Abstract

The history of ancient Pangasinan peoples is yet to be written. Rosario Cortes has written what has been regarded as groundbreaking narrative of Pangasinan history consisting of three volumes (1974, 1990a, 1990b). Nonetheless, its chapter on the period before 1572, titled “Prehispanic Culture,” is rather sketchy and draws much of the data from the work of Diego Aduarte who was more interested in recording the successes of the Dominican missionary efforts to convert the stubborn Pangasinenses than in noting the latter’s customs and traditions.

Recent scholarship, ranging from linguistic to anthropological and folkloric materials, has yielded significant amount of new insights on the culture and history of the Pangasinenses before Spanish colonization. In 1962 Keesing came out with his book on the ethnohistory of the peoples of Northern Luzon, including the people of Pangasinan. Surprisingly, Cortes did not consult this seminal work when she wrote her history of Pangasinan. She could have produced a more credible account on the Pangasinenses if she had included in the picture the relationship between the Cordilleran and lowland peoples. Though she tried to “uncover the beginnings of the Pangasinanes as a people” (1974, ix), her account was circumscribed by the limited resources that she used.

However limited those sources are, it is up to the historian to reconstruct the configuration of the early society and civilization of the Pangasinan peoples based on available evidence. It is to be admitted that the use of Spanish sources is weighed down by their authorial biases. Yet looking at the Pangasinenses through the lens of Spanish friars does not necessarily mean accepting hook, line and sinker the prejudiced interpretations of precolonial practices and customs that one is likely to encounter in their works. In the interstices of biased accounts, it is still possible to spot the hazy image of a chieftain resisting the Catholic religion, to listen to the silenced voices of a manag-anito (indigenous priestess), or to visualize a prosperous settlement and a vibrant port in the eyes of Juan de Salcedo and his men. In short, looking at the same set of facts but using new perspectives, one could get a clear view of early Pangasinan prior to colonial contact.