Oroquieta
By OTI ANO
I GREW UP in a place where a river runs through it. Meandering through mountain passes that nudged us to the primal presence of Mt. Malindang yonder, the Layawan River gurgled, in our memory, in the stony shallows of Villaflor and Langcangan, where we splashed about in the cold, swift water before it calmed down beside the Poblacion, its emerald sheen belying its sudden width and depth as it embraced the sea.
CROSSING WATERS, CULTURES, GEOGRAPHIES, AND NATIONALITIES: Jesse Varela, with coffee on one hand and a hug on the other; global citizen Bobby Varela; life-of-the-party Maricor Buta-Cariño; Faith Tagubar is caught in the act
The ambit of city life was on the northwestern bank—the market teeming with kinhason (shellfish) and lumayagan (squid) and lato (seaweed); the Our Lady of the Holy Rosary Church, painted an evocative corral pink in its heyday, now repainted in bland washed-out Marian blue; the schools that sent its graduates to the universities in Cebu, Dumaguete, and Manila (the University of the Philippines, in Diliman and in Los Baños); the bakeries, general merchandise stores, Chinese restaurants, and, take note, not less than three cinemas that kept us captive, or captivated, with their never-ending double features; and the city hall with its front-yard plaza and seawall (before climate change was a thing) and vintage, inimitable kiosk.
Everything happened here, on this side of the river.
Across the water was Tabok.
I like that Binisaya word. Tabok. It signifies a place, a destination, the great unknown. But it is first an action word: to cross over. To go beyond what we know. To step out of the familiar. Take a risk. Cross the line. Almost, if not truly, an act of transgression.
Tabok is to go away and to arrive elsewhere, all in one word.
Just the very word to name this independent digital newsroom that seeks to produce stories about the Filipino diaspora. Tabok. Filipino migration, after all, is crossing waters, cultures, geographies, nationalities. Not merely physical movement, it is breaching boundaries, a dynamic exchange of ideas and identities, exploring intersections of worlds and worldviews.
It is a story of choice: one giant leap for oneself, or the loved ones, or the cherished dreams. Choice. Courage. Change.
It may also be a story of coercion, who knows.
The Tabok newsroom aims to capture all of this, celebrating as well as interrogating its complexity and contradictions, its costs and conflicts and consequences, and its countless cast of characters—who, perched on some riverbank or sea-slicked shore or the edge of one’s patience or frustration or yearning, must have intimated possibility across the vast unknown and, on the wings of hope and maybe not much else, slowly and suddenly dared to cross over and go beyond.
And so here we are.
Tabok.
BREACHING BOUNDARIES: At a recent reunion, Franylou and Ornan Rivera sandwich friend Chai Gabitanan, while Emily Roa and Faith Tagubar chill out in San Diego
THIS WEEKEND, here they are. In Oroquieta, of course, for the city fiesta. And in Las Vegas for the fiesta celebration and grand reunion—organized by the Oroquieta Charity Foundation, Inc., headed by foundation president Dennis Digamon and his wife Susan (nee Casing), together with point persons Rebecca Galuppo, Jewel Revil Lindayen, and host Nerissa Olegario Foronda—for Oroquieta City denizens who have made the great tabok.
In the next few days, we will tell you about the UP Diliman activist who now curates a fully-booked insider’s tour of New York City. About the Sourdough Sisterhood in California. About a book author who writes about the most stylish and substantial stuff, like stilletos. Their stories somehow hark back to Oroquieta.
To be sure, Tabok is not about Oroquieta as point of origin. It is about all of us who made the tabok from any of our 7,641 islands.
There's the doctor who lives in a picturesque wood-and-glass cabin by a lake in the US East Coast who commutes to the West Coast to work as a community doctor for the most part of the month.
Meet a top official in Europe who grew up eating dried fish and root crops in the Visayas whose luck changed because his brother painted someone else's house; a whistleblower in Canada who earned his stripes in Chinese schools in Cebu and Cagayan de Oro; a scientist in Thailand and another scientist in the East Coast whose friendship forged during their college days in Dumaguete has seen them through life's up and downs; a successful entrepreneur in Australia who acted in Binisaya plays in his youth; a welder in the Middle East who sees the irony of foreigners populating his hometown, Siargao Island, while he toils elsewhere; an inventor whose patents secured him a top job in Silicon Valley who is still reeling from the loss of his son back in Luzon, killed by a motorcycle-riding gunman not too long ago; a journalist for a leading Manila newspaper back in the good, old days who now has military Guam merrily in her fingers.
Perhaps you know the name-droppable socialite who used to own and run a very happening bar in Malate who has now ensconced himself in Manhattan's fashion district, where he can help you find the best bargains in town, if the spirit moves him.
Of course, we look forward to hearing your stories, too. Or maybe you know of someone's inspiring, or instructive, tale of tabok?
Let us join hands as we, in our various, vital ways, continue to tabok.
BECAUSE we are in a city fiesta frame of mind right now, here are some stories about Oroquieta City you may have missed:
How the ladies in the Catholic Women's League in Oroquieta fought the bishop in Ozamiz to save local heritage:
Commercialization threatens historic Mindanao church plaza
An on-and-off romance that spanned from Oroquieta and Cebu to Australia and California:
She married the man her ex-girlfriend has become
