BULACAN

People and Culture

The province of Bulacan is still preserving the Filipino culture music that is handed down from generation through the lifting if sounds of bamboo. There is a popular and unique orchestra band name Pangkt Kawayan in Bulacan that draws music from unconventional bamboo instruments. The instruments are are made of bamboo in different sizes, shapes and design that is so unique that only in Bulacan you can find. Ato Magat,age 74, is the only living founder of the band in which he claims that her designed most of the instruments himself. The band is composed of musically-talented students and their songs ranges from folksongs to some light classics, to modern and pop music. People of Bulacan are also skillful in arts and crafts like making the cut pastillas wrappers in San Miguel, exquisite jewelry from Meycauayan, and singkaban bamboo arches that adorn churches and streets during fiestas. Bamboo crafting is also one of the main source of income here in Bulacan. With the use of bamboo, skillful bamboo craftsmen can make bamboo furniture, towel holders, wine and candle holders, trays, picture frames and other decorative and religious items. Hut that are made of bamboo are also made which is popularly used in resorts and even home gardens. The most traditional and oldest use of bamboo in Bulacan is in making the "singkaban". Bamboo is also widely use in making bamboo decors for Santacruzans and parades. Bamboo is also used in making Christmas trees and lanterns.

Political Subdivision

Batanes has six municipalities, 29 barangays, and one congressional district. The six municipalities are Ivana, Uyugan, Mahatao, Basco (the capital), and the island municipalities of Sabtang and Itbayat.

Climate

The Batanes weather is rather pleasant. Compared to the rest of the country, Batanes is blessed with a cooler, balmier climate. It enjoys practically four seasons, the best one being summer which is from March to June. Average monthly rainfall is 450 mm.

Population

The 2002 census of population for Batanes registered a population total of 16,467 distributed over a land area of 230 square kilometers.

Language / Dialect

The mother tongue of Batanes is Ivatan, spoken by 93.94 percent of all households. The Ilocano dialect is also spoken while Filipino and English are generally spoken and understood.

Major Industries

The province has a total agricultural land area of 5,438 hectares and has a wide area open for agricultural expansion. Due to its terrain, it is a major livestock producer with cattle as its main stock. Carabaos and goats are also popularly raised. Another major industry is fishing which reaches its peak during the summer months, from March to June, when the seawater is relatively calm.

History

Pre-Historic Era

The story of Bulacan really begins with cataclysmic changes in the earth’s crust which, started during the late Cretaceous period, about 65 million years ago and eventually led to the formation of the Philippine Archipelago and the China Sea out of the vast expanse of the Pacific. In this group of islands gradually isolated at the end of the last glacial period from the Asian underbelly on the largest island of Luzon, three mountain ranges, the Sierra Madre, the Zambales and the highlands of Laguna and Batangas conspired with the great Central Valley to produce tectonic stages and the patient gathering of effluvia more than one million years ago, the Bulacan River and its delta on which, Bulacan is now built. Pre-Hispanic Period The earliest Bulacan men came on the scene towards the end of the Paleolithic age about 250,000 years ago and was preceded by elephants and rhinoceros whose fossils have been found in what are now parts of the Province of Bulacan. He was like the rest of the human family of his time, a caveman, feeding on small animals like bats which he trapped and on the snails, crabs and shellfish which he found in the mud of the deltaic swamp of his still nameless home. In time he developed flake tools, adzes and chisels and drills and small stone knives and suddenly mobile one day he began to move up and down the Bulacan River in crude boats. And thus he learned to communicate and to trade. After many more years he began to mine metal, to plant, to weave and to make glass and jade ornaments for the women. The large Manila Bay, the Binoangan, the Maycapiz and the Wawang Dapdap Rivers joined with the mighty Pampanga River and the Bulacan River attracted a new population, the slim, brown, lank haired Malays from the Malay Peninsula and Indonesia. They came in ships called balangay, the name they gave their first social unit, the clan village. During the reign of the Tang emperors in the 10th century, Arab and Chinese traders began to come to Bulacan, with both Indian and Chinese influences intensifying in the 11th and 12th centuries. Bulacan had by this time became an entreport and the Bulakeños expert seafarers. They built and sailed ships of many kinds, river canoes as well as larger vessels to carry merchandise and as many as a hundred rowers and 30 fighting men. They lived in comfortable houses made of wood, bamboo and palm leaf thatch, had a syllabary written on bark and bamboo, played music, wore silk doublets and loin clothes or flowing skirts and flimsy blouses and a great deal of jewelry. They had devised a complicated social scheme of nobles, freemen and serfs and buried their dead in formal graveyard (with grave furniture consisting of imported Chinese pottery) at least one example of which can still be seen in Bulacan today. The history began when a small settlement of fishermen lived along the coast of Manila Bay before the coming of the Spaniards. Later on, these settlers became farmers after moving inwards as they discovered that the land in the interior part was fertile and very much drained by the network of rivers and streams. These settlers grew and flourished into large and prosperous settlement now known as the province of Bulacan. Quite interesting more on the country's prehispanic highlights was the discovery of the Laguna Copperplate Inscription or the LCI at the Lumbang River in Laguna in 1991 (and deciphered by Antoon Postma of Mangyan Heritage Center in Mindoro). Historians such as Zeus Salazar of the University of the Philippines considered the date of the LCI AD 900 as the start of the recorded Philippine history, not of 1521. This copperplate was written in Kavi, an ancient script related to baybayin, and contains the placename Binoangan (now a barangay of Obando), Pailah (now Sitio Paila, San Lorenzo, Norzagaray), and Puliran (first to be said somewhere in Laguna, but Postma announced that it was much near to be Pulilan of Bulacan), and a native chieftain named Bukah in to which Gatbuka in Calumpit probably derived. All of these were now part of Bulacan.