Mandaluyong: Sa Labas

I still spend most school breaks in Frisco. But, this particularly hot "summer" was different. An aunt-- a musician by profession, asked Dada to stay with her for a while. I tagged along, of course. Dada kept house and cooked for my aunt on weekdays; then on weekends we took a bus back to Frisco.

The bungalow where my aunt lived in Mandaluyong, then still a town, was across the perimeter fence of the National Mental Hospital (-- named the Insular Psychopathic Hospital when it opened on December 17, 1928). Patients, in yellow (or was it orange?) colored uniforms, would clamber up the fence to scavenge and beg on the streets; sometimes I see them selling chicken eggs; sometimes I see them buying candies and soft-drinks from the neighborhood sari-sari stores. If not for the uniform and the fact that they were not wearing shoes, they looked pretty much like regular people. My aunt told me that these people had been diagnosed as “cured” and had been discharged, but had opted to stay within the compound as squatters either because their family didn’t want them back or have been abandoned. The really dangerous ones, my aunt explained, were locked up in buildings called Pavilions; she pointed out a building, I think it was Pavilion 4, in the compound and told me that it was where Valentin de los Santos was locked up.

Valentin de los Santos or Tatang as he was called by his followers, was the Supremo of the Lapiang Malaya.

Tatang, a Bicolano and by then already sixty years old, founded the Lapiang Malaya in the 1940s. The sect had millenarian Rizalista roots, but Tatang added a distinctly martial element to the sect. Followers brandished bolos, believed in the anting-anting and carried protective oraciones. The Lapiang Malaya remained relatively innocuous until the Philippine Constabulary (PC) uncovered a plot by some of the cultists to take over the local government of Albay province; in 1957, the Lapiang Malaya was shoved into the national spotlight when Tatang registered his group as a political party and ran in the presidential elections against Carlos P. Garcia. Tatang fared poorly in the elections; Tatang would again run in succeeding presidential elections, faring poorly each time. Things came to a head in 1967, when Tatang demanded that Marcos should step down as president. The demand was met with snickers, but when nearly 500 Lapiang Malaya adherents congregated in Pasay City, the Philippine Constabulary took notice; Tatang’s followers were armed with bolos and dressed in blue uniforms with red and yellow capes. They had marched from their hovels in the paddy fields of southern Luzon. Their objective: to march to Malacanang and overthrow Marcos.

As they lined up for the march, PC troopers blocked their path. The 380 or so cultists were unafraid. They believed that the pebbles they held in their mouths rendered them immune to bullets; waving their bolos, the cultists charged into the stuttering M-16s and Carbines; within minutes, more than 30 lay dead, more than 40 wounded; the rest were arrested for sedition and put in prison. Tatang was hauled up to the National Mental Hospital were he was reportedly killed in his sleep by other mental patients.

It took the Filipino people sometime to get wind of what Marcos was up to and twenty more years to do something about it; not Valentin de los Santos; he saw it right away and took action. He was a visionary.

(N.B.-- remnants of Lapiang Malaya maintained otherwise re the last days of Valentin de los Santos: they say somehow Tatang got out, lived on as a recluse in a mountain top in Nueva Viscaya near the town of Solano; and died at a ripe old age. A community had been established there and the Lapiang Malaya continue to exist in seclusion there; they call it Vucal ng Pananampalataya; led by a third-generation descendant of Valentin de los Santos.)