It's heartening to know that in the recent two big-ticket festivals in our province (Puto Latik Festival in Binan City and Sampaguita Festival in San Pedro City), the organizers of the two festivals also made (re)discovering their cities' unique history a priority.
At least two events in the Puto Latik and Sampaguita festivals were symposiums, seminars, aimed at engaging the interest of local youth in Binan and San Pedro City on their cities' own local historical heritage. Damn, I'd have given a lot just to have heard prominent historian Dr. Xiao Chua when he gave his own talk on history here in San Pedro City.
There are twofold reasons for these seminars and symposiums. One is that our local history, particularly oral history, is in danger of being lost.
The "old-timers," the families that once became prominent in our cities' political, social and cultural scene, are now either dying or moving out of our cities, either to Manila or abroad.
A lot of history tends to be preserved in the stories that our lolos and lolas, our titos and titas, our nanays and tatays, tell us children. And in San Pedro and Binan cities, there is a growing interest in preserving these oral histories for future generations.
The second reason for these events is to show Lagunenses and Filipinos that there is still much to be discovered in our histories than what we learn in textbooks.
And in the context of the recent outrage among academicians against our education officials' apparent watering-down of history in our curriculum, local histories can very well help fill in the blanks.
Laguna, as we all know, is a province steeped in history – and yet when you ask Lagunenses what they know about their province's history, all they can tell you is Jose Rizal, our national hero.
I'm sure anybody who would seriously study our province's history would ask upon hearing the same old spiel about Rizal: That's it? Nothing else?
Laguna's history did not start and end with Rizal, or even the Spanish colonization of the Philippines.
Heck, who among us knows about the "Laguna Copperplate," a copper document that indicates that ancient Filipinos already had an advanced civilization and were actively involved in trade around Southeast Asia even before the Spanish conquest?
How many of us even know about the "Siege of Los Banos" during World War II, where many prominent Lagunenses – including San Pedro's own Abelardo "Kapitan Remo" Remoquillo – performed daring deeds of courage to free Laguna from the Japanese occupation forces?
Not to mention the centuries-long struggle of tenants of the vast haciendas that once made up San Pedro to gain ownership of the lands that they had tilled for centuries, now immortalized by Magsaysay Road and the barangays of Magsaysay and Narra.
This is just the tip of the iceberg, so to speak.
There’s more to Laguna’s history, waiting to be discovered by a new generation eager to know the past.
Like a gold hunter, all you need to do is to dig deep to get the nuggets that form the pieces of our history.
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