HAVE YOU ever joined a panunuluyan procession? That’s a community re-enactment of the Holy Family’s search for the inn. At first, you might think, “Yeah, I remember my Lola telling me about that in her hometown. She’s still nostalgic about it, but I don’t think my generation would go for it.”
However, panunuluyans are also held within cities such as Quezon City, where urban poor families are featured, dramatically integrating the divine search for the inn into their own struggles for decent and affordable housing in the city. In such cases, spirituality and social justice mobilization go hand-in-hand.
There, determined women, excited children and youth, and supportive men carry placards proclaiming community issues: “Condone unpaid installments!” Other placards will repeat issues made in past processions: high food prices, demolitions and evictions, tenure and onsite upgrading, and presidential land proclamations.
Wending their way toward the National Housing Authority (NHA) and the Department of Human Settlements and Urban Development (DHSUD), the earnest marchers pray, sing, wave to bystanders, and make their voices heard. The central figures head the procession in a tricycle with a very pregnant Mary, a pillow stuffed under her flowing blue gown, pedaled by a young and clearly worried Joseph.
Their first stop is the locked gate of the NHA office. The crowd calls the officials to come out to hear their voices. Mary moans loudly through it all, sporadically emitting a scream, “The baby is coming!” Still, there’s no place for shelter. Joseph and the crowd repeat their roared messages to the security guard at the gate, “Call your boss to come down and talk to us!”
Guessing the officials won’t appear, one of the brawnier men of the community, dressed as an innkeeper, rushes to the gate and enacts his role. He yells at the crowd, “Umalis kayo dyan! Wala rito si manager! (Get out of here! The manager is not here.)”
There was no room at the inn. The procession moves on for another try at the DHSUD building not far away. On arrival, Mary lets out her long-practiced and most bloodcurdling scream. Women rush to her side. Suddenly, Baby Jesus is held up high. A glowing star appears over the tricycle. The crowd cheers. People burst into Christmas songs and restate their demands. The guards repeat the expected threats, and the drama winds down.
Still bereft of shelter, Mama Mary, cradling her baby with Tatay Joseph peddling, pulls away to find a shack along the estero. It does not look all that different from the original stable. Children dressed as angels dance in accompaniment, protected by shepherds and the Three Wise Men, all dressed for the occasion. The crowd is tired but exhilarated. They had called NHA and DHSUD chiefs to account, just like the Holy Family did 2025 years ago on that first Christmas. Follow-up actions will begin the day after.
Preparing for this annual event is always a fun time for the communities. With Philippine Educational Theater Association friends helping to choreograph the drama performance, the leaders begin recruiting the actors in October.
How do Ateneans relate to all this? At their end, they discover early on that social justice is learned not only in the classroom, Leong Hall, Rizal Library, or the College Chapel. It becomes real when students meet and talk to ordinary Filipinos living in urban slums, on farms and along poverty-stricken seashores, or in the upland forests of indigenous people.
They listen to those deprived of liberty languishing in jail, single moms nurturing infants and toddlers, street-dwelling families, young people with disabilities, and others who have become the detritus of failed human rights guarantees.
Outreach programs like Binhi, Bigkis, and Punla move Ateneans over a three-year period from simple exposure to more collaborative arrangements aimed at helping the affected groups gain access to a better future. Different professors and programs have their own ways of enabling students to understand, appreciate, respect, and contribute to helping the people they meet.
For example, SOAN 129.4: Urban community development classes give its teachers a chance to have our juniors and seniors experience the Informal Economy onsite as “engaged anthropologists or sociologists.” They get to talk to informal workers, men and women who, according to the Department of Labor and Employment, make up a large portion of the labor force in Metro Manila.
In dynamic local settings that have the majority operating in the informality-formality nexus, they see families facing multiple challenges in employment, livelihood, micro-enterprises, housing, health, education, environment, and access to government services.
That institutional framework hides the reality of citizens discriminated against because of their “illegal” status—for selling goods on sidewalks or bottles of water in the midst of car traffic. Cell repair, box folding, cheap jewelry makers, barbers, manicurists, and the like use their homes as earning sites.
Regarded disparagingly as unregistered workers who don’t pay taxes, the better-off citizens ignore their contributions as lowly paid service providers. Yet, these are the people who enable the city to prosper and allow the better off to live their comfortable lives.
Our Sociology and Anthropology students in the first semester have been introduced to communities through non-governmental organization (NGO) partners with whom I’ve worked for many years. They go, not with ready-made topics for investigation, but with open minds, ready to meet people, listen, and figure out how they can somehow promote the people’s priority issues with people organizations, nanay entrepreneurs, and NGO leaders.
Many of the communities have invited the students to help collate and interpret already existing data about their members. That information is scattered all over the place in surveys, website entries, meeting minutes, statements to the Congress, donor reports, and their own records. The communities have asked the students to produce the consolidated profiles needed to lobby for their rights.
That’s what engaged social science or co-knowledge generation is all about—people with different skills coming together as caring persons in activities of co-creation, co-implementation, co-ownership, and co-benefits. The people acquire the information they value and, in the process, improve their own technical skills. The students learn about urban citizen agency and begin to comprehend that urban informal settlers deserve the “respeto (respect)” and “dignidad (dignity)” they seek.
Mary Racelis, PhD, is a Lecturer in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology of Ateneo de Manila University and a research scientist in the Institute of Philippine Culture. Her areas of study range from poverty, community development, gender, civil society, and social policy.
Editor’s Note: The views and opinions expressed by the opinion writer do not necessarily state or reflect those of the publication.
