Excuse Me, Our Culture is Showing
by Arch. Augusto Villalon
LUGAR, Bookmark © 2001

So many of our collective Filipino lifetimes have been spent making excuses for our culture going back to the days of our great-great grandfathers. We have learned to brush our culture aside so habitually that it feels as if we are apologizing instead of proudly declaring that we are Filipino. We have inherited a national fear of openly talking of our culture. Instead of blaming our forebears, our society and others, it might be best to begin confronting our culture now so we become comfortable with it.

Thinking about Filipino culture, is as far removed from everyday consciousness as thinking about the precision of neurobiology. We have clouded “culture” with a mystique that transformed it into an unreachable and elitist topic.

Culture is farthest from being elitist. It is so deeply and indelibly rooted into every Filipino that it is the invisible string that ties all of us together. We really should be familiar with a few of these strings.

“Culture” is a word that describes our “way of life.” It describes without making any positive or negative judgments. It never suggests that someone else’s culture is better than yours or mine. It simply describes and illustrates the way we like to do things. That’s what culture means.

The way most of us love to sing our hearts out in karaoke bars and to dance in ballrooms rather than to sit quietly enveloped by Mozart at a concert is an illustration of how we like to experience music. We demolish the queues at cashier stations, bus stops, airport check-in counters and at traffic lights, but our culture puts up with the chaos. The delicious way that we have adapted Filipino, Chinese, Spanish and American food (even Italian, as in sweet spaghetti with melted, oozing orange cheese) to evolve a Filipino cuisine shows that we welcome outside influences and adapt the interesting aspects into our culture.

Architecture is another way we express ourselves. It flavors our cities with an overlay of buildings from different historical eras and is another record of our evolving culture.

Since culture is the way we live, culture always changes. As we change, we discard much of our past and substitute it with the new. However, some things remain constant and become traditions. Those are ways of the past that we have chosen to keep, like honoring our parents and grandparents, or maintaining the same family rituals on special occasions such as birthdays and Christmas.

What, then, are the other examples of our culture that are all around us? Many of these examples of these exist in our neighborhoods. Tracking down these examples may develop into an interesting activity if done with a group of neighbors, children, or assigned to students, as suggested by Felice Sta. Maria during her term as the Commissioner for Cultural Heritage of the National Commission for Culture and the Arts (NCCA).

Ms Sta. Maria suggests to take a look around your neighborhood to look for:

• Cultural resources outlets: libraries, museums, antique and art shops, public or privately owned collections of antiques, heirlooms, monuments, historical houses, zoos.
• Cultural propagators: Are there historians, storytellers, writers, performing groups, zarzuela, komedya, pasyon, etc. who can connect you to traditions?
• Traditions: Are there any special traditions unique to your community? Are there special celebrations, fiestas, performances that only happen in your community than anywhere else?
• Historical places or homes: In what homes did historical or important people stay, work, or visit? What did these important persons contribute to the neighborhood?
• Community name: Why was your neighborhood so named?
• Community history: What were the economic, scientific, geographical, artistic, culinary, and political events that were so important in shaping your community?
• First families: Who were the early pioneers or the first families of your community? Why did they move to your area? Are they still there or have they moved out? Where are they now?
• Community identity: Does your community have an official coat of arms, symbol or motto?
• Location: Is there anything significant about the geographic location of your community? Are you near beaches, volcanoes, mountains, rivers and streams, forests, etc.? Is there anything really significant about your location? Do you know how old your area is geologically?
• Folk knowledge: Are there people who know folk medicine, or who can talk about old folk beliefs? Are there people who know and can tell folktales to the other neighbors?

Ms. Sta. Maria goes on to suggest some projects for the community to undertake:

• “Get to know your community walks”: Get different people to lead walks around your community so that you see your surroundings through their specially developed eyes: walk with a biologist, zoologist, historian, environmentalist, sculptor, architect, farmer and see their different points of view on your neighborhood.
• Recollection sharing: Invite someone from the community to recall a significant event, such as the sparing of an old building from a World War II bombing. Someone can talk of how your community survived a particularly bad flood. A grandmother could tell stories of what it was like living in your neighborhood before it became crowded and commercial.
• A Day in the Life of My Community: This is a documentation project where children, adults, teachers, or anyone interested in documenting the daily activities in the community can photograph, draw, video film, or use any medium. The results of their work should be exhibited.
• Mapping: Making cultural maps and street maps to indicate where everyday activities take place, such as the location, of the sari-sari store, the sidewalk vendors, the postal station, school, the oldest house in the neighborhood, church, plaza, etc.
• Cleanup and maintenance: Get together to clean the streets, sidewalks, drains, etc.
• Fiesta committees: Set up a system to be sure that national holidays are celebrated in the same way communities celebrate religious fiestas: with parades that include full participation from the community. If there must be a beauty contest for the next neighborhood fiesta, it has become part of our 1990s culture, then integrate it with a past event that happened in your neighborhood or something meaningful to your neighborhood.

Sharing the results of these activities with the rest of the neighborhood brings out the reality that culture is indeed all around us, and is something that touches our daily lives. It will further bring out that some, if not many aspects of our culture are worth knowing about and passing on to our children.

If anything else, knowing about the unique culture existing in your area will establish a sense of solidarity among all the neighbors and most importantly build a feeling of “pride of place” that is so sorely missing in today’s Filipino.

(This essay was culled, with permission by the author, from Lugar: Essays on Philippine Heritage and Architecture published by The Bookmark Inc. The author is an YTRiP adviser, one of the few conservation architects in the country and is responsible for the inscription of five Philippine sites in the UNESCO World Heritage list. He is a founder of the Heritage Conservation Society. He has a column in the Philippine Daily Inquirer).