Pepe Jocano and rising above the culture of the slums

Felipe Landa Jocano, by my estimate the foremost Filipino anthropologist, died and left with us a legacy in scholarship — several books which help us know ourselves better. It is this knowledge of ourselves, our identity, which is the single most important ingredient in the shaping of our personalities and in the formation of our community and nation.

I knew Jocano — or Pepe, as I always called him — from the ’50s onwards. I was editing the Sunday Magazine of the Manila Times — then the largest English language magazine in the country. He had just returned from the University of Chicago where he obtained his PhD. He wanted to contribute to the magazine and I obliged, finding soon enough that his interests complemented mine.

In the ’50s, I also traveled all over the country, from Sabtang in the Batanes to Sitangkai in Tawi-Tawi, the Turtle Islands, Cagayan de Sulu, and on to Sandakan in North Borneo. The agrarian problem, poverty, culture change — in that order — fascinated me. By this time, Pepe was also drawing the ethnic map of the country and living in different regions, including the Ilokos.

After that exposure in the North, he came to me — a wide grin on his face — and announced. “Frankie—you Ilokanos are really different.”

I have, of course, known that we have been stereotyped as industrious tightwads, and worse —as country bumpkins. He confirmed the thrift and industry, and our clannishness most of all.

I asked how may one explain the vendettas, the fearsome feuds that have bloodied several generations in the Ilokos? He said that was the negative extension of the clannishness.

He also observed how competitiveness among Ilokanos is tamed, the ing-git as the Tagalogs call it. When such exists, the weaker usually leaves to make it elsewhere and return only when he had succeeded. He noted how houses, communities are well maintained though they are poor, fruit trees in the yards, the tidy well groomed farms — all of which as an Ilokano boy I took for granted.

In the 1950s when much of Mindanao, Palawan and Northern Luzon was still caparisoned with jungle, I asked if an Angkor Wat or a Borobudur are lurking under the forest canopy. He replied that it was unlikely because Asia’s great religions, Buddhism and Hinduism, were not transplanted here. But he assured me we were not illiterate savages before the Spaniards came, that communities thrived all over the archipelago. He mentioned the Boxer Codex, the first paper document on our ancestors, as drawn by a Chinese visitor.

The upper classes wore embroidered clothes, footwear; the women were adorned with gold jewelry, belts. The men had swords, bows and arrows, spears. It was the peasants who were barefoot but they, too, had clothes. I was to see the famous document later on at the Newberry Library in Chicago, resting on a pillow, the room where it was kept equipped with proper air control.

There was yet no Web where instant information is available; Pepe also explained to me the principle of carbon dating.

I like to think that I am the first Filipino to have visited the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan which, in the past was far more closed to the world than Tibet. I went there in 1963 via the Himalayan highway which our party opened. I was Information Officer of the Colombo Plan which Bhutan joined that year. We flew from Calcutta to Puntsholing in the Indian doars in the early morning and from there, boarded half a dozen jeeps. The single lane road hugged the mountain side and we often looked down ravines thousands of feet deep. Rhodonderons as tall as trees garlanded the road in rose and pink. The tropical climate soon changed, and the Himalayan October chill cocooned us.

It was harvest time, too. One evening after dinner with the Prime Minister, Jigme Dorji, he asked if I wanted to see a Bhutanese folk dance. I was eager to witness one. In his courtyard, with the barley harvest piled in a corner, a bonfire was ablaze. A dozen girls in costume were gathered in a semi-circle before the bonfire. They joined hands, started swaying, chanting, stomping their feet and jingling the bells on their ankles.

They call it “the shock of recognition.” It was no different from the dugso, the Manobo rice harvest dance, in Bukidnon!

When I got back to Manila. I sought Pepe and asked him how could such a coincidence ever happen — a kingdom in the Himalayas, a plateau in Mindanao.

He had a ready answer: geography, climate, history and religion produce similarities in culture. I was thus not surprised when I saw later how very much alike Indian weaving in the Andes was with what our Cordillera people created on the loom.

When starting a story or article about which I have scant knowledge, I consult the experts. I was working on my story, Waywaya in the ’70s — a romance long before the Spaniards came between a man and a woman belonging to two warring tribes. Censorship at the time was imposed by Marcos and I intended the story to be a comment on that regime. The woman’s name, Waywaya, means liberty in Ilokano. I showed the draft to Pepe who read it carefully then said, “remove the flowers on the girl’s hair. That is not Filipino — it is Polynesian.”

Like contemporaries Mary Racelis and Aprodicio Laquian, Pepe was confounded, repelled by poverty. He knew it as a boy but now as a comfortable academic, he must probe into it. One day, a relative was shocked to find him in rags, begging infront of the Quiapo Church; the relative did not realize he was gathering empirical data.

At one time, too, when he was doing research for his study on deviant sexual behavior, he worked as an attendant in a love motel. He admitted sheepishly that he surprised a few colleagues who patronized the love motel.

When I started working on my novel Ermita about a high-class Manila courtesan, I read a few books, fiction and non-fiction, on prostitution, classics like Nana by Emile Zola, the Woman of Rome by Alberto Moravia, and that English study on commercial sex, “Sitting on a Fortune” I thought Moravia made a serious error by writing his novel in the first person.

Pepe and I talked about our findings and on two occasions, we visited a pick-up bar in M.H. del Pilar close to my bookshop and a popular massage parlor in Quezon City.

He was very thorough; he reminded me so much of the Japanese journalists I knew, how they amassed so much information and used maybe just one-tenth of that material in their stories.

I talked only with the girls; he did that, too, and more; he interviewed the attendants, the waiters. He even took measurements of the massage cubicles, noted the fixtures.

When his study was finished, he gave me a chapter for my journal, Solidarity. Twenty copies disappeared in the printer’s shop; in a month, the whole 2,000 copies sold out — I had to order a second printing. To my mind, it was the first “scholarly pornography” ever.

During the Marcos years, Pepe was a low-key supporter of the New Society. Like my compadre, the poet Alejandrino Hufana who even composed a volume of poetry for Imelda, I chided him, too. Alex got just the position of librarian of the Cultural Center. For Pepe, nothing.

His many articles in the old Sunday Times Magazine and in my journal, Solidarity, were written with felicitous simplicity, bereft of the bewildering jargon of academe. They were meant to be read, understood and ingested easily like vitamins in syrup. There was nothing pompous about the man or his work — just steady, meaningful study strewn with keen insights. He was so unlike most middle- or upper-class scholars who bypass the deeper truths known only by those who come from the lower classes. This is one lasting value in Pepe’s work which scholars — with all their good intentions — often miss.

In the 1950s, the American sociologist, Oscar Lewis, immersed himself in a slum in Mexico and wrote that landmark study on the culture of poverty, “The Children of Sanchez.” Pepe Jocano did the same thing with his books on our slums. His conclusions on how to rise above this culture are worth considering and absorbing by any Filipino who wants our people to leave the swamp.

A hoary Chinese saying states that a man’s longevity is defined by three achievements. He shall have planted a tree, sired a son and written a book. I do not know if Pepe ever planted a tree — he must have in his native Iloilo. I am sure though that he did plant a lot of vegetables in his backyard. He sired two with the former Adrea Payad; a daughter, Lizabeth, a graphic designer and a son Felipe, Jr. who is now teaching medical anthropology in Diliman. As for books — there’s two dozen of them which singly or in their entirety make a formidable base for the study of the Filipino, his origins and his culture. They are rock-hard achievements that give us seekers a solid pathway to nationhood.