BACOLOD CITY — It was the early part of 1979. There was still the sugar crisis. The 41st Charter Day was still months away. The topics in the papers and in the radio were mostly about the sugar crisis.

The problem of attracting foreign tourists was not much talked about. It was only Kalibo with its already famous Ati-Atihan. There was no “Sinulog” of Cebu yet. Nor was there the “Dinagyang” of Iloilo.

I recall about writing the need for a Harvest Festival, knowing October was the month when sugar milling just started, usually in September. My idea was one of the Mardi-Gras. I wrote suggesting in the coming Charter Day the theme should be Harvest Festival, following the Harvest Festival celebrated in England on October 1 which until today churches are decorated with corn, fruits, vegetables, and other farm products.

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I wrote this was needed to perk up the sugar industry which at that time was ailing. There would be a ritual on how cane points were brought to Negros. There was to be street dancing like Kalibo. Plenty of merry making.

This is what I can remember of how MassKara came into being.

I recall, it was the help of the Arts Association of Bacolod led by the late Ely Santiago, a graduate of Fine Arts of U.P. and a good portrait painter that was sought to set up a festival by then Mayor Jose Montalvo, the late Councilor Romeo Geocadin and then Tourism Coordinator Evelio Leonardia.

Because there was money in their making of masks, Santiago suggested that they call it a “MassKara Festival”. Not Mascara, saying it was a combination of “Mass” for people and “Cara” or face, which was Filipinized to be spelled “Kara.”

And there would be street dancing with people wearing masks. I did not oppose. I agreed with it. It was a mask a cover for our woes, putting up a happy, smiling face in the midst of a crisis.

I knew the crisis would soon go away but what would be left was the smiling faces of the masks and Bacolod came to be known as the City of Smiles, as suggested by the late antique collector Fulgie Vega.

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It’s good nobody claimed to have single-handedly authored the MassKara Festival. It just evolved but it was Ely Santiago who gave the name “MassKara” and its spelling. Just plain money motive at first.

He asked me to support it. And I readily said, yes. I could see it could invite tourists to Bacolod and cover up with a mask the pain of hunger.

And the mask, a thing used to supposedly hide the truth is a beautiful thing to write about. But, is it bad to hide the truth?

Yes, but in our case, hiding the truth of pain by wearing the mask of a happy people that year 1979 was very well needed and justified. We saw the face of poverty in Joel Abong, the enunciated cover boy of magazines, who became the symbol of hunger and poverty in the sugar industry. Because in the end, we cannot hide the truth.

Poet William Congreve wrote, “No mask like open truth to cover lies,/ As to go naked is the best disguise.”

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Or wrote another author whose name I can’t recall, No matter what kind of mask he puts on, you will know the real man in the face of peril and adversity.

There was the mask but we still showed who we were at that time in the face of peril and adversity. We stood up and faced the adversity gravely without the mask.

This is the legacy that MassKara gives us.

It’s not just dancing there. It’s not just drinking promoted to perk up sales of beer. No, there is something more.

MassKara is the story of how a people weathered out a crisis by pretending they were still smiling even if the stomach was empty.

And in the face of the world’s economic crunch, we can weather this out by not worrying but working for our survival.

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MassKara was only a prop to hide the problems. For beneath the veneer of those happy faces were a people steeled by fortitude, emboldened by the thought that there is no problem that is not surmountable, and with a single-minded determination to overcome everything.

We face a crisis today. I am not afraid of it. For the history of Negros showed in the 1930s when the U.S. cut off sugar quota from 1.4 million tons to only 980, 000 tons, we survived it.

I sound like a broken record. But the secret is producing our own food, if possible organic food.

It is a pity we do not have a national government that should give enough attention and importance to food security instead of importing all the food we need, in effect, subsidizing producers in other countries.

We have been importing rice heavily. And sugar too. Now, noise is being made of shortage in pork. Is government thinking of importing pork also instead of making people raise pigs?

One Response to “We masked our problems”

• 1
  Dr. Antonio Gestosani
  October 15th, 2008 04:05

  What? To import sugar? Ask me that question in 1970 -1972 when I was a resident physician of St. Joseph Hospital owned by Victorias Milling Company in Manapla, Negros Occidental, and I will tell you - you are nuts! I will take this issue personally because I had ties to this then big sugar exporter and my last employer before I left Philippines in June of 1972. Teach your people to grow foods and be self sufficient. With this global economic crisis, monies from the OFW will start to slow down, and you might not be able to afford to import anymore! GOD BLESS YOU ALL.

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