The month of May is always the merriest of the year anywhere in the Catholic world, but more especially in the Virac of our affections. But the merriness is of different flavors according to particular time regimes. Here, I write of the 1960s of my childhood. Since the special character of May time is mostly religious in nature, I will discuss four religious practices, namely, the Tuki, the Flores de Mayo, the santacruzan, and the San Vicente devotion of barangay San Pablo.

In Virac, May’s arrival is signaled by the massive Labor Day parade of the unyon, the organization of stevedores at the pier site. Just endless lines of muscular and sun-burnt menfolk in white shirts walking through the poblacion to the music of a marching band; no frivolous trimmings, no beauties in finery waving atop floats. So it was was quite a macho start for the month of May, although the rest of which is decidedly, unapologetically feminine. The Tuki, the Flores and the santacruzan are defined by female sensibilities. Curiously however, the ending salvo, the San Vicente devotion in San Pablo is packaged in a perverted masculine assertion.

The Tuki

The word refers to the demolition of a concrete structure. As a religious practice, Tuki is a traditional dramatic reenactment of the finding of the Holy Cross by Emperor Constantine and his mother Queen Helena. This is staged on May 2, eve of the feast day of barangay Sta. Elena. It is a folk religious practice in the league of the komedya, kagharong and sinakulo. Introduced during the Spanish period, it is a street play staged in stylized conventions, with sung-through dialogues. While Constantine is the power behind the institutionalization of Christianity in the Roman Empire, the search for the Holy Cross is packaged as Queen Helena’s initiative. So she takes the lead role in the Tuki drama, giving it a strong feminine character.

The staging is a collaboration between two adjacent barangays, Sta. Elena and Sta. Cruz. It starts with a procession of the cast of characters led by Sta. Elena and her son Constantino from the chapel of Sta. Elena and ends up at the chapel in Sta. Cruz. The precession represents the journey to the Holy Land by the royal mother-and-son duo, converts to the Catholic faith, to find the genuine cross on which Jesus was nailed. Along the way, stops are made to dramatize specific episodes of the narrative.

At the frontage of Sta. Cruz Ermita, they build a provisional stage where the actual tuki is performed. There is a cartoon representation of some stone ramparts surrounded by a wilderness of pandan plants. The actors slowly excavates into this array of barriers. As the last debris is removed, they find three crosses. To determine which one carried Jesus, they employed a test. They have a dead body and a sick person kiss the three crosses: which ever could raise the dead and heal the sick must be the one. As soon as the true cross is identified, Constantino and Helena raise it up and cry “Viva!”” Then they mount it on the waiting carosa bearing the icons of the saintly mother-and-son. The return procession then proceeds back to Sta. Elena chapel to the jubilant ringing of bells.

There is an interesting sidelight to the tuki. According to popular lore, the fiesta on May 3 cannot push through if they fail to find the cross. There was supposed to be an incident where they hid the cross in a most unlikely place. So it happened that it was already nearing midnight and the actors have all been exhausted searching in many places, but to no avail. People started to get anxious, not only the folk of Sta. Elena whose large kettles of fiesta putahes were already waiting in their kitchens, but also those from other parts who already had their fiesta clothes pressed hanging-in-wait in aparadors. Happily, the dilemma was solved when Tang Atin ( or Martin), probably the most famous gay person in town during that period, managed to send a message to the searcher-actors that the one true cross was waiting to be found atop the ermita bell tower. So Constantine with his weary assistants scaled the kampanaryo. It was said that they had to rouse the actor playing dead for the miraculous coming back to life. It happened that he had gone to sleep due to the extended waiting for his moment of glory.

But a bit more about Tang Atin. He was exemplar of how being gay in the 1960s, one could find a place in the community and in fact thrive, even in most limited extent. He was talented in the decorative arts and did brisk business making paper flower wreaths for the dead. He was also para samno (decorator) for religious purposes. He maintained a small sari-sari store in Sta. Cruz that also sold isisila (viand dishes) and cooked the best pinangat.

In line with my long-running research on popular religious forms, I have particular interest in probing how these traditions get reproduced through time. The tuki is an insightful case-in-point. For any tradition like the tuki to be perpetuated, there has to be some pivotal person who possesses not only expansive knowledge and experience of the various aspects of executing it, but more so the motivation to carry it out year after year; it is such a demanding mandate.  For the tuki in Sta. Elena, the task had been taken by an old woman called Nang Priska for the longest time. Among her responsibilities were recruitment of players, rehearsing them, and coordinating all other things that needed to be done involving operatives of the two collaborating barangays. In similar manner that her predecessor had prepared her for the job, Nang Priska identified her own understudy in the person of Mrs. Nelia Vargas. Tia Nelia therefore had been assisting Nang Priska. Herself keen on many popular devotions, Tia Nelia’s two daughters Joy and Jeanette, had taken the lead role of Sta. Elena in the Tuki.

