Jose Rizal's Laguna Reveries

The evening shifted as though the weight of stars bore down on this corner of the universe. It’s half past eleven in the evening, a Wednesday, a few days prior to the rising of the full moon. A child was heard a-screaming, belting from one end of the spectrum to the other a cry yet to be silenced by the surrounding darkness. Beneath the looming scar that sliced the night from the birthing day, a poor mother pleaded to the Virgin of Antipolo to save her newborn son. Save for that evening’s defiant moon, the night was pitch black, and nothing but angels and a clutch of stars had heard her cries.

When I went to Calamba, Laguna to see the house of Jose Rizal for the first time, typhoon Basiang had just shaken up Metro Manila and surrounding provinces. So it was with much awe that I stepped inside the Rizal Shrine, the house where the national hero grew up, seeing it unscarred by the fury of the storm.

Laguna's Legendary Makiling

Like in most things in Filipino culture, we can always begin with Jose Rizal. As the foremost Philippine folklorist, he penned in La Solidaridad in 1890, the story of the young woman who would become a hometown legend. 

In various versions of her myth, the maiden known as Mariang Makiling, is described in Damiana Eugenio’s Anthology as “a fairy,” “a goddess,” “a fantastic creature, half-nymph, half sylph.” “Whatever she was,” says the translation by Guadalupe Fores-Ganzon, “she was not mortal.” 

Before there was the movie, Fame in 2009, which was based upon a 1980 film about young talents attending the New York City High School for the Performing Arts, there was already the Philippine High School for the Arts (PHSA) back in the 1970s.