Esturya

Mr. Gaston has made his mark on various fields of art — from painting and concept art, to acting and film production. He co-wrote the screenplays for films like Gagamboy (2004), Pa-Siyam (2004), and Yanggaw (2008). Most recently, he was recognized alongside director Jay Abello at the Cinema One Originals in 2014, winning Best Screenplay for the film Red, in which he also played a role.

Let's get started!

Please tell us how you started the story. Was it written specifically for the Esturya app, or was it an existing story that you had already written prior to the project? Did you have any previous ideas that you considered to write about?

As a little boy growing up in rural Silay (a city in Negros Occidental known for many hispanic ancestral houses and where the Bacolod-Silay International Airport is located), I became friends with several bakero or cowboys of my age, whose job was to watch over their carabaos every day. They would bring their carabaos to our subdivision which had some fallow rice fields. I would hang out with these kids and they taught me how to ride these huge but gentle beasts. Often we would just lie relaxed on their itchy backs, looking up at the thick cumulus clouds. I never forgot my friends and although Inting was written specifically for the app, I had always wanted to do a story about them. I wanted to express the bittersweet divide between the freedom to do anything you want with your time vis-à-vis the wonder and excitement of the process of education as experienced by children. 

I had two other stories, one very specific in its Ilonggo-ness as it centered around a beautiful lantern festival that is now all but extinct in rural Negros. The other was a Christmas story set near an informal settlers’ community.

How did you decide to make the main characters a boy and a farm animal?

Even then, I was impressed by how close the boys were with their carabaos, treating them like they were their brothers. Not talking to them, specifically, but communicating their affection through casual caresses or pats or gentle grunts and clucks.

How long did it take you to write the story? To storyboard/illustrate the chapters? 

Um, a couple of months, I think. I’m a slow worker. About two weeks for the story, and the rest for the illustrations. Or maybe it was longer. I think it was longer.

You've made so many traditional paintings and art work over the years. How has the digital painting process for Inting and Butud been like for you?

Oh, it was a joy, as always. It’s always so much easier for me to draw or paint than to write. When I paint my surreal paintings or design a sci-fi costume or whatever, my subconscious takes over and the ideas just well up even while I’m talking or listening to music. Whereas creating a universe through language demands a more precise imagining process. You become necessarily schizophrenic; you listen to conversations that occur wholly inside your head. So I need a lot more concentration and silence when I write.

As a self-taught artist, I find digital painting to be more forgiving; it’s so much easier to correct mistakes than an oil painting or worse, a watercolor. However, I always start my digital paintings with an actual sketch, followed, if necessary, by inks, which I then scan to the computer. I’ve found that I can control a pencil and pen much better than a tablet pen, maybe because I learned to use a tablet late in life.

Which part of the story did you find the most difficult to write and/or illustrate?

All of them were equally hard AND easy. The real challenge was to word the story in such a way as to fully exploit the possibilities of the app. 

A bonus question — if Butud weren't a carabao, what animal would he be? 

To answer why Tagalog and Filipino are different would mean talking a little bit of our history. Since it is National Language Month, let's take a closer look at these two languages.

The Pre-Hispanic Tagalog

Unlike the famous chicken or the egg dilemma, it's easy to point out which of the two languages came first. Tagalog was an old language, mainly used in central or southern Luzon, and spoken by an ethnic group that was known to settle near rivers, like the Pasig River. They were part of the Kingdom of Maynila before the Spanish conquest began in the early 16th century. The people, and the language they spoke, were called Tagalog based on the local word taga-ilog, literally meaning 'river dwellers'.

However, Tagalog looked very different on paper in the old days. The language was written in an ancient, alpha-syllabic script called Baybayin — a script that shared many traits with the Kawi script in Java and some of India's oldest writing systems. In Baybayin, certain characters can represent either a single sound like a vowel or a consonant, or an entire syllable, not unlike Chinese characters.

It was not until the hispanic colonization that the Spanish language was used, especially by the higher class. We know these Spaniards introduced us to many things, from bay leaves and Christianity, to the Latin alphabet. Things took a turn then: Baybayin began to decline in use, with majority of the people gradually preferring to write Tagalog in this new alphabet. However, despite its nonuse, Baybayin still serves as an icon of Filipino heritage — we find them in logo designs, art pieces, books. It even exists as a security feature on modern Philippine bills!

A unifying language

It is a lesser known fact that, a few years before his death, Jose Rizal devoted some time to study the Tagalog alphabet and structure; local words at the time were mostly spelled Spanish-style, like the use of c and q, instead of k, for example. A year after his death, Emilio Aguinaldo led the Philippines to its first declaration of independence as the Republic of Biak-na-Bato, with our first-ever constitution declaring Tagalog as the official language. Granted, this period barely saw two full moons, but Rizal's studies would come in handy decades later.

In the 1930s, our Commonwealth Constitution assigned English and Spanish as our official languages, showing that Spanish influence remained high. The Abakada alphabet was presented at this time as well by Lope K. Santos, the Father of Filipino Grammar, and was heavily inspired by Rizal's suggestions. But our people were now more determined to find a way to bridge our individual cultures. So a mandate was made to develop one national language.

By then, Tagalog was widely used in Manila, the politico-economic heart of the country, and its nearby areas. This has always been the case, pre-colonization. In the end, it wasn't very hard to choose: in 1937, President Manuel Quezon proclaimed Tagalog as the foundation to create our Wikang Pambansa.

