Filed under: essay, food, thoughts | Tags: bran, cycle, Filipinos, grain, gruel, hay, recyling, rice, seedlings
Until a tiny white hill hazed in its steam is served and I discern in it thousands of grain, only then, do the bowls of boiled fish, broiled meat and sautéed greens take on taste and meaning.
Rice for Filipinos is life, the dining table but the heart. Its life like ours has seasons that begin with planting, which also starts the cycle of producing and recycling. Right after harvest, grain is chosen for seedlings where most of it is hauled off for milling. But first the grains are beaten off the stalks and gathered un-husked. The stalks are left to dry in the fields as hay—when dried these will be used as bed for mushroom spawns or burnt one bundle at a time and soaked as shampoo. At the rice mill, the husk is separated from the bran: husk heaped on coals in an earthen stove keeps it warm; bran mixed into swine gruel enriches it.
Only whole dry grains are cooked; wet grain pounded by hand is topping for ice cream; grit is home-bred chicken feed. Rice should be served no more than one meal but leftover rice may be fried in lard and garlic for breakfast or it can be sun dried then fried for a crunchy snack.
Rice is cooked with two parts water but an extra cup can be scooped off while boiling, a pinch of salt added as healing drink for an upset stomach, and so is toasted rice boiled as coffee.
Boiled with chicken sautéed in ginger and garlic, rice becomes congee. Powdered rice makes a soft tasty cake if cooked with coconut milk and flavored with anise. Coarsely ground rice steamed in double boilers and topped sesame seeds pairs well with saucy minced pork cooked with blood paste.
Copyright 2009 by Alegria Imperial, an unpublished essay
Filed under: essay, history, Uncategorized | Tags: American regime, Filipinos, land bridges, Madjapahit empire, martial law, migrations, people's revolution, Spnaish colonization
Filipinos trace their beginnings to waves of migration that happened in the Indo-Pacific, the last of which were Indo-Malay influx into the northern coastlines. Earlier though, geological events that resulted in the changes of land masses, as well as the appearance and disappearance of land bridges also form part of their origins. Anthropological studies show that small mountain-dwelling tribes akin to the aborigines of Australia called aetas in the Philippines
Colonization
Magellan landed in 1521 in one of the islands mid-south, called Limasawa where he planted the Cross and celebrated the first holy mass. Colonization and conversion hardly advanced with him as a battle of resistance led by a chieftain, Lapu-lapu, felled him on the seashore while trying to get back to his boat. It took another fifty years for the conquistador Miguel Lopez de Legaspi to re-establish Spanish rule and to confirm the naming of the islands after Felipe II (King Philip), then the reigning monarchy. This, he did in Manila on the ashes of a vanquished native fort Datu Sulayman ruled by the banks of the Pasig River
Intramuros, Walled City of Manila
On a piece of land that jutted on the mouth of the river, the Spaniards built Intramuros, a medieval walled city, declaring Manila the capital of the islands in 1571. In here arose the seat of the colonial government, of religion and learning. Inside what is barely 7 kilometers of walls, there were 16 churches including a cathedral, several gothic shrines, and some small chapels inside of convents and schools. Secular orders founded schools and seminaries, building them in Intramuros. The oldest university in Asia
Colonial Rule
Spain ruled the islands through Mexico
While agricultural economy hardly advanced in Spanish times, farming developed to a certain extent with some kind of boost which came by way of new decrees on land ownership in the mid-18th century—an attempt by the colonial regime to increase production and hasten the conversion of the Chinese immigrants. This gave rise to a landed middle class. From this class would emerge an intelligentsia schooled in Europe and who brought back home ideas of freedom that swept France in the late 18th century. Jose Rizal, the Philippines
Spanish colonial towns and lifestyle
The missionaries also converted native rituals of harvesting, fishing, and honoring the dead into religious feasts. Depending on the livelihood of the towns, the Spaniards chose a patron saint to be honored during these feasts. The natives were then encouraged to offer their produce to God through the intercession of such a saint. The feasts, called fiesta, were spectacles of religious processions, and community dancing and singing. Families gathered with especial dishes; their homes were decked with their produce made into craft objects. Such feasts are celebrated to this day.
