Once we had a farm

Once we had a farm behind the University of the Philippines in Los Banos (UPLB). It was known as family property. My mother inherited her share from her father, Mauricio Mercado Cruz, who inherited it from his mother, Maria Mercado/Rizal, who inherited it from her brother Paciano Mercado/Rizal. It was part of the Paciano Rizal holdings in Los Baños.

My mother loved our farm. She started very simply, building a small two-bedroom house without a first floor. Over time the lower floor was enclosed to make an office, a meeting room, a kitchen and a maid’s room for Trining. Trining was the widow of our male cook, Victor, who was killed by the Japanese the night they came and took all the men in our family, including my grandfather, uncle and my father.

Those were happy times. I remember going to the farm and walking on two kilometers of railroad tracks to our property. Sometimes we would ride on a platform with wheels pushed by men on the tracks to get us to our place.

My mother learned how to shoot. She had a .38 caliber snub-nosed black revolver, which she would take apart and oil on Sundays. I spent many harrowing summers of my teenage years manning the clinic at our farm. I remember cleaning infected wounds, dispensing razor blades that they would use to cut the umbilical cords of babies as tenants wives gave birth and basically learning how to not let anyone — including my mother — know how panicked I was over this assignment.

My children loved going to our farm. My mother built a big cement tub under the trees where they could take warm baths from the hot spring water there. That’s why it was called Barrio Mainit, because of the natural hot spring water available then. When my marriage broke up, I went and spent two weeks at my mother’s farm, drinking the thick barako coffee there, staring at the peaks of mountains visible from the back windows, listening to Spanish music played on the stereo by my mother, who loved the Trio Los Panchos.

There was also a bamboo treehouse and lots of bougainvillea blooms. We had a cow called Wingle and very many lovely memories from days spent there. I remember taking my three daughters to a park up in Mount Makiling where they could swing and on our way home seeing a gargantuan black and white caterpillar on the grass crossing our path. We stopped to make it cross. Strange the memories we keep.

Then in the summer of 1974 my mother came to me in tears because the Marcos government had sent someone to see her and told her they would take over her property and pay her P2.50/sq. m. or something like that. My mother said it was the price of raw land. I could tell from her voice and her tears that my mother’s heart was broken into a million pieces. We lost our inherited land. It was taken over by the UPLB for IRRI, they said, to experiment with more vegetables, which the country badly needed then. Or so they claimed.

While Marcos was president we could do nothing. But around 20 years ago I was invited to an event at the UPLB and I saw what remained of our house. It was being used as a guest house. On our property stood a three- or four-story building. I went behind looking for the vegetables they said they would grow. I found nothing. Suddenly I heard a male voice say, “Si Señorita Tweetums!” I looked around and a young man approached me. “I am the son of one of your tenants. I was a little boy then but I recognized you.” That touched me. Once again time passed.

A few weeks ago was Paciano’s birthday. His descendants got together for lunch at his home in Los Baños, then a few of us drove over to look at our property for sentimental reasons. It has buildings but they don’t look too active to me. Some of them are empty with many broken glass windows. There is a lovely house built across the road from my mother’s property. It was also empty. For the most part the Paciano Rizal estate, once property of the Rizal descendants who went there to plant, pray and play, is almost all in the hands of the Philippine government now, though they were not paid enough by the Marcos government.

I look at the property that once was my mother’s. It does not look familiar to me anymore. There are no more trees that I remember. I feel leaden. One phrase runs through my mind: Once we had a farm. It was taken by the Marcos government to grow more vegetables but in 41 years no vegetables have been planted. Maybe it is time for us to try and get our land back.

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My mother’s farm in 1966 in Los Baños, Laguna