Editorial
Beyond Fiestas
We stand in
solidarity with the various peoples of the Philippines in Hawaii in their
celebration of a number of fiestas all over the islands in this festive May.
For us over here, it
is a ceremony of remembering.
It is a ritual of
renewing our membership with the various ethno-linguistic communities of the
homeland, communities that we have brought here in this state, in our
destination place.
We are these
communities.
We are many—but we
are one.
We are one in the ‘many-ness’
that we are.
But even as we take
active participation of these fiestas, whether in Oahu, in Maui, or in the
other islands, we think of the roots of these fiestas in our history.
We think of the
performance of our everyday lives in Hawaii, or in other places where we have
found a new home.
We think of the
performance of the everyday life of those in the old homeland, and we cannot
resist the thought that somewhere in between the spirit of celebration and gaiety
is the wretched lives of those who do not live the same kind of life that we
do.
We think of the
performances in fiestas, and somewhere in between the spectacle for the tourist
and the momentary forgetting for the least advantaged are stories of hunger and
want, of deprivation and dispossession, of inequality and unevenness.
There is something
celebratory in fiestas.
There is something
joyful in witnessing simple acts of joy, so simple in their indivisibility that
we remember again to laugh, and laugh to our heart’s content.
There is something
infectious in seeing that happiness is worth our while, and that, at day-end,
despite the odds, we owe it to ourselves to be happy.
Indeed, it is so.
But here, we issue
our reminder: that fiestas could become a façade to hide those things that we
do not want to see, the things that we do not want others to see, the things
that we keep hidden in the nooks of our day-to-day life in the diaspora.
To display the best
of what we can offer is an obligation.
But to forget those
things behind the display is antithetical to that obligation.
For one thing, our
Philippine culture is not a case of one-size-fits-all.
We are a diverse
people, even as we claim the same heritage, with the reality of that sameness
celebrating the difference.
One thing that we
need to remember is that Philippine cultures and the ways to celebrate them are
not a case of booths, exhibits, parades, and pageants alone.
We need them, these
community ceremonies and rituals.
We need them, these
objects of our material culture.
But we cannot make
them as absolutes in an effort to reduce our sense of self and community as a
case of the four D’s: dance, dialect, dress, and diet.
As a people, we are
more than the tinikling that we perform.
As a people, we are
more than the ‘national language’ that we have used to usurp the other of his
right to educate himself in his own mother tongue.
As a people, we are
more than the indigenous weave we don to remind us that somewhere in the past
our ancestors had pride in the fabric whose designs they had to dream of.
As a people, we are
more than the pride that we feel in offering the ‘chocolate meat’ or lumpia or
turon or pancit to our guests.
This is the ‘beyond’
that we are looking for in our annual ‘display’ and ‘showcasing’ of what we
have got as a people.
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