tribal peoples in the Philippines have dealt with this by fighting with settlers and colonial or corporate authorities, retreating from encroachment, or finding ways to assimilate, “get along,” and survive—often while losing their homelands, culture, and languages.

Despite that, there has been movement toward understanding and respecting indigenous ways of the Philippines, and even utilizing some of that knowledge to help with mental and physical health, spiritual, and social issues, and during times of natural disasters.

In Zambales province, where my mom Trinidad, and grandmother Matea, are from, the tribal groups are the Sambals and the Ayta (also known as Agta, Aeta, or Negrito). The Sambals are one of those groups that have fought hard against incoming settlers. They seem to have a reputation for being “testy” or even violent—to the point of taking heads. They were also very good at making and wielding spears and poisoned arrows. While government and tourist websites have much to say about the “peaceful” Subanen of my father’s homeland in Mindanao, there is little information to be found about the history of the Sambal online—as if it’s a dangerous area to tread. When they are portrayed, their images and festivals look like they are aimed at tourists.

The Ayta have long been hunter-gatherers (although they now also cultivate crops) and are considered the earliest inhabitants of the Philippine islands. Thus, they nurture the oldest wellspring of inherited, generational knowledge about their homeland—its plant and animal life, its spirits, gods, and myths. Ayta women actively participate in hunting and fishing as well as foraging and planting crops. Their shrinking territories in Luzon include areas in Sorsogon, a mountainous region with a considerable coastal area. Many of the people living there are a mixture of Malay, Chinese, and Spanish settlers. But as the most endangered tribe in the Philippines, the Ayta are “undergoing deculturation” and language loss, with multinational corporations moving onto their land and forcing the Ayta out (thus also forcing them to assimilate).

When thinking of the Sambals, I can’t help but recall my lola1 Matea’s reputation for feistiness. You wouldn’t want to cross her, and you wouldn’t want to insult or threaten her or her children. When young men came to court her daughters, she stood by the gate with a broom to whack and sweep out any man who didn’t meet her standards. My mother once recalled to me an incident in her childhood. She was seated at a patio table with her mother and a male visitor. He had the temerity to insult lola Matea, who promptly pulled a hatpin out of her wide-brimmed hat and stabbed him the nose with it!

By contrast, my lolo2 Ignacio seemed much more agreeable. My mother described him as kind, walking through the front gate always with treats in his pockets for the kids. He was by all accounts a charming man, and a musician to boot. In fact, he was possibly too charming—a quality that brought on the wrath of Matea and his eventual self-exile to the United States.

Even as I write this, I have a sense of struggling to understand lives that were lived in a distant archipelago far from my home in the U.S. I do know that the Philippine-American war, World War II, and the presence of the Japanese and American military in the Philippines had huge, life changing effects on both sides of my family.

I have almost no details about my grandfather and his boyhood in Sorsogon. I have no clue as to why he pursued a musical career and made himself so damned charming. I can guess at some of the causes of my grandmother’s anger and the determinedly independent nature that she passed on to my mother, and thus to me. But I’m sure there is much more there that I’ll never know—except perhaps in my dreams.

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