LANDSCAPE Gemma Cruz Araneta Milonga attracts a lot of attention because her bold markings of orange and black cover her entire back; she looks like an abstract painting when she is asleep, slender body stretched out on a window sill. Once, while waiting for our turn at the vet, a woman (who...
LANDSCAPE Gemma Cruz Araneta One of the paintings I inherited from my father-in-law, Don Jose Antonio Araneta, depicts the first mass, but where it was held remains a controversial issue, now heading towards a full-blown legal battle between the contending sides. The date on this oil painting by F....
Landscape Gemma Cruz Araneta Chapter eight of “Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas”, by Dr. Antonio de Morga, is a glimpse of how our ancestors lived before the Spaniards came. Although the book was published 43 years after Miguel Lopez de Legazpi arrived, the friars’ zealous Christianization had...
LANDSCAPE (Part I) Who was Dr. Antonio de Morga? He was a soldier and a lawyer, an explosive combination, especially if one was also a high-ranking colonial bureaucrat. Antonio de Morga SanchezGaray was born in 1559 in Sevilla, Spain, 38 years after Magellan was killed by...
LANDSCAPE (Part II) How many people read Rizal’s Noli Me Tangere when it was hot off the press? Two thousand copies were printed, a number must have been sold among the Filipino expats and Spanish liberals sympathetic to the cause of indio Filipinos. Rizal sent a copy to Prof. F. Blumentritt whom...
LANDSCAPE (Part I) My younger relatives, sturdy branches of the Rizal genealogical tree, have often asked during family reunions – why Rizal? Why was he singled out? Why was he the only one executed under such dramatic circumstances? He was banished to rot in Dapitan, imprisoned in Montjuich and...
LANDSCAPE The first Holy Mass was celebrated not in the Visayas but in Mindanao because that historical event, that first step to staking territory in the name of God and King, occurred not in Limasawa which is part of the Visayas, but in Butuan (Mazaua) situated in northern Mindanao. Please do not...
LANDSCAPE Gemma Cruz Araneta Like it or not, believe it or not, Cuba and Venezuela are forging ahead of us in this battle against COVID-19 and its deadlier mutations. At this writing, a first case of the dreaded UK variant was reported in Pasay City, which makes one wonder if there are many more...
LANDSCAPE Gemma Cruz Araneta Historically speaking, Cuba is our sister republic. Both of us were colonies of Spain and launched our anti-colonial movements at the same time. In fact, Jose Rizal and Antonio Luna wrote to each other about the Cuban revolution; Rizal observed that the Cayo Hueso (Key...
LANDSCAPE Gemma Cruz Araneta When the presidential elections in the USA were over, I felt it was time to unglue myself from You Tube and go back to listening to local news on AM radio. But when Capitol Hill was attacked on 6 January, breached and occupied by what looked like a...
LANDSCAPE Gemma Cruz Araneta “Maybe, I will have to leave the country,” former US President Donald Trump said, jokingly, in one of his super-spreader rallies. He firmly believed that there was only a one in a quadrillion possibility that he could lose the 3 November elections. Well, he did...
LANDSCAPE The United States of America is no longer a ship at full sail, it seems. Although I am not a US citizen, I am afraid for President Joseph Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris as their lives are and will always be in constant danger. They are the moving targets of...
