By By ARTHUR L. ALLAD-IW
www.nordis.net

(In celebration of the Women’s Month, the Advocate gives way to Lorie Joyce T. Agayo, who is taking up Bachelor of Science in Nursing at the Easter College, Baguio City. – Ed)

March is a month for the women. Unknown to many, it was in March more than 200 years ago when the great Generala, Gariela Silang, was born, and, afterwards, bravely fought Spanish atrocities in the Ilocos and lowland Abra. Her waged battles and death became an igniting force for women and men alike to fight for their independence from the yoke of oppression and tyranny.

Born as Maria Josefa Gabriela Carino Silang on March 19, 1731, Gabriela’s mother, never named by historians, was from Pidigan, Abra and her father Anselmo Carino, was from Santa, Ilocos Sur. She was orphaned at a young age.

Gabriela was adopted and raised by Tomas Millan, a rich businessman in Ilocos. Historians had contradicting opinion as to her alleged marriage at age 20, some claimed she was married to her adopter. Others claimed, she was married to another man. Her first marriage existed just for three years as her husband died but left all his wealth to Gabriela, though without a child.

In 1757, Gabriela and Diego Silang got married after their relationship flourished. Diego was then a well known leader of the Kailanes, a group of Ilocanos fighting against Spanish impositions – such as high taxes, forced labor, and quota for agricultural products for export, and tyranny. With his campaign for Ilocano independence and establishment of Vigan as the capital of his government, he garnered massive support and won battles against the Spaniards. As the Spanish failed to quell his forces in a military war, they hired, for his elimination, his friends Miguel Vicos and Pedro Becbec where the former, on May 28, 1763, treacherously shot him from behind which caused his death, historians claimed.

Gabriela took over the vacuum of leadership left by her husband with the support of her husband’s uncle Nicolas Carino and loyal lieutenants, Sebastian Andaya and Manuel Flores. Three months after her husband’s death, she recruited fighting troops about 2,000 men, mostly from her mother’s place in Abra, where they were armed with captured weapons from their Spanish enemy and indigenous armaments, like bows (bikal) and arrow (pana), blowguns (sumpit), bladed weapons such as bolos, daggers and swords, and head axes (wasay).

She waged wars, mostly in the Spanish garrisons along the coastal areas of Ilocos. It was victory after victory, against the colonizers. As she hit the Spanish troops and the locals who joined the colonizers, she earned the masses’ support and was called “generala.”

Due to her victories, she attacked the center of Spanish authority in Vigan. Her bolo brigade and Tinggian archers assaulted the Spanish troops and their local recruits. Braved but out armed by Spanish superior armaments and concentrated troops of at least 6,000, she lost most of her men, including Diego’s uncle and her loyal lieutenant. Nicolas, perished in one of her defeats. Historians claimed that she retreated to the mounatins of Abra and neighboring Mountain Province but was cornered and captured there with her remaining 80 men.

Trying to bring mesage to the locals that resistance against Spanish rule would mean death on the gallows, her men were hung one after the other by the Spaniarads, within the full view of the locals. The great generala was brought to the Vigan Plaza where she was hanged, September 20, 1763. On the same place where she was hung stands a hospital, named after her.

Gabriela, also known as the Joan of Arc of Ilocandia, ended her heroic life fighting for her people’s freedom. She deserves the garland of greatness and worthy of emulation. This maybe the reason why the nation’s largest women’s organization, Gabriela, was named after her and for them to continue her struggle for independence.

As an Ilocana and Cordilleran (Tinggian), I am proud of the first female martyr who led a revolt against the yoke of tyranny and oppression perpetuated by the Spanish colonizers. # nordis.net

By REV. LUNA DINGAYAN
www.nordis.net

“So there is no difference between Jews and Gentiles, between slaves and free people, between men and women; you are all in union with Christ Jesus.” — Galatians 3:28

Continued from last week

Women in an Egalitarian Christian Community

Galatians 3:28 is considered to be the clearest statement of women’s equality to be found in the Christian Scriptures. According to Hans Dieter Betz, Galatians 3:28 actually is not an original composition of Apostle Paul, but rather a quotation from a baptismal formula presumably known and respected by the Galatian Christian community. Thus, its beginnings lie not in Pauline theology, but in the life experiences of Early Christians.

Another Biblical scholar, Wayne Meeks, agrees with Hans Dieter Betz that baptism was understood quite literally by Early Christians as entry into a new creation, in which the religious, cultural, and social distinctions between Jew and Greek, slave and free, male and female had been abolished. Borrowing a term from linguistic philosophy, Wayne Meeks describes the Galatian baptismal formula as a “performative utterance,” meaning the Early Christians who spoke it believed that it not only expressed a reality but enacted it.

