In 1909, an American teacher was assigned to Laguna; her name was Lucetta K. Ratcliff. In 1911, she was, in her own words, "engaged in teaching for the United States government in the Camarines High School, Nueva Caceres." Like what she did when she was stationed in Pagsanjan, she asked also her students in the first and second year to write "about their lore."The stories became part of the paper that she submitted to the journal called Western Folklore in 1951.
Here is one of the "lores," then that, I believe, will surprise us and shock us. The tale has been edited and its grammar "normalized," according to the editor. The student was one named Quirino Omoroso and he told of "The Legend of the Virgin of Piña Francia."
Long ago there was a woman who owned a large pineapple plantation on the bank of the San Felipe River. This woman earned her living by weaving piña. One afternoon while she was visiting her plantation to gather piña leaves, she found the Virgin swinging in a hammock tied to the stalks of two piña plants. Surprised and overjoyed, she took the Virgin to her house and informed the Bishop of Caceres about her find. The bishop placed the Virgin in an altar of the cathedral, but the Virgin returned to the plantation. After several attempts to keep her in the cathedral had failed, the bishop decided to build a church on the piña plantation. When the building was finished, the Virgin was named Nuestra Señora de Piña Francia. The church still stands, and many people come from the surrounding towns to celebrate the Virgin's festival.
Used as we are to the origin tale, which points to some rocky hill along the boundary of France and Northern Spain, the story of the most famous Marian image for Bikol is astounding. I have heard the mention of pineapples in the story of the Virgin but this is the first time for me to see the narrative all laid out.
Where did the boy/young man Omoroso get this tale? Was the story about the Lady of Peñafrancia, as we know it now, not popularly circulated then? Or, are we asking the wrong questions?
For those familiar with origin tales of devotion, and of how shrines came to be, this Omoroso/Ratcliff version regularly follows the motif of those tales. There is always this image that is placed on a particular altar by a priest. Then the next day, that image is missing from the altar and is found somewhere: the edge of a river, on top of a rock, beneath a tree. This then is interpreted as the desire of that image (representing a saint or a Marian figure) to be placed not on the site decided upon by people but by something super-natural and near-magical.
The story of Our Lady of Caysasay in Taal, Batangas, is perhaps the best example of this mobility. A fisherman scooped her out from a river, taken to a rich woman's home where it disappeared and appeared in an urn. Moved to the church, the image kept going back to a place called Caysasay, where it was found. To this day, a shrine is built in that place where the Lady was first found.
In these stories, the sacred artifact usually "talks" through a native in the form of an indigenous plant, a river that had always been there, or a local person. The official of the Church validates the story; the church is built on a site that is decided by faith.
Certainly, Omoroso and his key informants found the story so credible that it stayed with them. When his American teacher asked for his contribution, this story about the Lady of Peñafrancia was his contribution.
Where did the story go? The story of Omoroso, perhaps coming from the histories recalled for the boy by a parent or grandparent or by some community storyteller, was surely defeated in the arena of competing discourses. In the "diagnosis of the present," I am curious if, at a certain point the lore about the Peñafrancia, ever took off and became a kind of dominant way of sensing one's faith.
Here is where history fails, where the beginning of things is not really a point of privilege. The historian can perhaps go back to archives and trace facts to what was said, when it was said, and who said them. The archaeologist can dig through layers of soil and explain the strata of stories. In both the speakers are the elite and the intellectual.
In the end, we have to look to the genealogical, where the truth and the false engage in a struggle of power. The pineapple as the site of faith vanished. Only the journal lives.