Aswang

A lot of things scare me: heights, fat brown flying roaches, long proboscis syringes, jump-scare horror flicks—but not aswangs.

I feel a certain affinity when I think about these hideous creatures from Filipino folklore. It's not that I'm a shapeshifting, flesh-eating monster myself, but I just think we'd have a decent conversation if I ran into one. I mean, my grandma, Nanay Lydia, once did—supposedly.

If I remember the stories correctly, it was the late 1960s in San Juan City, in a makeshift house where she, her cousins, and their kids lived, when an aswang came to visit. It was early evening and a young Ernesto, a cousin of my mom, was sitting by the window when the aswang dropped upside down from the roof and grabbed the boy like a stuffed toy. One of the aunties ran, jumped, and scrambled on the floor just to get hold of Ernesto’s legs. A tug-of-war between the aunties and the aswang ensued for the next few minutes, until the monster gave up, morphed into a giant pig, and ran away.

Days after the incident, Nanay would see a familiar face walking around the village—a fellow migrant from Iloilo, who everybody knew came from a long line of aswangs. It was Nanay and some of their elders who confronted her about the attempt to snatch the boy. They asked if she could at least spare their family since they all came from the same hometown—kabayan!

The aswang seemed to have honored her word. (See? They can be nice!) The boy, Ernesto, would change his name to Dobo—Tito Dobo to us kiddos. It was a badge of honor, he would often tell us reeking of gin and varnish—a reminder to everyone that he survived an aswang’s attempt to turn him into a human adobo.

Tito Dobo turned into a fatal alcoholic. Gin, he argued, kept him safe from aswangs who prefer fresh and healthy livers. I’d like to think he achieved a certain degree of success. He would eventually die of organ complications due to excessive alcohol consumption. He was probably in his late 50s or early 60s, in Sta. Maria, Bulacan with his auntie’s family, when he died.

Do I believe in aswangs? I can’t say for sure. The world has so many mysteries that we can’t explain. Even my mom had a fairly recent personal sighting of what she believed was an aswang—a humanoid with huge bat-like wings hovering over the house of our severely-ill neighbor in 2012—a story for another day.

Maybe, they are real after all, but we refuse to believe. I mean, for us, creatures of the wretched cities—we rarely believe in anything we don’t see, as if the only world that exists is the one in front of us. Otherwise, to borrow the ancient millennial phrase—it’s always pics or it didn’t happen.

But all the aswangs, elementals, spirits, sorcerers, gods, and goddesses were our ancestors’ reality before the colonizers came—white, gun-wielding men from the “civilized west” who deemed our own creatures and deities as witches, demons, and savages, cast away onto the fringes of the reality they forced into our throats.

And that is, perhaps, why I feel a certain kinship with the shapeshifting aswangs. Their persistence to exist—to resist complete disappearance—in a society that refuses to see or believe them—even in the imagination, they still haunt even our fried, gentrified brains. We would say we don’t believe them, but we doubt the second we’re left on an isolated rural town, surrounded only by trees and roofed by a moonless midnight.

Nonetheless, I would like to believe they’re still here with us, adapting—shifting into the shape of us—a sleepless BPO worker on the way to the office, an underpaid office clerk squished and canned like a sardine in an MRT train, a hopeless romantic stuck on graveyard cashier duty of a busy 7-11 branch—such a shame though, they were more beautiful and powerful with their claws, fangs, and wings.

Julio is not an aswang. He was a rice farmer, but he needed to shift into something he’s not just to stay alive—a Grab driver.

Like most farm workers in the country, the Cagayan native never owned the land he tilled. But it was vast, beautiful, and full of life, he recalled as we drove through an unusual Sunday traffic along EDSA near Camp Aguinaldo. And that’s the issue for Julio—farmers toil the field under the violent heat of the sun, nurture the soil with utmost care and attention to detail, their hands cracked and backs bent to birth the yield, but they never reaped what they sow.

“See that gate, sir? Imagine stooping down to the mud, planting seeds just several inches apart, and doing it all the way until, say, the MRT station in Cubao," he said, pointing to a two-kilometer stretch along EDSA. "Imagine doing that under the afternoon heat." They get around ₱200 ($2.5) a day for that kind of work. Worse, traders would buy their palay for a measly ₱8 a kilo ($0.14)—today’s prevailing farm gate price. Then, in Manila, we buy a kilo of rice for over ₱50 ($0.85) a kilo. “That price, sir—it’s a real killer. That’s why I left Cagayan. My family would’ve died had I stayed,” he added.