The Philippine Revolution
American colonization happened with hardly any resistance. The Philippines had just gained independence from Spain in the 1898 Revolution. It turned out that Emilio Aguinaldo, one of the insurrectionists who won among the other revolutionary leaders had secretly sought American assistance in Hongkong; the US was engaged in the Spanish-American War then being waged in Cuba. Two years later, the Americans took over the islands after the Battle of Manila Bay described by historians as nothing more than a mock fight. A revolution broke out shortly after the establishment of the regime but it was short lived. In Mindanao
American Rule
America ruled the islands as a colony from 1900 until 1934, when it granted the Philippines a self-governing status as a Commonwealth. Where public health and education almost came to a standstill during the Spanish times, the US
Among the most significant reforms in government rule the Americans initiated was the separation of the church and state. A number of religious landholdings were taken over and distributed to tenants. It was also during this regime when a schism led by nationalists in the clergy happened in the Catholic Church; they founded and established the Philippine Independent Church or Aglipayan church named after their leader. With the coming of the Americans, Protestant churches started to abound.
Philippine Independence
Four years later than promised by the law that granted it commonwealth status, the Philippines gained its independence on July 4, 1946
Martial Law and onward
The world-renown Marcos regime gave the country a semblance of political stability. Under martial law that lasted from 1972 to 1981, the Philippines emerged as a leader in Southeast Asia
Miracles: Only Hope for Filipinos
Copyright 2007 by Alegria Imperial, unpublished essay, 2007
Filed under: essay, history, thoughts | Tags: Filipinos, freedom, Spanish American colonization, Western mode, World War II
The Filipinos are really too complex to box-in: their ancestry and heritage is so rich it belies the simplicity of their ways. They are essentially still the fiercely freedom-loving island people the Spaniards found, which brings up the charm the world loves. But today, they are also a rationally modern people, Western in mode and manner, adept where their Asian neighbors are still learning—language, for one.
They were not really just islanders though; the Spaniards discovered a people who had organized settlements engaged in on-going trades with ancient peoples of the Far East, not only with the Chinese but also with Persians, Arabs, and much to their surprise, a trade they had dreamed of—spices, exotic pearls and porcelain among loads of goods they later shipped on galleons that plied a straight ocean route from Manila to Acapulco and back loaded with gold, silver and European imports, if any number of the galleons could make it, to the banks of the Pasig.
But their coming did not only benefit the Spanish monarchy then ruled by Philip II after whom the islands, which the colonizers rigged up 7, 107 of them to comprise an archipelago, was named. The Spaniards linked the Philippines immediately to worlds on the other side of the hemisphere, Europe, and gifted the Filipinos with Christianity that to this day sets them apart in values and traditions from the rest of Asia.
The Philippines was already a nation when all of Asia still existed under sun rulers and brassy sultanates. A nation, indeed, but a servile people under colonizers who, it now appears, kept up their harshness because they could not put down the fierce spirit of the Filipinos. Nor could they understand them—how could the Spaniards with the Filipinos’ heritage mix of Oriental mysticism and Malayan wanderlust?
Despite an apparent ‘cowing down’ in spots, both the Spanish and the American colonizers, who took over after a mock battle, had to keep up their iron hand because rebellions and revolts hardly ever ceased; they erupted spasmodically in many parts of the archipelago. (In quite an increasing volume of local history being put together now in the Philippines, several unrecorded events are turning up for the first time; these include fights waged and won by Filipino guerillas during the WWII.) The Filipinos had not ceased to be an island people in this sense—lovers of free earth, water and sky, free to be who and what they want to be.
Indeed, multiple cultures make up their consciousness, and a complex of racial genes comprises their make-up. Nowhere does this sharply surface than in another country, where they are pitted against the very cultures that they also carry. They are no less who they are even if they have adapted to other cultures, albeit, out of necessity.
This explains their flexibility, a trait that has since been noted world-wide where Filipinos have migrated or gone for work: Whether it be in the Americas or in Europe, Asia and even the Middle East, a Filipino blends because he has in him part of where he goes yet is apart because of all that he is.
Alegria Albano-Imperial, “Celebrating the Filipino”, (2007) an unpublished article in full, published in part as commentary, philippinews.com