WITH the rest of the country calling Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo the worst President the Philippines has ever had, you'd think they would take it against all Kapampangans and never again put another kabalen in Malacañang.
Our countrymen have all the right and reason to suspect we were, to borrow Nick Joaquin's description of Kapampangans, "wicked accomplices" in President Arroyo's plot to become Speaker of the House and possibly Prime Minister by delivering her Congress seat on a silver platter.
The fact that another Kapampangan has just been elected to lead this nation is a sign that President Arroyo has not done any permanent damage on our reputation, after all.
Noynoy Aquino's Kapampangan roots are firm and deep and all over the place, not just in Tarlac but also in Pampanga. In fact, the Aquinos of Tarlac did not originate in Tarlac; they came from southern Pampanga, where the ancient Kapampangan civilization began. (Noynoy's great-great-grandfather was, in fact, a Macabebe.)
The Aquinos moved to Tarlac only in early 1800s as part of the wave of Kapampangan frontiersmen who pushed north in search of forests to convert into farmlands. At that time, Kapampangans were being pressured by the colonial government in Manila to produce more rice and sugar.
This was the same spirit that prompted Don Angel Pantaleon de Miranda of San Fernando to go north and start his hacienda in a place called Culiat (later Angeles).
You could tell which towns in the north used to be forests because our ancestors often named their new settlements after the type of vegetation they had just cleared, e.g., Culiat after kulyat vines, Mabalacat after balakat trees, Capas after kapas weeds, and Tarlac after malatarlak grass.
The Aquinos chose a spot much farther north, in San Bartolome, near the Parua River (known today as Sacobia River). With the Aquinos were other Kapampangan families like the Lucianos, Dizons, Suings, Felicianos, Cortezes and Pinedas.
In 1861, a catastrophic flood scattered these families in two directions: one going south to a place that would later become the town of Magalang, and the other going north to a place that would be known as Concepcion. The Aquinos belonged to the latter group.
In 1873, when Tarlac was separated from Pampanga, Don Braulio Aquino y Lacsamana went to Angeles to marry Doña Maria Antonina Petrona Aguilar de Hipolito, probably the most sought-after local girl at the time. She was the great-granddaughter of Angeles founder Don Angel Pantaleon de Miranda and niece of both the sitting mayor of Angeles, Mariano V. Henson and the matriarch of the Nepomuceno clan, Agustina Henson (Pio Rafael Nepomuceno's wife).
The Aquino couple had seven children, all born in Angeles, including Servillano-Noynoy's great-grandfather-and Brigida, who married Andres Ganzon. (The Ganzons owned the house along Miranda Street where the future General Servillano Aquino would stay to watch over his boss, Gen. Emilio Aguinaldo, who stayed in the Pamintuan Mansion across the street.)
When Servillano was nine, Don Braulio and Doña Petrona relocated to Concepcion, Tarlac, where Don Braulio would eventually become mayor and where Doña Petrona would die at age 33. Don Braulio remarried and had a daughter, Elena.
(This Elena married a Gueco in Magalang and had a daughter, Paz Gueco, who married Daniel Romualdez, first cousin of Imelda Marcos. Local residents still remember a young Imelda swimming in a river in Magalang during summer breaks and dancing with a young Ninoy Aquino during a party in the Gueco mansion.)
After schooling in Manila, Servillano Aquino married Guadalupe Quiambao, a fiery Kapampangan woman who was known far and wide as a swordswoman (she would later die in the Revolution, her right hand holding a bolo and her left a dagger).
Guadalupe's parents were Pablo Quiambao, a Macabebe scion-turned-fugitive and later a local Robin Hood in Tarlac, and Lorenza Tañedo, from the same mold of fiery, bolo-wielding Kapampangan women.
Servillano and Guadalupe lived in Murcia, Tarlac and had three children, all boys, one of whom was Benigno, future father of Ninoy and grandfather of Noynoy.
The boys lived with their Ganzon aunt in Angeles where they studied under Maestro Bartolome Tablante. When they became uncontrollable (as children separated from their parents often were), they were transferred to a boarding school in Bacolor under the super-strict Maestro Modesto Joaquin.
After Guadalupe's death, Servillano married Guadalupe's widowed sister Petronila Estrada (known later as Eva Estrada Kalaw's grandmother). They had a daughter, Fortunata, who would be so popular among Kapampangan poets as muse that she eloped to Shanghai with one of them, the great Amado Yuzon of Guagua.
Servillano went on to become a Katipunero and later close ally of Gen. Aguinaldo; he fought both the Spaniards during the Revolution and the Americans during the Philippine-American War, on both occasions retreating to Mount Arayat to consolidate his forces, and on both occasions getting arrested and imprisoned but always managing to escape execution.
Like Gen. Aguinaldo, Gen. Aquino probably lived too long for his own good-he died only in 1959 at age 84 (Aguinaldo died in 1964 at age 94), outliving his own son Benigno Aquino Sr. He even got married a third time, at age 72, to Belen Sanchez, with whom he had a son, Herminio, who would become Raul Roco's running mate in the 2004 presidential elections.
Benigno Aquino Sr., Ninoy's father, was President Quezon's Secretary of Agriculture when World War II broke out. Some people still refer to him as a traitor and collaborator, but in time of war, patriotism often takes two expressions-resistance against the enemy and tactical alliance with them. Because he chose the latter, Aquino was tried for treason. He died in 1947 while on bail and watching a boxing match at the Rizal Memorial Stadium.
His son, Benigno "Ninoy" Aquino Jr. is, of course, the man whose assassination in 1983 set off a chain of events that led to his widow's and son's election as President of the Republic in 1986 and 2010, respectively.
(Source: The Aquinos of Tarlac by Nick Joaquin)