I admired rice paddies long before I met one in person.
Growing up in San Diego, I poured over National Geographic, romanticized lovely curves of lush terraces like only an angsty second-gen can.
It wasn't til that muggy Philippines evening in Hacienda Luisita—when the sun glowed its golden goodnight—that I stood in a rice paddy...Enamored.
Maybe it was that dreamy light-the kind that makes everyone look hella good. Or maybe it was the charming organizer glowing in that light with me.
A tanned young kasama with a sad story and a wide grin, he rode up on his motorcycle the night before to rock the Bahay Kubo with his band by flashlight.
But what really made me cling to that field, that moment was the resilience.
Of that Kasama who called himself Pow—always on the road
Of the elderly farmer besides us—Back bent over rice, hands moving.
Of the people cultivating palay and gulay --rice and vegetables. Feeding themselves from their own land like it was the most natural thing in the world.o
We live in an unnatural world, where landowning politicians command armed thugs to demand sugar cane. so that while Filipinos kids starve, American kids get diabetes. If money grew on trees, they’d turn our whole damn country into one big plantation.
If soil has memory, then this land at Hacienda Luisita remembers the day 5000 sugar cane workers barricaded factory gates. Remembers neighbors joining the march, the strikers cheering when tear gas and water cannons couldn’t move them November 16, 2004 when the military started shooting. When 12 adults, 2 children rejoined the earth.
One decade later, the Hacienda Luisita farmers remember with their hands deep in the land. No more sugar cane production, no more industrial pesticides poisoning the water, the soil. Instead...
Bungkalan: Collective farms. Peasants scraping money together to grow food. Rice and vegetables for eating, not export.
And here I was in a field, camera in one hand, kawayan stick in the other, while the young kasama spokein a language still foreign to my ears.
"Do you want to try planting palay?" he asked in English.
I smiled and he took my hand and eased me calf deep into the mud.
And one by one, the elderly farmer showed me how to reach into the water, pull stalks of palay out by the roots and replant them nearby.
My hands shook as I pulled the stalks out. They felt so lithe, so frail. I wondered if they quivered at my touch.
I wondered what moved the palay to take root.
Did they dream of feeding a family?
Itch to incite revolution?
Or were they just hustling through another day
I wonder if the palay’s roots could feel the peasants' blood in the soil, the tension in the air?
I can't remember the touch of the kasama's hand as he helped me out of the field.
All I remember is the palay and the wet soil, slipping between my fingers-- strong, fertile, alive.
kaledo-art
theartofmadeline
dailybridgerton
titsay
dededos
germansingergirl