Cagayan Valley has over 500,000 hectares of farmland where a huge chunk of the country’s rice and corn is produced. The vast fields are walled by two great mountain ranges—the Cordilleras in the west and the mighty Sierra Madre in the east. The longest river in the country, the Cagayan River, runs through it, making the land of the region highly fertile for any crop you need. From the mountains, the fields, and the rivers, to the Philippine sea up north, Cagayan Valley is teeming with life. In theory, living in Cagayan shouldn’t be a problem. But it seems like only a few people are getting the best of what the land continues to give.

In Julio’s home province of Cagayan, the northern tip of the Cagayan Valley region, black sand mining and river quarrying have been eating up the lands that farmers used to till. Three companies are behind the project. They aim to extract specific minerals, like magnetite, which are allegedly shipped to China for their own production—no farmer or fisherman gets to benefit from this exploration. The government, of course, denied it. The press release is a tireless cliche: It isn’t black sand mining but dredging for a flood-control project. The farmers and fisherfolks in the area beg to disagree—since the project started, they’ve been seeing Chinese miners with their machines digging through the land they and their ancestors have been tilling since time immemorial. Now, who would you believe, the locals or the government?

On the southern front of Cagayan Valley, the greens of the fields and the mountains are also shifting into gray barren rocks in the name of government-backed business interests. In Dupax Del Norte in Nueva Vizcaya, a foreign company is looking to convert a huge part of the mountain to a large-scale mining field. The mining exploration is led by Woggle Corporation, a subsidiary of Britain’s Metals Exploration. Farmers and indigenous people, facing displacement, hunger, and death, rose up to protest the project but were recently met with police officers who were, apparently, trying to defend foreign business interests. Nueva Vizcaya is a critical watershed that is essential in irrigating the farmlands of the region. A large-scale mining project would not just displace the locals of Dupax Del Norte. It would kill more farmers in the process.

Instead of struggling forth, Julio chose to leave the greener pastures of Cagayan for the dog shit-peppered pavements of North Caloocan. He said he lost all hope. He thinks the government does not care about farmers anymore. They only care about business and money. He said if it really cared for the farmers, all the billions of pesos lost to corruption—they should’ve gone to the farmers first. He wouldn’t have to leave the fields he loves. Then, he went on a long rant. “Tell me, sir. Who doesn’t need rice? We all need rice. We all need vegetables. Who produces these? Us, farmers. Now, why are they not helping us? Why are there no proper farm to market roads or subsidy for seedlings? You know why, sir? It’s because there’s more money they can pocket in rice imports.”

He isn’t wrong. Since President Rodrigo Duterte signed the Cynthia Villar-authored Rice Liberalization Law—a law that virtually lifted the limitations for rice imports—the price of palay dropped like gravity left the building. The price of rice in the market? High as a kite. The traders and the middlemen? Wealthier than ever. It’s a bit ironic that we have millions of hectares of rice fields across the country, yet we remain the world’s largest rice importer. “I didn’t know Duterte signed that law,” said Julio after I talked briefly about the law. He’s been a die-hard Duterte supporter because of his anti-crime advocacy. He stayed silent for a few seconds before letting out a sigh. “We can’t really trust anyone, can we? Dutertes, Marcoses, Villars, and all the senators and congressmen—if I were crazy, I’d bomb them all.”

Julio shifted to park and lifted the handbrake as we arrived at the destination safely at around 5:30PM. The rusty sky was shifting into a deeper, darker purple hue in Quezon City—no aswangs but there’s threat of rain. Our travel covered 12.8 kilometers in 40 minutes—pretty slow for a Sunday drive. He asked me to watch a YouTube documentary that made him shed a tear. (I did the next morning.) It was the one by Kara David that showed how vegetable farmers in Baguio are also facing the same crisis. We thanked each other for the nice discussion as we waved goodbye.

If you’re a frequent milk tea drinker, there’s a good chance a landless, underpaid farm worker from Negros Occidental triggered your much-needed sugar high.

