Tuesday, February 27, 2007 Tantingco: Our money's worth By Robby Tantingco Peanut Gallery
PREHISTORIC Kapampangans bartered goods with other regions in the archipelago as well as with other countries. The discovery of ceramics in archaeological sites in Porac, Guagua, Lubao and Candaba proves that prior to the Spanish Conquest in 1571, China, Vietnam and other Southeast Asian nations had traded ceramics with our ancestors.
In return, our ancestors paid them with local products, such as venison (deer meat) and indigo (blue dye), which we produced in big numbers at the time, according to archival documents.
Even in the 1800s, there were still so many deer in the Kapampangan region (mainly Pampanga and Tarlac) that, as Fray Martinez de Zuņiga, OSA wrote in Estadismo de las Islas Filipinas, there were more than what hunters and their families needed.
The French visitor Jean Mallat also reported that "in 1819, they say that more than 7,000 stags were killed in a single pueblo in Tarlac." According to Prof. Lino L. Dizon, consultant at the HAU Center for Kapampangan Studies, dried and salted venison (tapa or pindang usa) was a delicacy among the Chinese, who thought it gave them sexual prowess, as well as among native and Spanish women, who ate it to cure various illnesses.
Fray Zuņiga wrote, "Native and even Spanish women who have just delivered eat nothing else, claiming that chicken meat gives them gas pains, that fish induces mucus, and that beef is not palatable, and so it is only dried venison that can save them from a kind of hysterical passion locally known as suba-suba, from which very few survive."
When the Spaniards introduced the monetary system, it was inevitably influenced by Mexico (the Latin American colony, not the town in Pampanga). As you know, colonizers from Spain coming to the Philippines first sailed across the Atlantic Ocean for seven months, then made a stopover in Mexico (lasting for weeks or even months) to rest and accumulate goods, and then continued their journey across the Pacific Ocean for eight more months.
Much of the culture that we imbibed from the Spaniards, including the monetary system, architecture, arts and crafts, flora and fauna, actually came not from Spain but from Mexico.
The Spanish peso (silver coin), for example, originally was a weight measure of silver that became the empire's currency when Mexico reigned as the world's top exported of silver during colonial times. It was equivalent to two tostones (one toston was 50 cents) or eight (8) reales.
In Pampanga, according to Fray Diego Bergaņo, OSA, "the biggest monetary denomination of these people, and which is their point of reference in counting their money, is the toston." However, early Kapampangans did not call it toston, but salapi. Today, the word salapi has become generic to mean any amount of money.
Thus, our ancestors did not use peso; only the Spaniards did. Our biggest denomination was worth only 50 cents.
One salapi was equivalent to two (2) binting; one binting was equivalent to two (2) reales. Thus one salapi was equivalent to four reales (which the Kapampangans called sicapat). In today's currency, a salapi (toston) would be 50 centavos (singkwenta), a binting would be 25 centavos (beinte singko) and a sicapat (real) would be 12.5 centavos, which of course has no modern equivalent.
One sicapat was equivalent to two (2) sicaualo (that's 6.25 centavos per sicaualo today), and one sicaualo was equivalent to six (6) barillas, which means one barilla would be worth roughly one (1) centavo today -- our modern-day mamera.
By the way, barilla is pronounced bariya or barya, which is the generic word for coins today.
In colonial times, however, barilla was not the smallest denomination. There was the cunding (one barilla was equivalent to two cundings) and finally the cuartillo, or calatio (one cunding was equivalent to two cuartillos).
Can you imagine? Our ancestors had denominations smaller than the mamera, probably because loose change was all the colonizers allowed them to have, and because there were goods and services that were really, really cheap -- as in cheaper than one centavo.
