Tuesday, October 07, 2008 Tantingco: The four fiestas of Angeles By Robby Tantingco
ANGELES was a barrio that became a town that became a city.
There’s no other place in this province and maybe anywhere else that has a similar plot. Betis was a town which became a barrio; Masantol was a barrio that became a town; Dau is a barrio that might become a city without first becoming a town; and San Fernando became a town that became a city without starting as a barrio.
San Fernando was never a barrio because it started as a town carved out of Mexico and Bacolor in 1754. About 40 years later, the ex-mayor of San Fernando, Don Angel Pantaleon de Miranda, cleared Kuliat, a barrio located at the northern tip of San Fernando, to establish a hacienda that would keep him busy in retirement.
He invited several San Fernando families to join him in his new settlement (which is why there are branches of the old Lazatin, Henson, Abad Santos, Ocampo and Dayrit families in Angeles today -- they had all come from the old towns of Mexico and Bacolor and moved to San Fernando before settling in Kuliat).
Why did Don Angel leave his town and create another? Did he have a fight with his parish priest (which probably explains why the most aggressive opposition to his plan came from the priest)? Or did he merely want to acquire more property to pay off debts, or to create more jobs and housing for his loyal casamac (farm tillers)? Or was it just the instinct of a frontiersman?
Did Don Angel want to clone San Fernando and recreate his old town according to his own vision? He named Kuliat’s poblacion area Santo Rosario, which was also the name of San Fernando’s poblacion. The names of the barrios surrounding the poblacion were the same for both Kuliat and San Fernando: San Jose, San Nicolas, Lourdes and Sta. Teresita.
Don Angel made sure that his new settlement would become a parish with its own parish church, so that his settlers and casamac would not have to travel to San Fernando to hear Mass (exactly the same reason San Fernando had been created in 1754 -- to give the inhabitants on the border barrios of Mexico and Bacolor more access to a church). The San Fernando parish priest was so opposed to the idea (probably because he didn’t relish a diminution in his Sunday collections) that he even badmouthed and humiliated Mass-goers from Kuliat during his homily.
So Don Angel arranged for the parish priests of Porac, Calumpaui (old name of Floridablanca) and Sta. Ana to say Mass in Kuliat, paying their fees with his own money.
On December 8, 1829, Kuliat finally and officially seceded from its matrix, San Fernando, after Don Angel paid (from his own pocket) the local government of San Fernando the equivalent amount of taxes collected from Kuliat’s 160 pioneer settlers. The total number of settlers at the time of the town’s foundation had risen to 500.
The town was renamed Angeles after its patron saint, the Holy Guardian Angels (Los Angeles Custodios or the singularized San Angelo), whose feast day in the Church calendar is October 2.
The following year, 1830, the town changed its patron saint to Our Lady of the Holy Rosary (Nuestra Señora del Santo Rosario), who was the patron saint of the founder’s wife, Rosalia de Jesus, and whose image was the one carried in procession during the clearing of Kuliat in 1796.
The new town coincided the date of its fiesta with the feast of La Naval in Manila (second Sunday of October), because they had the same Marian icon, Our Lady of the Holy Rosary (who, many believed, was the reason the Spaniards beat the Dutch invaders in a 1646 naval battle -- hence, La Naval).
The feast of the Guardian Angels was moved to the Monday after La Naval fiesta, for practical reasons. Two years ago, the parish moved it back to its original date, October 2.
Meanwhile, Angeles has a third feast day in October, that of Apung Mamacalulu (Santo Entierro, or the Interred Christ), which is celebrated on the last Friday of October. The devotion started between 1828 and 1838 after parish priest Fr. Macario Paras had the image sculpted by a certain Buenaventura, installed for veneration in his family’s premises in Talimundoc, and then donated to the church in 1872.
In 1928, a descendant of the Paras family caused the image to be forcibly taken during a procession and deposited in the estate of the Dayrits. When the Archdiocese of Manila sued (the Diocese of San Fernando had not yet been created), the court ruled that the image should be returned to the church. It was -- or was it? Some claim that a mere replica was returned to the church, and that the original has stayed in the Dayrits’ chapel, which is now the object of the Apu devotion every Friday.
Today, Angeles City celebrates not one, not two, but three religious feast days -- October 2, for its titular patron saint, the Holy Guardian Angels; the second Sunday of October for its patroness, Our Lady of the Holy Rosary (La Naval); and the last Friday of October, the Apung Mamacalulu.
And then there’s also December 8, the anniversary of the town’s independence from San Fernando.
