A friend of the theater discipline put it most simply: “Where are these costumes coming from?” She was referring of course to the costumes of Sinulog dancers, dressed this way and that, complex, multi-material, layered and always colorful. To what extent are the costumes true to the native inspiration? How genuine are they?
Some will say: Not at all. The indigenous tribal cultures of Cebu, if they ever existed here at all, are not recalled in practice. The history books contain only drawings. We have the words for them fortunately. We have Pintado and Aeta but as to who they are and where they might be found in these islands, we have no idea at all. If there is a word here that might refer to the living native, that word can only be taga-bukid. But that word is not taken to mean the indigenous. Instead, it is always used as a disparaging word to refer to people who are literally “ignorant” and so, therefore, unfamiliar with the “civilized” way of life.
The word has a quaint exactness of meaning, for indeed, the literal meaning is true in the sense of usage. It does clearly reveal the colonial social bias that is prevalent until now among city dwellers, those who allege themselves to be “civilized,” what the taga-bukid themselves call the taga-baybayon—those whose ancestors once lived by fishing and scrounging for anything that could be foraged from these shorelines. When the Chinese and the Arabs came, they learned the value of trading. When the Spanish came, they were the first to surrender to their rule, their new way of doing things, their way of civilization. The tribal gave way to the municipal and then the urban. They still called the Datu, datu, lived in communities called barangays, but little else was left of the old ways.
The manner of dressing was probably the first to go. By the records of colonizers women used to weave cloth with back-strap looms. Men and women covered their bottoms but not their tops. That was not acceptable by Western standards. It might have been better if we developed our own weaving industry but weaving always survived at the fringes and practically disappeared with the advent of imported cloth. Only in current times it is struggling for a comeback.
The only genuinely native form of weaving left is found among the taga-bukids in the form of hats and sleeping mats known here as banig. Outside of that, we have nothing left by way of indigenous clothing and costuming that is genuine. The costumes we see at the Sinulog are most likely contemporary reconstructions. Unless, of course, they come from Mindanao or the far-flung barangays of the Visayas islands. In Cebu, there is nothing left that is truly indigenous. And if one truly searched for the oldest remnant of the old ways here, that would have to be the Badjao. The fact they are mostly street beggars now puts some sort of ironic twist to the whole Sinulog festivities. The fact we spirit them away to some island somewhere here before the tourists start arriving indicates the true value we actually hold for the native and the indigenous.
But even so, there must be something that is truly indigenous in the contemporary Cebuano even if it can only exist in spirit, in psychology, in unconscious culture and, finally, in sensibility. Carl Jung had written the literature for a concept of the “collective unconscious.” Even if the material culture of the indigenous has disappeared, it is possible we still hold inside our minds a latent bias for certain aesthetic tendencies that differentiate us from other people. In the sense of art and culture, this should be the mark to validate the Cebuano artist and cultural worker in general and the Cebuano costume designer in particular.
Having little material record of the indigenous, he or she can only approach the problem at the most unconscious level, drawing everything from the depths of his or her own aesthetic tendencies for what is beautiful and pleasurable. The operational indigenous word would have to be lingaw. He or she can only work to produce the costume that is most lingaw. The people for their part can only favor those costumes that are for them the most lingaw. By this way, we can reconstruct the aesthetic culture we have lost after more than 400 years of cultural subjugation and surrender. But before that will happen, we would have to rediscover inside ourselves a genuine love for the indigenous and the native. We might start by treating the Badjao a bit better.