Summer 1974: Pabasa, Basketball, Libots and Flores de Mayo in Bulakan Bulacan

The second semester having ended, I spent the entire 1974 summer break in my hometown, Bulakan, Bulacan. Our barangay's name was Maysantol, but it was also called Kupang.  It was a busy summer, busier than usual. UP politics and anti-martial law protests were far from my mind.  Little did I know that this summer would be one of the last authentic and personal enjoyments of my hometown I would experience before my activist career began.

I spent this summer hanging around with my barkada, which consisted of Edmund Reyes, my younger brother, my second cousins Tony Enriquez, Jun Enriquez, and Val de Jesus, and our next-door neighbor Edjie de Jesus. We whiled away time in front of Horacio's sari-sari store across our house, which had in front of it two worn out but glossy bamboo benches, facing each other.

Photo shows my barkada in Bulakan, Bulacan during much of the Seventies. We were having a picnic in the garden  in front of our house. We were feasting on pakbet, longganisang Bulakan, inihaw na bulig, (grilled mudfish), suman (glutinous rice wrapped in banana leaves), bananas, San Miguel and Budweiser beer, Johnny Walker whisky, and Remy Martin cognac. I'm the one in  light-blue shorts. My elder brother Luis E. Reyes is the one holding a beer bottle at the extreme left. The one sitting is my brother Edmundo E. Reyes. Drinking from a Budweiser can behind Edmundo is my second cousin Antonio E. Enriquez. The one wearing the Lee t-shirt is another second-cousin, Emiliano "Jun" Enriquez.  At the extreme left is Mario de Jesus, and to his right is our guitarist, Gener Candor. Holding a San Miguel Beer bottle behind me is Gener's elder brother Titot Candor. This picture was taken on November 25, 1979.

I also participated in an uneventful  barangay inter-color basketball league, which played about thrice a week on a clay court and at early evening. Dribbling was hard and a sweaty player really got dirty upon falling on the court. However, with the wild cheering of the barangay folk for their team of choice, the lowly basketball court might as well have been Araneta Coliseum to the players. 

The tournament ended abruptly in a court-wide rumble with no champion being declared. I belonged to the Tangerine Team, and my number was 77. Sometimes I even did the play-by-play announcing over a loudspeaker, being very good at it, I'd like to think.  I did it in Bulakan Tagalog!

This is the "half-court" behind our house. I am hoisting my then two-year-old
son Nikko to try to shoot the ball through the hoop. This was taken in 1985

Lastly, and not in the least, I was elected, via viva voce,  president of the barangay church youth organization. This organization of teenagers and twenty somethings was in charge of conducting the Holy Week pabasa, or the singing of the Philippine Pasyon in March, and staging the annual Flores de Mayo in May. 

It was based in the barangay "bisita," or chapel, which was located some fifty meters from where I lived. The barangay people referred to it as the Pamunuan ng Kabataan or just plain pamunuan. There were two presidents actually, one for the men, and the other for the women.

This picture shows some of my basketball mates, many of whom are about ten years younger than me. We had just played several furious three-on-three games on the half-court behind our house. Standing at the extreme left, front row is my younger brother Edmundo, while another younger brother Vincent holds the ball. 

 I remember going house to house raising funds for the Flores de Mayo particularly to pay a fourteen man band or musiko. I even went to friends and relatives outside of Bulakan, Bulacan to solicit money. As president, I had the time honored duty of providing from my pocket a hearty dinner to them right after the 9 pm procession. They had walked some two hours and several kilometers around our barangay while carrying and playing their instruments; the men were very hungry. They ate at our house.

The musicians set aside  their instruments at one corner of our house and went straight to the dining table. They understandably made short work of the nilagang baboy, chicken in cheddar cheese sauce, and rellenong bangus our maid Ka Sila had prepared, all for the grand sum of fifty pesos.  After eating, the men sat in our living room for about an hour and smoked a lot.

Some have left while a few have joined our group in this pose. I am partly kneeling with the ball, my younger brother Vincent gives the highest victory sign. My nephew, Raul Enriquez, in the blue t-shirt, is at the extreme right. 

After paying the leader of the band, something like two thousand pesos, I saw them off in their long Sarao jeepney in front of our gate. It was already 12 midnight, I had been up since 5 am, but I still had enough energy to clean the mess in our house the band left behind. It is amazing what a twenty year old body can do. After washing my face and brushing my teeth, I dozed off in my unkempt bed. I slept oh so soundly, I was dead tired.   