For all we know, a huge portion of the sweets we consume came from the blood and sweat of Jenny Bantillo and her fellow sugarcane farmers working on vast hectares of fields in Negros Occidental. After all, more than 60% of the sugar Filipinos consume come from the province. But we know little of the sugarcane farmer’s lives, let alone their daily struggle against hunger and violence.

Like the farmers of Cagayan, Jenny gets a measly ₱82 ($1.40) in piece-rate (pakyawan) for weeding more than a hectare of sugarcane field every single day, come hell or high water. The work isn’t easy. Weeds are persistent and they grow back fast. They need to make sure the fields are clear to keep the cane from getting choked. She mothers the earth as she mothers her three kids at home. But the land isn’t even hers. The yield of the field goes to the larger market, and the profit goes to the arrendador (lessor) and the landlord of the hacienda. All that Jenny gets to keep is her daily pay.

When you think it’s the worst that could happen to a sugarcane farmer, wait until you hear about “Tiempo Muerto” (literal translation: Time of Death). It’s the annual off-milling season when the fields are full of tall, maturing sugarcane, and there’s no large-scale field work available. Jenny and her husband, who also works the fields, would try to plant vegetables on the small patches of land available, so they won’t go hungry. But the landowners won’t allow it for no reason at all. The season of death would push them to look for odd jobs just to sustain their daily living.

The harrowing conditions in Negros should be enough motivation for Jenny to leave the fields and, just like Julio, take a shot on a better-paying job in Manila. But Jenny is a farmer, and she knows her worth. Her soul is tied to the land she tills—land that should’ve been theirs to begin with. For what’s land without a tiller? What’s a tiller without land? They are just dirt without each other. Jenny chose to resist the systemic abuse driving farm workers away from the fields. She led and organized her fellow farm workers, first to assert their right to fair wages, and second, to secure their right to own the land they till under our flawed land reform laws—it’s the best shot they have.

But to resist means going against something powerful—and in this case, it’s going against state-supported hacienderos or landlords. When Jenny and her group started to gain ground on their legal battle, she suddenly became a subject of a police intelligence operation. “I was shocked and terrified. In our town, intel operations are done for drug pushers. I’m just a farmer fighting for my right,” a teary-eyed Jenny recalled as she shared the whole ordeal to us.

Most of the subjects of the intel operations in their place were either jailed or killed. The fact that Jenny was being monitored triggered an alarm that forced her to be on the move, living away from her family. Soon after, she found out who the police officer was, which allowed her to file a blotter and eventually confront the cop. Turns out the intel operation was a sham—it was yet another move to intimidate their group. But Jenny is a mom, and she will do everything for her kids. It’s enough reason to fight on.

Police and military aggression against farmers who fight for land is not really new in Negros. Since the time of the late dictator, Ferdinand Marcos Sr., so much blood has spilled over the disputed lands of the province—and for what? Again, we all go back to state-backed business interests.

As Jenny fights for the land she tills, the government is actively working with businessmen to convert hundreds of hectares of farmland to renewable energy plants. A report from AGHAM, a group of scientists, revealed that six solar power farms covering 362.2 hectares of agricultural land have been established since 2015. The report added that there could be more than 500 hectares of farmland up for conversion—that’s 10 Ayala Centers of farmland shapeshifting into solar farms. And for what? Cheaper, cleaner energy? Energy for who?

As we speak, the whole Negros region is already abundant with renewable energy. In fact, there’s a reported surplus of renewable energy coming from the island, yet local energy prices remain high. Why? There are a couple of explanations:

Like the rice fields of Luzon, the sugar-producing lands of Negros Occidental is about to be erased on the face of the earth—and with them, the farmers that till the land. There are land conversion projects in Talisay, Bacolod, Granada, Silay, Hinoba-an, La Carlota, Manapla, San Carlos, Cadiz, La Castellana, and the biggest of all in Candoni—a 6,652 hectare farmland and forest, home to 300 farming households and indigenous peoples, being turned into a palm oil plant by the Consunji-affiliated Hacienda Asia Plantation Incorporated. They sell it as progress and development, but not a farmer who toiled those fields would reap the benefits.

And you’d think that now would be the best time for the government to step up for its food producers as they fight for their land. But nope. Earlier this year, President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. signed a law that practically allows foreigners to lease private lands in the country for up to 99 years. I mean, if you’re leasing a land for nearly a century…isn’t it practically owning the land? And in 99 years, how many farmlands can they convert into their own banana plantations, mining fields, IT-BPO centers, or Boracay-like vacation spots?