A Tagalog 2.0

It is not very surprising that after centuries of hispanic control, Spanish words have leaked deep into our languages. The wikang pambansa was renamed Pilipino in 1959, and eventually, under President Marcos' guidance, many attempts were made to turn it into a more native vocabulary: silya (chair), for example, is Spanish in origin, and was to be replaced with the more local word, salumpuwit.

But society was comfortable with the status quo by then, and had already adapted too much to accept this version of Pilipino.

And so our government needed to adapt as well. Today, we still follow the 1987 Constitution, which now officially rebrands the Tagalog-based national language as Filipino.

So what sets apart the two languages? With Filipino, we're able to adapt foreign words into the language. While we easily call a dictionary diksyunaryo in Filipino, a Tagalog purist would refer to it as a talatinigan. Because the modern Filipino alphabet also contains more letters, we are open to more phonetics and free to accept many transliterations. This is why we now commonly use foreign-based words like kompyuter, aksyon, and even doktor ("manggagamot").

Endlessly evolving

Many have pointed out that, especially for people outside the country, Tagalog, Filipino, and Pilipino are often used interchangeably. It may also be more likely to find an English-to-Tagalog dictionary in a bookstore, than an English-to-Filipino one.

Indeed, besides the tendency for transliteration, there is no strict difference between the Tagalog and Filipino languages. But as the national language, Filipino, in many ways, would have to constantly adapt and evolve, just like its people.

References:

The Origin of the Filipino Language (Wikang Filipino). (2013, January 22). Retrieved from http://ffemagazine.com/the-origin-of-the-filipino-language-wikang-filipino

Ramos, Teresita V. (n.d.). Intro to Tagalog Language. Retrieved from http://www.seasite.niu.edu/tagalog/tagalog_homepage99/the_tagalog_language.htm

There are as many ways to prepare the classic adobo as there are islands in this country, and despite that, or perhaps because of it, the adobo has always been the typical Pinoy favorite. But as a country with centuries worth of Spanish influence, did we simply copy the adobo from the colonizers? Just how authentically Filipino is our (unofficial) national dish?

A History

You and I are lucky to live at a time when refrigerators and freezers were already invented; our ancestors, not so much. Food preservation was barely a recognized concept back then, and in a land with naturally warm climate — and long before the 16th century colonization — they had to be creative to keep food fresh for more than a few days.

And so they discovered vinegar, which, science later tells us, keeps the bacteria at bay. They stewed pork in vinegar and added salt for flavor, and the resulting dish reputably could last up to five days.

Soon, the Spanish community took over. With them, they brought corn, garlic, peanuts, peppercorns, and bay leaves — some of which found their way to the recipe that we're more familiar with today. One of the first records of the dish dates back to 1613, made by Pedro de San Buenaventura.

It was the Spanish who named the Filipinos' vinegar-braised cooking process adobo — a term derived from the word adobar, which meant marinade. What the Filipinos used to call the dish itself is now lost in history; over time, people started to call dishes prepared this way the adobo.

Adobo Today

The best thing about cooking adobo may also be the worst thing about it: there's really no fixed set of ingredients. Sure, the vinegar is the heart of any adobo — but even families and cooks debate over the best kind of vinegar to use, how much pepper or soy sauce to add, the addition of pineapples, kang kong, or calamansi, or how saucy or crispy it should be.

In general, the typical adobo is a meat dish — usually pork, chicken, or both. Less common versions make use of liver, or even squid. The meat is usually soaked in a marinade of vinegar and soy sauce to tenderize and give it flavor and color. Some choose to marinate for only a few minutes, others overnight. Then the meat is cooked slowly, with garlic, bay leaves, and pepper. Since many households or cookbooks tend to use different techniques, the fun often starts here.

More variations of the adobo are made as people experiment with ingredients and sauces (there's even a White House version). You might also want to try our own chicken adobo recipe, featured in the Sabor Filipino Cookbook app with 24 other regional recipes (Sabor is available on the App Store, for free).

While not on the same level of popularity as our Asian neighbors, Filipino cuisine steadily gains recognition on the international scene, mainly thanks to Filipinos abroad and their home cooking, and to the growing number of restaurants popping up in cities like New York or Dubai.

Rizal or Mercado? 

Rizal initially used his complete surname, Jose Rizal Mercado But then his brother, Paciano, got the Spanish leaders’ attention for his links to the martyred priests Gomburza. He encouraged Rizal to drop his second surname to disassociate himself from him, and since then, he identified as Jose Rizal.

Small body, big head

Literally — it has been said that Rizal’s mother, Teodora Alonzo, had the hardest childbirth with him. He had allegedly a larger head than usual, and only grew to roughly 5’3” tall as an adult. Obviously his physicality did not hinder his accomplishment in many fields.

Words and comics

Some people say Jose Rizal was the father of Filipino comics. In the 1880s, Rizal was asked to contribute a fable to a magazine — he wrote The Monkey and the Tortoise, and even drew a comic strip to go with the fable.

Face of cigarettes

There was a time when cigarette labels were mediums of art and propaganda: near the 20th century, the labels featured the likes of Manuel Quezon, Sergio Osmena, Rizal himself, and even geishas and scenery like Mt. Mayon. This was also a testament to how much Filipinos loved to smoke.

Draco rizali

Well-immersed in science, Rizal also dealt with preserving and classifying animals like snakes, lizards, birds, and even shells. He was the namesake for a native lizard species, the draco rizali, known elsewhere as the Guenther’s flying lizard.