For Early Christians it was a fact, not just a hope for the future that their community was demarcated through baptism from the larger society with its social inequality and hierarchies of race, class, and gender.

Both Meeks and Betz find it significant that the phrase used in the baptismal formula is not “man and woman” but “male and female”.

This indicates for them a link between Galatians 3:28 and the myth of the androgyne as it was found in various forms throughout the Greco-Roman world, including within ancient Judaism.

The androgyne myth recalled an original state of humanity in which male and female was a single entity. In Judaism it was an interpretation of the Genesis creation story, where God created humankind “male and female” (Gen.l:27-28).

Galatians 3:28 advocates the abolition not only of religious-cultural divisions and the domination and exploitation brought about by institutional slavery, but also of domination based on sexual divisions. It claims that within the Christian community no structures of dominance can be tolerated. It proclaims that in the Christian community all distinctions of religion, race, class, nationality, and gender are insignificant. The text, however, should be understood as a communal Christian self-definition, rather than a statement about the baptized individual person.

The baptismal declaration of Galatians 3:28 runs counter to the general acceptance of male religious privileges among Greeks, Romans, Persians, and also Jews in the First Century C.E. (Common Era). It was a rhetorical commonplace that the Hellenistic man was grateful to the gods because he was fortunate enough to be born a human being and not a beast, a Greek and not a barbarian, a free man and not a slave, a man and not a woman.

This cultural pattern seems to have been adopted by Judaism in the First or Second Centuries C.E. and found its way into the synagogue liturgy. Three times a Jewish man thank God that God did not create him a Gentile, a slave or a woman.

Therefore, for men conversion and baptism into Christ implied a much more radical break with their former social and religious self-understanding that it did for women and slaves. For while the baptismal declaration in Galatians 3; 28 offered a new religious vision to women and slaves, it denied all male religious prerogatives in the Christian community based on gender roles.

Just as born Jews had to abandon the privileged notion that they alone were the chosen people of God, so masters had to relinquish their power over slaves and husbands over wives and children.

Since these socio-political privileges were, at the same time, religious privileges, conversion to the Christian movement for men also meant relinquishing their religious prerogatives. Hence, the socio-legal and religious-cultural privileges were no longer valid for Christians.

Thus, insofar as this egalitarian Christian self-understanding did away with all male privileges of religion, class, and caste, it allowed not only Gentiles and slaves but also women to exercise leadership functions within the missionary movement.

As a concluding remark, we could say that based on our analysis of the Pauline writings the struggle for the equality of women was very much alive in the pre-Pauline and Pauline churches, even though Apostle Paul tries to react to it because of his great concern for “order” and decency in the Christian community, and later on the Pauline school and the early church fathers try to modify it by introducing some patriarchal elements in what used to be an egalitarian Christian community. # nordis.net

Click here for part 1

By INNABUYOG-GABRIELA
www.nordis.net

The 8.9 magnitude earthquake that shook Japan on March 10 has left this small country struggling to recover as the number of casualties, injured and devastated economic and residential areas continue to rise. Because of this, the lives of 250,000 of our Overseas Filipino Workers employed in Japan are also hanging in a balance.

We, the INNABUYOG GABRIELA call on the international community, especially the Philippine government agencies concerned to carry out immediate actions to alleviate the conditions of our Filipino brothers and sisters. We are calling the Department of Foreign Affairs, the Philippine Embassy in Tokyo and the Philippine General Consulate General’s Office in Osaka to exhaust all necessary means to reach out every single Filipino in every area devastated by the earthquake and the 30 meter tsunami that followed. It is also imperative that all are well accounted for on safer grounds and their needs are adequately addressed. It is the mandated duty of the Philippine government to protect every migrant Filipino and guarantee their safety and well being. We also call for the Philippine government to immediately face the necessary repatriation for those who seek to come home.

On the other hand, there is an alarming concern over the future of the OFWs coming home. Here in Cordillera, many families rely on their relatives working in Japan. Upon the unemployment due to the disaster in Japan, the OFWs find themselves also unemployed here in their hometown. We are faced with the dilemma that our OFWs from Cordillera will come home and join the grim statistics of unemployed in the region where resource and livelihood are aggressively plundered by big multi national companies. Mining and development aggression engulf the vast areas of the region, displacing the people from their livelihood.

