Note: This photo-esssay in slightly different version was featured in the 30 May - 05 Jun 2014 issue of FilAm Star, 'the newspaper for Filipinos in mainstream America, published weekly in San Francisco, CA. The author/blogger is the paper's special photo/news correspondent in the Philippines.
Rafaela
Evangelista, the popular Ka Pelang of Obando, is almost 80, and she may be the
last of her generation who graced the procession of March 18, the feast day of St.
Clare of Assisi (the Santa Clarang Pinung-pino of local folks). It seems she doesn’t
have any more favors to ask. After all,
she bore 13 children: 10 sons followed by three daughters, which she attributes
to the patroness saint. The beautiful
woman had been dancing most of her life.
I had the chance
to talk to Ka Pelang before the start of the procession. She was with the group
of relatives and friends who were all wearing her old Filipiniana costumes of
various colors and designs. She said that she cannot dance anymore but she
would walk in thanksgiving for all the blessings she has received. Her
daughter-in-law Julie is four months pregnant. She has three daughters already
but she came dressed up in one of Ka Pelang’s antique garments to dance for a
son.
Santa Clara is
one of the trinity of patron saints of Obando. According to the history of the
parish, the Franciscans introduced the veneration of the saint to the village
people in the 17th century when Catangalan (old name of Obando) was still a
part of Polo (now Venezuela). San
Pascual Baylon/Bailon joined Santa Clara as another patron in the 18th century when
Obando was already a town of its own, and the church was being built. The coming
of the Virgin of Salambao to Obando also in the 18th century is the subject of
folklore about the image of the Immaculate Conception being caught in the net
(salambao) of two fisherman brothers.
Popular town histories
trace the evolution of the folk Catholic dancing tradition to the pre-Spanish rituals
called kasilonawan presided by high priestesses, usually nine days of eating,
drinking, singing and dancing at the residence of the village chief. The
religious orders adapted these pagan rites as tools in their evangelization
mission. In the case of Catangalan, the
ancient house gods before whom women did fertility dancing was replaced by the
image of Santa Clara.
That may explain
how San Pascual Baylon, patron saint of Eucharistic congresses and associations,
was absorbed into the town’s fertility dancing tradition. There’s a basis though for the married folks
to include the Virgin of Salambao in their prayer dance for children, she is
after all the image of the Immaculate Conception. The town has a term for this
dancing: bayluhan, derived from the Spanish baile (dance) or from the Baylon or
Bailon name of the patron saint.
The church
history marker clearly delineates that the Obando fiesta of 17, 18 and 19 May
honors the trinity of saints with dancing: San Pascual for child bearing, Santa
Clara, patroness of the conceiving mother, Virgin of Salambao, patroness of
fishermen and farmers. Throwbacks culled
from literature though tell us that the bayluhan was done in various ways and covered
other requests for saintly intercessions.
Throwback late
1800s. Jose Montero y Vidal (Cuentos
Filipinos,1883) wrote that the “indios and mestizos” danced before the image of
San Pascual for the healing of every kind of illness and for protection from
other misfortunes. During fiesta days, men, women and children went to Obando “fancifully
dressed, head adorned with feathers and provided with tambourines, guitarillas
they call cinco-cinco and other instruments ... cheerfully dancing, not
allowing a moment of rest, despite the fire of the sun falling on their heads.”
At the sight of
the image of San Pascual during the procession, he wrote, “people of all
classes, ages and conditions, jiggle, jump and dance incessantly to implore the
holy healing of their ailments, pointing out the diseased part of the body;
they swarm in all directions, pray, sing and never stop dancing, even in the
church after the conclusion of the procession.”
One throwback is
an aside, fictional, from Jose Rizal’s Noli me Tangere (1887) about Capitan
Tiago who enshrined several images of saints including San Pascual Baylon in
the small chapel in his house. He and
his wife had long wished to have a child. Their pilgrimage to the shrines of
the Virgin in Taal and Pakil had all been in vain. She danced for a son in Obando during the
feast day of San Pascual Baylon; she bore a daughter instead who was given the
name Maria Clara in honor of the Virgin of Salambao and Santa Clara.
Joseph Earle Stevens,
an American, wrote in his ‘Yesterdays in the Philippines’ (1894) about taking
the train to attend the three-day fiesta. He noted that many pilgrims went
there on foot, and “[e]verybody seemed to think it his duty to dance, and men,
women, old men and children, mothers with babies and papas with kids, shouted,
jumped around, danced, joggled each other, and rumpussed about until they were
blue in the face, dripping with heat, and covered with dust. Then they would
stop and another crowd take up the play.”
Apparently the frenzied activity lasted until sunset with tired groups
sleeping under the shades around the church while other groups took over the
dancing and shouting.
Throwback Peacetime.
The accounts come from issues of the American Chamber of Commerce of Manila
(AmCham) Journals several years before the Japanese invasion, when Obando was a
short railway or motor vehicle ride away from Manila.
A 1932 account
described that most of the pilgrims came from the lower classes who fastened to
their clothing or hats pieces of colored paper cut in fanciful shapes. It
appears that the focus of their devotion was San Pascual, and they went to pray
for a child, for healing, or for protection.
There’s something
incredible in the story: pilgrims dancing from “Tinajeros cemetery on the
Manila North Road [later named MacArthur Highway]” all the way to the Obando
Church. My research tells me that
Tinajeros is in Malabon, but there was no cemetery there of that name. Malabon
had a cemetery near the San Bartolome Church and one in Tugatog. The distance from any of them to Obando
Church would be around seven kilometers!
Still, the pilgrims “who still [had] sufficient strength [kept] on
dancing and leaping until they [sunk] to the ground in exhaustion.”
Throwback 1940 describes
the three-day fiesta as “characterized by dancing by couples [who may also
merely be betrothed] whose prayers are that their union will be blessed with
children.” The patron of devotion was
San Pascual Bailon. The dance also named after this saint was one of the many
religious dances in the country, wrote Lydia Villanueva-Arguilla, “consisting
mainly of jogging and skipping, funny to the spectator but performed in all
earnestness by the dancers.”
The Obando fiesta
was disrupted by the second world war, and the centuries old images of the
patron saints enshrined in the church were all destroyed by the bombs of 1945.
There was no
fertility dancing after the war. The
church abolished it because of its pagan origins. The tradition however was
revived in 1972.
Back to the
present. During the last pintakasi, I
gathered that different groups of Obando folks from different barangays dance
during the procession of the images of the three saints. There are groups dedicated only to one feast
day or to one patron saint. The men and
women wore different sets of Filipiniana costumes of different cuts and colors
to distinguish their groupings. The group of Ka Pelang wore her antique
garments for Santa Clara.
Yes, there were
still pilgrims from other places who attended mass and may have joined the
dancing inside the church after the service. It’s possible they were in the
procession too and may have swayed with the crowd from the church down the main
street and back to the same tune played over and over by the musikong bumbong
and several brass bands: the ever popular Santa Clarang Pinung-Pino, although I
did not hear anyone singing the song:
[Santa Clara, Thou blessed one, / Solemn promise I have made to thee, / When I
reach your shrine at Obando, / I will pray, then dance the Fandango. / Aruray,
Araruray, Oh, Santa Clara, hear my vow. / Aruray, Araruray, Oh, Santa Clara,
hear my vow. – Translation in the 1914 music book for primary grades]