When you try to imagine an ideal life, what do you see?

Start with yourself—are you still in the same line of work if money is not an issue? Or have you become a dancer, a poet, a singing content creator like Aljur Abrenica? What does home look like? Do you have a family? Got pets? What’s for lunch? Go out, then, and look around—where are you living? Are you still in the city or are you somewhere cool and green? Walk further and see what’s down the road—who are the people within your community? Are they businessmen, simple store owners, or professionals? It’s dinner time, you’re with friends—what are you eating? Are you going out in a posh dining place? When you dream of a better life, do you even see the people who make your food? Where are the farmers and the fisherfolks in your ideal world?

I must admit, for most of my life, I hardly thought of the people who toil the fields. It’s a bit ironic since I am an immediate descendant of agricultural workers—Waray fisherfolks on my father’s side, Bisaya farmers on my mother’s side. They all left the farms and fishing grounds after World War II to live a better life. They would always tell us that life in the fields is hard. We must study, graduate, and find a job. The television tells us the same idea: Fuck the farms, get a good office job, buy a car and a house, build a family, travel the world. The school virtually says the same thing: Be an accountant, be a manager, be a CEO, be the richest businessman in the world, give back to the poor. And that’s what we set out to do.

The progress they keep on selling is hinged on our capability to consume, when real progress should be measured in our ability to create. When we, weary phone-facing cityfolks, dream of a better life, we rarely think of what we can craft, create, and produce, not just for ourselves, but for our community. And I can’t even blame you—we were so deprived of the most basic things in life that we tend to dream of hoarding the world for ourselves—the rich resources of the earth, everything, becomes commodity, something to buy, flaunt, and throw away after use. When we dream of a better life, we see more buildings and offices than farming villages. We’ve been wired to believe that our land, this goddamn archipelago, is better off with dozens of BGCs and Poblacions—so we beg for them and cheer when we see new malls and IT-BPO hubs grow of our farmlands.

But do you know what farmers dream when they dream of progress? They dream of tilling their own land so they can produce enough yield to feed the country. They dream that we never have to rely on another country to give us the nutrition we need because all the things we need, our land freely gives. They dream of low food prices so we may never go hungry and eating healthy won’t need an overpriced meal prep service. They dream to be free to sing and dance with us as equals, not our piss-poor brothers and sisters from the countryside. It’s one of the most unselfish things you’ll hear. Yes, they also want to live a good life, but they see never see life in isolation—it’s always a life connected with each other—the kapwa, a concept we’re slowly losing in the individualist, consumerist culture the people in power are shoving down our throat.

We, fancy-suited professionals, used to dream that way because we were all once farmers and fisherfolks. Our feet were once inseparable with land. Now, we rarely feel the earth. Now, we rarely see farmers in our midst. Slow and steady, the machineries that run the system are turning our own farmers into folkloric beings—remnants of an old world that we no longer need in the age of AI, textbook sketches that no longer exist, a dying breed of uneducated creatures without a place in the Villar Cities of the world. They want us to forget about the farmers. Out of sight, out of mind. The less you see, the less you care. The less you care, the less they’re real.

Except that they’re real—which is somewhat a funny thing to say. They’re here with us, making up 20% of our labor force—that’s more than 20 million human beings. More importantly, our farm workers—our food frontliners, dreamers of a free society, are fighting back. Their persistence to exist—to resist eradication despite facing guns and goons, to resist being silenced by threats and harassment—it should be enough to draw our support. Their fight for land is also our fight for our food—our life. Without them, only hunger awaits. Maybe, we all ought to shift our mindsets—rid us of our consumerist dreams. Maybe, it’s time to get out of our tiring routine and look for the tillers—learn from them—fight with them.

After all, we’re not just corporate slaves lining up every damned day to the mouth of the buildings that lord over the cities. We’re more than just the titles and positions. We are our ancestors—powerful like the babaylans and elementals. We are the mountains—strong and steady shelter from the storms. We are the fields and the seas—an ever-giving, ever-loving mother to all. And maybe, we all ought to shapeshift into aswangs, rising up from obscurity and alienation—hideous and fanged, wings a-bloom, claws out—a real terror to the terrorists pestering our fertile lands—out to eat the rich.