By Rex Catubig   \BEFORE an infamous dam lent a bad reputation to the name, making it synonymous to being a harbinger of catastrophe as opposed to its religious significance of being a beneficent healer of sickness, San Roque had been, and remains a revered patron saint of my beloved…

By Rex Catubig    IN my boyhood in our barrio, the month of August is customarily associated with relentless rain. “Nepnep” is how it was called when the monsoon dumps torrent of rain and the downpour inundates the river and engenders strong current. From out of nowhere the raging river…

By Rex Catubig   AUGUST is when monsoon brings copious rain, and usually intensifies into tropical typhoon. In my boyhood, at the start of a heavy downpour, we would run out into the yard and cheerily drench our fragile bodies with heaven’s libation. But as thunder rolls and lightning menacingly…

By Rex Catubig   IT was just another Monday. As the sultry afternoon was winding down, clock watchers in offices were fidgety and kept glancing at the wall clock, waiting impatiently for 5 o’clock to strike. The lady employees had begun the ritual of retouching their make-up, nudging off their…

By Rex Catubig   MY American journey took 8 long years of my mother’s life. She had to shuttle back and forth from Dagupan to Los Angeles to maintain her petitioner status—spending 10 months in the States and 2 months here in the Philippines. It was hard on her because…

By Rex Catubig   IT was the lifeline connecting the island barrios to the heart of Dagupan and “the gateway to the west” along the meandering Agno, “part of the 12- kilometer Golden Road” linking Dagupan to the western towns of Pangasinan. Built by the Americans in the 1920’s, the…

By Rex Catubig   CLASSES had just begun at the Calmay Primary School a couple of weeks earlier. It was a squat, unpainted, four-room wooden structure by the riverbank that housed Grades 1 to 4. It was my first time to attend school as a Grade 1 pupil. I was…

By Rex Catubig   THE patriotic fervor was at its crest. The centuries of unrest and uprising against two imperial powers and the gruesome resistance against a third would-be colonizer, had finally paid off. In July 4,1946, the Filipinos proudly raised its flag up high as it gained its penultimate…

By Rex Catubig   TO paraphrase a writer’s thought, “Why did our leaders give our people the freedom they don’t really need, rather than the bread he badly wants?” In the context of the colonial past, with the discrimination and abuses documented in two epochal novels, our leaders might have…