Tomorrow is the Feast of San Isidro Labrador

We are an agricultural country, so we find it ironic that Labor Day is a national holiday while the Feast of San Isidro Labrador, since the Spanish times was commemorated as Farmer’s day, is not recognized as a national holiday. It is celebrated only in towns where San Isidro Labrador happens to be the patron saint. Isn’t this enough proof of the low regard that our national officials have for the tillers of the soil? Labor Day should have been just an extension of the Feast of San Isidro Labrador. Labor is labor whether it is done in the fields or factory.

The farmers are the true founders of every civilization. All trade depended on their primitive activity and later even the arts followed. To give labor its due while ignoring the farmers completely shows how little we know our historical traditions.

The first great poetic outburst on the plight of the farmer was Edwin Markham’s Man with the Hoe:

Bowed by the weight of centuries he leans

Upon his hoe and gazes on the ground, The emptiness of ages in his face, And on his back the burden of the world.

The man with the hoe was a subsistence farmer. It was the plow with its corresponding draft animal that really brought about the agricultural revolution. The tiller of the soil graduated to a surplus farmer. People could buy their surplus stock and become full-time weavers, barbers, carpenters, writers, singers, painters, dancers, architects, lawyers and politicians. It was the farmers that liberated man.

We would have no Labor Day if we never had a Farmer’s Day. The irony is that now even Labor Day is just a non-working day. There is no real celebration to honor labor for the vital contribution it makes for the country. We should put things in their proper perspective and start by paying homage to our farmers.

Two of the most touching fiestas we have ever witnessed are the carabao festival of Pulilan, Bulacan and the Pahiyas of Lucban and Sariaya in the province of Quezon. The former is our greatest tribute to the carabao. The carabao festival represents our finest tribute to Filipino-animal relations. In India, there is a legend that man emerged clinging on a carabao’s tail. The Filipino farmer did emerge with the carabao that was the perfect draft animal for wet cultivation. Only the carabao’s splayed hooves can operate on the muddy rice fields. The Spaniards introduced the plow as the instrument of San Isidro while the carabao was the animal of San Isidro. And so in Pulilan, the feast of San Isidro starts very early in the morning, when the bovines are bathed and shaved and their horns and hooves are rubbed with oil and given a shine. Then they are marched in procession carrying images of San Isidro and the farmers’ paraphernalia. When they get in front of the church, they literally kneel. Time was when it was generally believed that all animals knelt during Christmas Eve to honor the Savior who was born in a manger. This has been immortalized in a poem by Thomas Hardy entitled "The Oxen".

Christmas Eve, and twelve of the clock

Now they are all on their knees.

The pahiyas of Quezon is the greatest color spectacle of all Philippine fiestas. The streets literally look as if a rainbow had splurged it with colors. And the colors consist of colorful kiping, a rice paste shaped into a leaf and tinted in brilliant tropical colors.

We can’t think of a better way of commemorating the Feast of San Isidro than by observing its fiesta in these towns of Bulacan and Quezon.