Before the Flores de Mayo, the pamunuan sponsored nine consecutive, nightly mini-processions, commencing at 9 pm, that were devoid of the gaudiness of the Flores de Mayo. They consisted merely of just twenty to thirty plainly dressed and slipper-clad young and older people carrying candles or kerosene torches.

My barkada on our way to Baguio in 1980. We were in Plaridel, Bulacan, and we thought the historical marker would be a great spot for a group picture. The marker commemorates the place where Col. John M. Stotsenburg of the US Army was killed by Filipino snipers on April 23, 1899, during the Philippine-American War. I am the one wearing the white t-shirt and shades. My brother Edmundo is standing at the extreme left, my brother Luis is standing at the extreme right, while my brother Vincent raises his clenched fist second from the left back row. At fourth from the left, back row, is my youngest brother, Francis E. Reyes.    

Each procession wound their way through the nooks and crannies of our barangay, making the full route, some three kilometers, in about an hour. Because of this, they have been called libot in our barangay, which is the Tagalog word for wandering. I remember we had the libot around the first week of May, and the Flores de Mayo during the last week. 

In the middle of the procession was a line of about three to four female children five or six years old, each carrying a religious object that looked like a one foot square picture of a saint or of the Virgin Mary, which were called estampas. Each estampa had at its top a small crucifix about four inches high and three inches wide.

The children were dressed in modest but somewhat worn out long gowns and  were accompanied by adult women. These were usually their proud mothers, who guided them by their wee hands, and cajoled the by now sleepy tots to keep pace with the procession. 

For these austere processions, these children were the substitutes for the sagalas or the various heavily made-up and fabulously attired queens of the Flores de Mayo. At the end of the libot, the estampas, holy and antique icons as they were, found their way to a secure bin near the altar of the bisita.  

At the rear end of the about twenty meter long procession, the male youth of our barangay congregated, consisting mainly of my barkada and then some. There were also five or six male adults in their forties, which we looked upon as already "old," calling them appropriately enough, katandaan or the old folk.   

The rear led the singing for the procession, with a guitarist always present. The older folk sang a lot better than we did. The outstanding singer was my second cousin, Raul Enriquez, who was an outstanding tenor. We respectfully called him Ka Raul. 

There were other quality voices in the older group, and one of them was Ka Raul's younger brother, Recaredo, whom we called Ka Rec. Ka Rec was was an active duty policeman in our town. Another notable voice belonged to bald Ruben Morelos, who was a wistful baritone, and whom we affectionately called Mang Ruben. Together, the rear group would lead the singing of the Spanish version of the Hail Mary, or Ave Maria, until the procession ended. 

We interchangeably sang the Ave Maria , or what we informally called the Dios Te Salve in two melodies.  The guitarist of choice was Gener Candor, or Negi, owing to his dark complexion. Gener was the best guitarist in our group hands down. The other procession marchers, most of them women,  sang along, which melodious chorus, to my approximation, was a mixture of the solemn and the festive. 

The Ave Maria went like this:

"Dios te salve, María, llena eres de gracia, 

el Señor es contigo. 

Bendita tú eres entre todas las mujeres, 

y bendito es el fruto de tu vientre, Jesús. 

Santa María, Madre de Dios, 

ruega por nosotros pecadores, 

ahora y en la hora de nuestra muerte. 

Amen."

I will never forget the smell of the kerosene torches, more than twenty five of them, and the yellow light and black smoke they collectively emitted, creating a surreal scene within the procession. It was as if the two twisted rows of torches were creating an eery, bright yellow and pitch black zone in between, where things were all in slow motion, and all you heard was the repetitive singing of the Ave Maria, and all you smelled was acrid burnt kerosene.  

If anyone was carrying a candle, his or her light was certainly overwhelmed by the torches and rendered unnoticeable. I surmised that there must have been very few candles in the processions anyway, because the bamboo kerosene torches, which I bought in bulk from Ka Rening, the barangay bamboo dealer, were cheaper, and were reusable besides.

At the procession's proverbial end, which of course was the bisita, all the libot participants partook of delightful bowls, five inches across, of either sopas, which was a creamy soup of elbow macaroni, chicken, and thin strips of carrots and cabbage, or arroz caldo, which was a thick rice porridge, ginger and garlic flavored, and provided with two or three chicken morsels per bowl. 

The steaming treats were cheerily served by the female officials of the pamunuan and some devout volunteers. Even non-procession participants, opportunists all, had their fill, for who could resist and who would refuse? Everybody was happy, because the supply was ample: it coming from two humongous calderos so big a toddler could hide in them. The merry eating, laughing, and flirting went on until something like 11 or 11:30 pm, after which everyone repaired to their houses.