Happy Birthday, Rosales!

My father, F. Sionil Jose, sent this draft of his final column to his loyal assistant, Cesar, on Thursday, Jan. 6, at 2 p.m. He was never able to review the draft since he was busy writing his thank you letter to his heart. He did what he loved the most – write about his beloved country and hometown, Rosales. He told us that he wanted his epitaph to simply read: “He wrote stories, and he believed in them.”

Not every town in the Philippines knows its birthday and I wish all of them do if only to promote among us Filipinos a firmer sense of time and place.

Rosales, my hometown, will celebrate its foundation day tomorrow, Jan. 11, and Mayor Susan P. Casareno has proclaimed the day a day of rejoicing and celebration. This happy event came about when the persevering historian, Adriel Meimban, Ph.D. and INC Minister of Rosales, found in the National Archives the old Spanish documents portraying the beginning of the township of Rosales and its environment. It is, of course, completely different from my fictional rendering in my novel, Po-on, which deals with Rosales at the end of the Spanish regime, but the narrative is not far distant because of the creation of towns like Rosales was due to the Ilokano diaspora, the seeking of Ilokanos for more land away from the narrow strip of coastal plain that the Ilocos region is. For instance, north of our village is Cabalaonan which means a native there is from the town of Balaoan, La Union. Farther north is Casanicolasan, the people there were originally from San Nicolas, Ilocos Norte. And of course, our barrio Cabugawan means that the people in my barrio originally came from the town of Cabugao, Ilocos Sur, and that most of the family names of the people in that town start with the letter S – Sison, Somera, Soliven, all these are Cabugao names. I remember only too well when I was young the caravans, bullcarts, with solid wooden wheels and buri palm roofs drawn by cows or water buffaloes park in the town plaza, in their long trip to the Cagayan valley, much of which was still jungle.

The documents found by Dr. Adriel Meimban are all in Spanish and La Union’s political leader, Mary Jane Ortega, is translating them into English. Earlier, Prof. Meimban has written a readable and well researched history of La Union Province. He wants to do the same with Rosales and he’s planning to go to the United States to do more research in the National Archives there, for he wants to illustrate the development of the town as well under the American regime. His grandfather was deeply in politics and like his grandfather’s opponent, well-known leader Angel Pile, fought one another in a bitter election campaign wherein both candidates sold much of their properties for their campaign. This is how it was in the old days, politicians sought high office and were willing to lose their fortunes for the honor of being Mayor, Alcalde, or Presidente as our town mayor was called.

In the 1920s and 30s, Rosales was an important rice center.

It was connected to the main Philippine National Railways through Paniqui, Tarlac. Two huge rice mills were close to the railroad station. Rosales and its environs were then huge haciendas.

Historically, as I have pointed out in my novel, Po-on, the significance of Rosales is the fact that when the revolutionary government was in Tarlac, and Mabini as leading thinker and official of that Republic was dismissed by President Aguinaldo, he had fled to Rosales where he stayed for a few months. He also visited the next town, Balungao, where there is a hot spring where he bathed when he caught fever. This is the crucial event in the beginning of the Rosales saga when Mabini asks Istak, the main hero in the novel, to proceed to the North and help show the way across Tirad Pass to the retreating Aguinaldo and his ragtag army.

I have written about the festivities in my hometown, the town fiesta on June 12 and 13, which is the feast day of San Antonio de Padua, the town patron saint. The town has the Roman Catholic Church, the Iglesia Filipina Independiente, the Iglesia ni Kristo and the SM Mall in the town’s biggest barrio, Carmen.

Small town politics can be as vicious as anywhere else, especially in the Ilokos region where conflicts are not just between political parties but between relatives and are often concluded with violence.

The politicians that dominate Rosales are basically from the landed class from the very beginning. I remember a few names, Victorino Pine, Fortunato Alberto, Felix Coloma, who was an Iglesia Filipina Independiente leader and, in more recent times, Ricardo Riveta, who discovered a very unusual relic buried in the village of Carmay. He was a military officer and he cleared the town of drugs. He was succeeded by Susan Casareno, who improved the town’s infrastructure. For more than a generation, Rosales politics was dominated by the Estrella family led by the patriarch Conrado Estrella, who was a personal friend of Ramon Magsaysay and under Marcos served as the secretary of agrarian reform. Before that he was the town mayor and was succeeded by his son and then by his grandson. He was also governor of the province.

All our small towns have unique stories that separate them from other towns; it is for their historians and natives to discover this and to understand what makes them unique. I hope that each town has only not an oral history alive in the minds of its people, but a written history they can go back to if they want to really remember.

The knowledge of one’s beginning is important not just to one’s self. It is important because it gives us not just a sense of place, but of time. The story of our towns bond us together into a sense of community and hopefully of shared responsibility and love for the place where we came from. And in this way, we truly become a nation.