ManilaMailDC.Net - The Province

Ā?The ProvinceĀ?

“The wheels of social change have been turning inexorably away from urban snobbery."
Why do we people of the National Capital Region aka Metro Manila, speak of “the province” as if it were some amorphous, unnamed planet in outer space, when we mean “the countryside” or “out of town”.
At most writers’ meetings, someone is sure to say firmly that a project or piece of information “should be circulated in the province”. To excuse odd behavior in a stranger, we suggest that, “Well, he’s from the province." I often catch myself saying condescendingly to a daughter, about a new woven beg she’s carrying, “Did you get that in the province?
We use “the province” so often and so vaguely that it has become an idiom, a code in both English and Filipino, so much so that the slang word-abbreviation, “promdi” is part of everyone’s vocabulary as a pejorative. Is that it? The clue word, Derogatory? It’s actually mental laziness in the user, for there are actually 76 or 78 provinces, last I heard, and in “imperial Manila”, as resentful Cebuanos call it, “the province" includes Cebu and all the other larger and richer provincial cities.
The use of “the province” by Filipinos, in general and from all over, probably stems from an acceptance of urban snobbery about city folk being somehow superior to their country cousins. Certainly it’s a result of centralism of all the governments we’ve known: Muslim, Spanish, American, Japanese which concentrated all the power and pelf in a single center, from where all decrees, laws, pronouncements descended on the hapless provincials with very little say. I remember that before the War and Independence, this centrifugal tendency was much more marked and that the most damning flaw in suitor, underling or candidate was that of being a “provinciano.”
The prevailing mindset was that of a map of the Philippines consisting almost entirely of Greater Manila with everything else outside it reduced to small, insignificant outer regions, something like those European medieval maps of the then known world surrounded by undiscovered oceans, labeled grimly, “Here Be Monsters.”
That concept or code word, “the province” has become an absurd conceit and an anachronism to boot. The Capital region has long been overrun by masses of Visayans and Ilocanos and, when you think of it, there never has been a single Manile±o president. The formation of separate regions, several of them autonomous, the devolution of functions and power to local government units, industrial and export zones out of Manila, and the prospect of federalism through charter change are other signs of decentralization. But this is a column about cultural anthropology, not political reform.
The wheels of social change have been turning inexorably away from urban snobbery. A native-born Manilan has become a rare bird and due for a comeuppance.
One of my sons went to the University of the Philippines and he reported that he became an object of curiosity, if not derision, when, in answer to a professor’s question on the first day, he had to reveal that all his parents, grandparents and great-grandparents had been Manila-born.
“You mean you don’t have a home province?” the teacher asked. He said he answered stoically, “Unfortunately not.” But when he came home, he asked me to please buy some land somewhere in any province so he could become respectable.
I did buy a small plot in Tanay to please him, but perhaps because it had a natural spring bubbling up crystalline water, an army general from nearby Camp Capinpin land-grabbed it, before we knew what was going on.
I took the case to court, but, as anyone who lives in the Philippines knows, no case against an AFP general has ever prospered.
We’ve come a long way from being 4th and 5th generation Manilenos and ignoring “the province”, to being the recipients of hostile behavior when we venture out of town. It seems “the province” will have none of us, “taga-Maynila.”