The solution does not end with the immediate repatriation or the safe keeping of our OFWs in Japan. We challenge President Aquino to reflect and rethink this labor export policy and instead begin implementing genuine economic programs that will truly address poverty and unemployment. There is also a much needed overhaul in the Aquino government that is decayed by graft and corruption. Millions of pesos are corrupted by people in the government and budget in the government services are rampantly slashed while the Filipino lives dwindle into poverty and hunger. The inability of the State to provide decent lives for the Filipinos drives them to leave their families and seek jobs in other countries for survival. It is important that while we look at the situation of the Filipinos abroad, the government should also look on how to fix the internal sytem. # nordis.net

By IVAN EMIL LABAYNE
www.nordis.net

The Baguio City Public Market is very enticing and interesting to various people. To spendthrifts or practical buyers, it is where they can buy certain products like vegetables, snack products or souvenir items at a cheaper price compared to their supermarket counterparts. To business-oriented people, it is a very good place to start a small-scale merchandising enterprise. To intellectuals or scholars, it can be a valid academic concern given that a large number of people go there and multiple interactions occur here every day. Lastly, and perhaps most notably, to plain “shoppers” (consumerists in more unpretentious terms), the public market is the most appealing quencher of their seemingly insatiable buying urges.

The city market is situated in a highly globalized setting marked by liberal exchange of all kinds of products among countries, migration and tourism, improved transportation and communication modes, multilingualism and multiculturalism.

In the market, we can see for ourselves its being global – stalls selling Korean foods, the block market which sells foreign-made products, “shoppers” of different nationalities and speaking different languages, tabako and betel-nut, strawberries, pirated DVDs and many more. It serves as a microcosm of the entire Baguio City which is always tagged as a melting pot of different cultures. More importantly, characterizing the coexistence of the different cultures and cultural products is an inevitable conflict.

What does this mean? The multiple cultures/products in the market have to outdo one another in advertising themselves, in earning the consumer’s approval and trust and ultimately, in being sold. Consumers are likely to take time choosing between native tabako or Hope cigarettes. In this competition of products emerge winners and losers.

Other cases will reveal the imbalance of power in the market. The ukay-ukay acts as the challenger of the brand new RTWs and signature clothes bought in department stores. These used clothes are being sold at much cheaper prices. Furthermore, one can get lucky and find a branded anything from the ukayan. This phenomenon makes dressing up more affordable and more achievable for more people.

Lastly, the small merchandisers who content themselves by setting up big cartons and some shade from the sunlight in sidewalks can be considered to contest those who can afford to rent a “legitimate” space in the market. Nothing vital differentiates the two. Both can sell their products since both are being seen by shoppers and both can earn from what they do. The only addition to those who can afford to pay for rent is that their prospective buyers can find it more convenient to buy at their stalls because they are at a more stable, less populated spot in the market, in contrast to the merchandisers who are setting up in in sidewalks. For the merchandise-in-sidewalk’s favor, he no longer need to pay for a rental fee so his earnings might even be more secured than the one who rents a place in the market.

At top of these discussions, I would like to point out that the public market as a whole can be read as a contestant against bigger commercial establishments like SM. The public market presents itself as a very viable alternative to the more patronized SM. In essence, they are the same. They both provide products to the public. The main difference is that SM claims “comfort and convenience” which is less evident in the public market (for instance, one is more exposed to natural elements like rain and sunlight; another thing is the dusty or muddy pavements). To compensate for this, the public market vaunts the evidently cheaper prices of almost all products sold in it. In both spaces, it can still be considered that shoppers can still “shop” and choose freely among the wide array of products made available for them, only that there is greater security in SM. The public market contests SM by undermining the commercial interest which is irremovable from its essence. By housing ukay-ukay, block markets, sidewalk stores and street foods, the market as a whole serves to threaten SM by being its cheaper alternative.

Even though the market as a whole tempers and makes more forgivable the commodification and the accompanying commercial interest because the scale of the business is smaller, it remains a business. This is proven by the existence of the Baguio Market Vendors’ Association (BAMARVA) — the place where vendors pay for their due fees in using the market space. The BAMARVA office is quite inconspicuous, not easily seen, if not isolated in the entire market. The BAMARVA is not exactly market in the sense that typical goods can be bought here but it is still part of the market. But why does it look more beautiful? Why is it more secured, less vulnerable to external elements which can be harmful? In other words, why is its construction more privileged? Basically, this highlights the operation of power and business in the market. The small and ordinary businessmen are under the BAMARVA, the larger association which ensures the smooth operation of the Baguio Market in general and its maintenance as a big “business.” In that sense, the small stall owners renting some space in the public market can be said to be the source of profit of bigger businessmen, including the city officials. They can put up the pretense of developing the market for the city’s internal revenue but we cannot be sure of the truthfulness of this principle in actual practice.

The BAMARVA overlooks all Baguio market vendors, and its primary motivation is that all of us are very familiar with – profit. After all, this narrative of profit-making is the grandest of all narratives in the public market. This is the grand narrative all of must be wary of, if not exactly reject. # nordis.net