By Rex Catubig March is Women’s History Month. The national theme for 2024 celebrates “Women Who Advocate for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion.” “The theme recognizes women throughout the country who understand that, for a positive future, we need to eliminate bias and discrimination entirely from our lives and institutions”….
By Rex Catubig HOMECOMING is that season in our lives that makes our heart sprout wings. For overseas workers, it’s the dream vacation with family. For expatriates or balikbayans, it’s a sentimental visit to hometown. For graduates, it is the reunion with classmates. There is a Greek word that is…
HOMEWARD BOUND: Dedicated to my Batch ’65
By Rex Catubig SHE was the fair maiden of the Doroteo Vinteres-Juana Galvan lineage that was witness to the ill-fated love affair of Dr Jose Rizal and Leonor Rivera. Her own love story mirrored the romance of the famous star-crossed lovers, but hers surmounted the challenges that barred the…
A LOVE SONATA : Based on the conversation with a grandson
By Rex Catubic CULTURAL heritage comes also in the form of culinary heritage—culinary practices and heirloom recipes handed down across generations. Their no-frill preparations, flavor and taste, hark back to halcyon times and recall happy moments of one’s youth. In every barrio, there is always a chef or two…
Burp of remembrance
By Rex Catubig “INTSIK tsonga”, “Tsikwa”– are just two of the monikers they are condescendingly called, implying disdain in the way they are regarded. Which reveals our bias and cultural ignorance. My father was privileged to enjoy a close association with the Chinese in the lumber business. I grew…
The Year of the Wooden Green Dragon: The ideal of unity in diversity
By Rex Catubig THE weekday morning couldn’t have been less hackneyed than any other morning the teenager wakes up to. It is the usual run of cliché common in a household. To jumpstart the day which could be hectic depending on what he crams it with, he goes off…
The ballgame is over: Anatomy of suicide
By Rex Catubig IN 2015, to celebrate the Golden Jubilee of my high school class of 65, I wrote a marching song as our gift for the City. When that year’s Hermano Mayor Joeyboy Atty. Tamayo II heard it, he endorsed it to Mayor Belen T. Fernandez who listened…
Recapturing the songs for my city
By Rex Catubig YOU could never catch my mother without makeup. Or at least without a penciled eyebrow and red lipstick. It’s a vanity routine she had to do that made her day complete. But it was something that for a young boy was both penance and punishment. It…
A portrait of my mother (on her nth birthday)
By Rex Catubig YEARS ago, a friend of mine took me to an impromptu whirlwind spiritual tour in the heart of Metro Manila. In what felt like a modern-day ferry across the innards of the city, and after enduring apocalyptic traffic, touring the St Jude church and the Padre…
A ‘Batang Quiapo’ epilogue
By Rex Catubig WHILE the hotly debated issue of where Gen. Douglas MacArthur landed along the Lingayen Gulf’s color-coded beaches may never be resolved, the one incontrovertible fact that we Dagupeños are rightly proud of and no one else can lay claim to, is upon his return, when he…