Tuesday, November 06, 2007 Tantingco: Pampanga on the brink By Robby Tantingco Peanut Gallery
NOW that the battle lines have been drawn between the Palace and the Capitol, expect Kapampangans to start taking sides. On one hand we have President Arroyo’s supporters -- all those government officials who recently trooped to Malacañang to pledge their allegiance -- and on the other hand we have Governor Panlilio’s believers and admirers, those who brought him to power and who want him (and everything he represents) to succeed.
And then there’s the vast majority who support GMA but also believe in Among Ed, who are proud that these two leaders are their cabalen, and who will never, Never find themselves in a position where they have to choose one over the other.
But as events continue to unfold and deteriorate in the next few days or weeks, Kapampangans will be forced, painful as it is, to choose between GMA and Gov. Panlilio. We’ve known, of course, that there is really no love lost between the President and the Governor, and that sooner or later these two would be on a collision course, but we were hoping that GMA would live out her term until 2010 without incident.
Well, one incident did happen, and it was indeed all it took for Kapampangans to start realigning themselves.
If only we could all hold hands and together sing Kapampangan Ku -- but in the real world, the first casualty of war is innocence.
Considering that there are only one million of us Kapampangans on this planet, and that we live in a sort of linguistic island surrounded by a sea of Tagalogs, Ilocanos and Pangasinenses, and that we are fiercely proud of our unique ethnicity and protective of our vanishing identity -- why do we turn against each other at the slightest provocation? The fact that we speak the same language should already make us realize that we came from a common origin and are headed towards a common destiny, but still, we quarrel among ourselves -- even over the way we spell our language!
When the Spaniards came and colonized us, Kapampangans promptly divided themselves into those who supported the colonizers and those who fought them. On one hand there were the wealthy families who benefited from the alliance, mostly descended from the datus who had been forced by the conquistadores to collect taxes for them or else they’d lose their power and property. Also on their side were, of course, the Macabebes -- the common term for all Kapampangans who joined the Spanish army in resisting Dutch and British invaders, Chinese pirates and local uprisings.
And on the other hand, there were the Kapampangan rebels -- whose who, in the tradition of Tarik Soliman (the first Filipino to die fighting for freedom, in 1571), continually fought the colonizers, including Francisco Maniago, who led the Kapampangan Revolt of 1660 which nearly became a national revolution except that it was sabotaged by, you guessed it, a fellow Kapampangan named Juan Macapagal.
When the Philippine Revolution did break out 236 years later, the Kapampangan ilustrados (educated and wealthy families) were among the first to support Bonifacio and later, Aguinaldo (Rizal had planted the seeds of dissidence earlier during his visits to San Fernando and Bacolor). And when the Americans came, even Kapampangan poets like Juan Crisostomo Soto and Aurelio Tolentino took up arms against the new colonizers.
However, down the river in Macabebe, the Americans secretly recruited a group of Kapampangans to their side -- the same Kapampangans who would eventually capture Aguinaldo and end all Filipinos’ quest for independence.
What’s dividing Kapampangans? Is it the land? Geographically, the province is divided into the elevated, agricultural Upper Pampanga (Porac, Mabalacat, Angeles, Magalang, parts of Arayat, Mexico and San Fernando) and the perennially flooded Lower Pampanga (Macabebe, Lubao, Sasmuan, Minalin, Apalit, Candaba, the rest of the towns). The ancient Kapampangan civilization started in these southern towns; it was only in the last two centuries that Kapampangan frontiersmen started pushing northward by clearing the forests and establishing farmlands.
And it was these farmlands and the way the landowners managed them that divided Kapampangans after the colonizers had left. As the rich landlords became richer at the expense of the poor casamac (made even worse by the sugar industry boom which gave the rich more money than they could spend -- this is how the grand balls and carnivals of the 1920s started), Pampanga became a hotbed of insurgency, spawning the likes of Pedro Abad Santos and Luis Taruc. This was the time Pampanga was known as the Philippines’ “Little Russia.”
Thus, Pampanga -- the bastion of Catholicism (producing the country’s first cardinal) -- is also the cradle of socialism and communism (producing the founders of the Socialist Party of the Philippines, the Huk movement, the NPA, the HMB, the KM, the KMU, etc.) and host to the United States’ largest off-shore military installation in the world (Clark Air Base).
With all these giant forces colliding in our backyard, no wonder Kapampangans have been pulled in so many different directions. I do not know if these historical and cultural wounds are fueling the passions of our leaders and causing the rifts at the Capitol. How sad that barely five months after our celebrated people power, we are back to dirty politics. How sad, too, that all this fighting comes at the time of our cultural renaissance, threatening to destroy our newly restored ethnic pride.
I join all Kapampangans of goodwill in urging our leaders to snap out of their preoccupation with political vendetta and put our Indung Kapampangan above their petty, passing political interests.
