PEACE-MAKER
Today, Dagupeños, together with thousands of local and foreign tourists, flock to Dagupan City’s central business district for the grilling of thousands of Bangus (milkfish), which is the highpoint of our city’s Bangus Festival.
The festival is a yearly food and culture celebration which promotes our city’s Bangus industry. It is held for some two weeks from late April until early May, with the grilling of Bangus in the streets on April 30 as the highlight of the occasion.
Dagupan City produces an estimated 16,000 tons of milkfish annually. Indeed, the Bangus Dagupan is “the juiciest and tastiest” in the world.
As a Dagupeño, whose education was helped financed by Bangus harvests, we are proud of this festival and of our Bangus. Our family owned fish farms in Bonuan just off the Dagupan River, on the eastern outskirts of the city. We cultured Bangus, a brackish-water fish our family harvested in large quantity. The fish farms have been there for many decades, inherited from our forefathers. We studied in high school and college partly on the income we raised from the farms, which is also the case with many Dagupeño families. That is also how our personal “life-long romance” with fish farming evolved.
Since the onslaught of the pandemic in 2020, we have been spending most of our time in Dagupan. We still recall how tremendously devastated this historic city by the Lingayen Gulf was when a powerful 7.7-magnitude earthquake struck it in July 1990. The city has since achieved remarkable development.
History tells us that prehispanic Pangasinan was the center of trade for East Asia. When the Spaniards occupied the Philippines, they made Dagupan and Lingayen the centers of Spanish governance and culture in Northern Luzon. This paved the way for economic prosperity and for Pangasinenses to pursue liberal studies in Manila and in foreign countries.
The building of the Ferrocaril de Manila-Dagupan in 1891 by the Manila Railway Company hastened the transportation of goods and people from Manila and vice versa which bolstered Pangasinan’s economic growth.
Dagupan became a city on June 20, 1947 by virtue of Republic Act No. 170, known as the City Charter of Dagupan, which was authored by the renowned Pangasinense, Speaker Eugenio Perez, who served as the last Speaker of Commonwealth and the first Speaker of the Republic.
Dagupan is where National Artist Victorio C. Edades was born – in Barrio Bolosan. He was known as the “Father of Modern Art in the Philippines.” Our son, Congressman Christopher de Venecia of the fourth district of Pangasinan, authored the law establishing the Edades and Bernal Museum in Dagupan, as a way of honoring Edades and another National Artist from Pangasinan, Salvador Bernal, who was acknowledged as the “Father of Theatre Design in the Philippines.”
Dagupan is also home to the now famous “MacArthur House,” the Home Economics building in the West Central Elementary School which General Douglas MacArthur used as a military outpost in Northern Luzon during World War II.
We are proud that it was also our son, Congressman Christopher, who pushed for the restoration of the “MacArthur House” and its transformation into a tourist destination and a heritage site.
As we wrote in this column much earlier, we actually saw General MacArthur in the Home Economics of the West Central Elementary School, formerly the Dagupan Elementary School, where we studied. We were then nine years old.
Our grandfather, Guillermo de Venecia, served as mayor of Dagupan in the early 1900s.