When it was Tia Nelia’s turn to take over, she was indisposed. She was in Manila at the time. Earlier, Nang Priska, having become too ill to stage the tuki, went to see Tia Nelia wanting to turn over the script (and the responsibility). But her understudy was out of town. The script, somewhere in the frenzy of Nang Priska’s falling into serious illness and eventual demise, got lost. It posed a serious dilemma for the barangay pastoral council of Sta. Elena as the fiesta approached: the tuki’s continuity as a tradition was at risk. But the stakeholders took the challenge. They gathered former players and reconstructed the script from memory. Without an over-all director honed by the traditional system of succession, they were able to put together a staging of the tuki. As such, the long-running tradition was saved from oblivion.

Flores de Mayo

This is arguably the most generic May time tradition in Catholicism. In Virac, it had recently been revitalized. In the 1960s, almost every girl within the ambit of the parish church would have participated in the flores one time or another. Done three times a week (Wednesday, Saturday, Sunday) during the entire month of May, girls would roam around town looking for flowers to fill up their baskets. I remember my own sisters joining gangs of flower searchers, making sorties to places as far as Palnab, Contod and Calatagan where households had yards teeming with flowering plants. Favorite for taking were calachuchi, melendes, santan, rosal. But my sisters had the distinct advantage because at home we had two calachuchi trees that bore white and red blooms. We also had santan shrubs. But they had to find somewhere else the one flower to be used as bisito (Spanish: small kiss) which was the last to offer in the course of a flores rite. Worthy of the bisito was a lirio, a rose, a daisy or a rosal.

To be able to participate, girls of proper age (between seven and twelve) must have a white dress and a matching belo or ta-ong. She must have a small wicker basket to contain the flowers. During the appointed days of the flores, the church patio would be teeming with girls in white. While waiting for the performance to start, they would find time to play about, girls being girls, engaging in traditional games like, estatwa, dali-dalihan, even shatung. Some adventurous ones would run through the triangular panels of the stone fencing of the patio, deftly scaling the up and down inclines. Then they would be summoned by the ringing of a bell at three in the afternoon to come and file up at the church main door. There would be two lines, the smallest ones at the front and he taller ones at the back.

At the head of the lines was the ofrecimiento that lent the flores in Virac added spectacle and significance. The ofrecimiento was a visual representation of a titular attribute of Mary culled from religious literature, such as formula prayers (principally the Litany). Ornately decorated, these visual objects were carried aloft on stakes. Every barangay in the poblacion had its own ofrecimiento featured one at a time in a flores performance. Some examples I remember include the “Ave Maria” of barangay San Juan,  “Madre Mia” of Palnab, and “Fe, Esperanza, Caridad” of San Pablo. The last day of the flores was marked by a grand procession around town that featured all the ofrecimientos.

The flores ritual consisted of the girls singing a traditional song in Spanish that went: Venid y vamos todos/ con flores a Maria/ con flores a porfia/ Que Madre nuestra es!  Every time they said “con flores” they grab a flower and throw it towards the image of Mary on the altar. The song was the chorus part to solos done by adult cantoras. Then it was time for the bisito. The girls would kneel, take their special bloom reserved for this part, kiss it three times before making the last throw. Then they turn back and make their exit to the front door, into the open patio where they were rewarded with tandan (give-away goodies of native cookies or cakes) distributed by the sponsoring barangay from large bacays (containers made of caragomay).

Excluded from participation, I used to accompany my sisters to the flores to witness the performance, especially to appreciate the day’s ofrecimiento. What also brought me was sharing the tandan with my sisters, or else being given my share if the sponsors had extra goodies for subi (second round).

While the flores had gained renewed interest among young girls in recent years, the ofrecimiento had vanished. I had suggested to the tourism people of Virac LGU that it be revived and incorporated to the Burac festival. As such, the town festival can have clear and solid cultural and historical basis and add more possibilities for creative display.

In Part 2, we discuss the Santacruzan, with focus on the “Three Sans,” and the San Vicente devotion in barangay San Pablo.