The Spatiality Of Rosario Cruz Lucero

Nelson Turgo
Negros is an island of injustice. Its one place, but it tells the story of a
nation. Nelson Turgo examines how a collection of short stories can make
this narrative a physical reality.
Among contemporary Filipino writers, Rosario Cruz Lucero has the most acute sense of place,
which manifests in her use of biography, geography and ethnography. The power to spatialize the
phantasmagoric realities of the Philippines in all its disturbing glory is most evident in her new
book La India or Island of the Disappeared.
Published by the University of the Philippines (U.P.) Press, the collection of short stories revisits
her native Negrosa Negros peopled by a disparate array of characters, spanning 400 years of
the islands history. Her characters occupy a nebula of larger-than-life historicized stories replete
with oppression, tactical collaboration, recalcitrant resistance, opportunism, and enduring hope.
In reading Lucero, one must examine how social spatializationthe imagining and the production
of physical spacematters in the creation of everyday life and the national imaginary.
In the story Povedano the Mapmaker, she writes of the 16 th century Spanish mapmaker who
first drew the island: Diego Lope Povedano, the mapmaker, was shedding copious tears, which
were making the outlines of Negros island run into the sea and join with the Batanes islands at
the topmost tip of the archipelago (p. 2). This spatial inaugurationthe cartographic imagining
of her islandforeshadows the social and geographical mapping of Negros in the series of events
depicted in the collection.
In the story The Courtship of Estrella, Gregorio, one of the would-be suitors of Estrella, the only
hacienda-owning native in Negros in the story, experienced a reversal of colonial hierarchies as a
kind of geographic disorientation. Estrella was on the balcony looking down on Gregorio and his
Spanish comrades, while they were in the dirty courtyard, exposed to the elements. Lucero
describes the scene from Gregorios purview:
It was a moment of sudden clarity for him. The reversal of order in this hacienda the Spaniards
squatting on the ground while the indios towered over them, and the switching of masters and
servants doors all of a sudden it seemed to cure him of his chronic sense of disorientation.
Here it didnt matter what was up or down, front or back, left, right or center [] (p. 66).

In her stories, Lucero probes into her own reservoir of personal experiences. Her appreciation of
the islands history and landscape and her acute ear for the humorous and scandalous among the
Negros elite and common tawos allow us to grasp what is left unsaid and will never be said about
the islands history. Her fiction constitutes a radical re-imagining of Philippine history where
myths of a bygone era and the cyclical massacres of the oppressed continue to haunt the
landscape of her province. More importantly, her Negros serves as an analogue for the nation as
a whole. The division of the Philippines into territorial fiefdoms of Spanish conquistadores and
religious orders mirrors how Negros was subdivided into encomiendas by visiting Spanish
marauders. She narrates:
Don Miguel the conquistador took a glance at Povedanos map and decided there was ample land
to be distributed among not just 10, nor even 11, but 17 encomenderos in fact. (p. 2).
The partitioning of the island into many geographical domains by different people, all belonging
to the conquistador elite, resonates with stories of land disputes across the archipelago. Those
who manage the political and economic affairs of the country own the land. It happened in the
Negros of the Povedano years and continues to happen in a Philippines with many Ampatuans.
Lucero emphasizes people and their subjugated historiesthe stories and the bodies that
disappear in an island like Negros. But in evoking the islands tumultuous history, it is not just the
travails of its people and the pluralities of narratives that are highlighted but the island itself. The
bodies of the disappeared are inscribed on the contours of the island, written on its body.
Luceros fiction forces us to re-imagine and historicize Negross towns and cities, its mountains
and streets, and the fields where sugarcanes grow, nourished by the sweat and blood of farm
workers. In this passage, she examines the relationship between historical narratives and the
evolution of the city:
In 1992, when most of the forests on the island have disappeared, the boulder is removed to
make way for the diversionary road and bridge that will decongest downtown traffic. The board of
local officials, agreeing on the importance of local history, resolves that the road will be named
Calle Hormigas, after the first graffito ever found on the island. All other side streets to branch
out of this main road will be named after insects.
There is some discussion over the inclusion of reprehensible insects like mosquitoes, bees,
wasps, and cockroaches.
But all insects are reprehensible, including ants, one remarks.
Butterflies are pleasant enough, another retorts.

What about scorpions? someone asks earnestly.

Finally the board resolves to table the matter because there are other items on the agenda and
time is short.
When the diversionary road is completed and the ribbon cut, it is named Dna. Dicang Ave., after
the mayors great grandmother, who has come down in history as the ruling hand of the islands
richest, hence, most powerful, clan. All other side streets hence would be named after each
member of her clan, including her great grandson, the governor.

By Dante Carlos
Lucero grew up in the grandeur (and poverty) of a Negros long gonea Negros of school
classmates vacationing in Spain while she made the most of the summer at home with her
accountant father who worked on the spread sheets of hacienda owners (her father was the
accountant of some of Negross leading land-owning families). As fiction is and will always be also
about the writer, Lucero writes about the lives of the people she knew well or, maybe, heard
about from her numerous travels in the island. When other stories are now available for hearing,
fighting back against the dominant discursive narration of those in power has a chance of
winning.
Unlike any other writer or Philippine academic, Lucero does not just poke into the dusty archives
of remoteconventos or pry into the lumang bauls of land-owning families. She travels and visits
the most unlikely places in Negros to hear new stories and learn new chismis from the people she
meets while eating in a roadside cafeteria or visiting a far-flung mountain colony of an indigenous
community.
Lucero does ethnography. She spends days and weeks observing peoples lives. She talks to them
and asks questions. It is no wonder that her stories capture the cinematic grandeur of a town
plaza (and its grotesque colonial use), or the fantastic allure of women saints in a church famous
for the absence of macho saints. In every church, she seeks out the most incongruous details and

spins tales so marvelous and yet so convincing that you would have thought she was there when
colonial friars first ordered the churches built. With a wealth of experience and knowledge that
mere archival research cannot provide, Lucero documents the rich texture of life in Negros. We
see its streets, its mountains, and the grand reception rooms of its colonial-era mansions. She
makes us understand how Negros was made.
Negros is Luceros metonym for the Philippines. Its history is our history. She might just be talking
about Negros but she writes most lucidly, disturbingly, charmingly, and lovingly of our past, of
those who never made it to the pages of Philippine history books. There are stories to be told and
we should all have the courage to uncover them. As Lucero explains, this was the kind of thing
that was happening all the time at that period in this nations history but is not the important
stuff of which history books are made.

Edith Tiempo, for example, regularly sets her stories and novels in familiar places from her very rich life -sometimes some small generic town in Mindanao, and sometimes the Nueva Ecija of her childhood. But
in many of her stories, the spirit of Dumaguete is endlessly evoked, even if they are camouflaged by some
other name. In her latest novel The Builder, however, she drops all those matters of cover-up, and states
clearly that her murder mystery is set in Dumaguete, with ample mentions of nearby towns of Sibulan and
Valencia. By the storys end, we find the protagonist in the middle of Tanon Strait, battling both revelation
and spiritual horror. My favorite Edith Tiempo story, though, is the wartime tale, "The Black Monkey,"
which won third prize in the first Palanca Awards. In this story, a housewife is forced to fend for herself in
the jungles of Negros Oriental as the Japanese advances deeper into the province. Injured, she is forced to
stay behind. Her husband makes her a little hut among the treetops; she had to stay, or else become a pest
to the already hard life among the evacuees. Only a gun gives her some promise of safety. And then the
black monkeys, symbolic of all dark, unknown menaces, come to disturb her...