My Published Articles for ViewsHound: Chapter 3: Ancestral Roots of the Nieva Clan of Marinduque

Monday, July 27, 2015

Chapter 3: Ancestral Roots of the Nieva Clan of Marinduque

This is the continuation of Rene's Nieva article on the ancestral roots of the Nieva clan from Marinduque. Chapter 2 was posted on July 13, 2015. Enjoy!

CAMALIG: ROOTS OF THE NIEVAS : In 1579, ten years after the first group of Spaniards led by Captain Luis Enriquez de Guzman and including Augustinian priests arrived in Camalig and started colonizing and Christianizing the residents, a Spanish galleon led by shipmaster Mateo de Saz and Captain Martin de Goiti also came to thesettlement. They formally took it over as a Spanish colony, one of the earliest places in the Philippines to be brought under the Spanish flag. They were accompanied by Franciscan missionaries Father Pablo de Jesus and Fr. Bartolome Ruiz who continued the colonization drive initiated by the Augustinians.

Camalig and the rest of nearby settlements that would eventually comprise the province of Albay always had abundant natural resources and a thriving agricultural industry consisting of coconut, rice, sugar and abaca plantations. This was because they were close to Mayon Volcano, which through regular eruptions throughout the ages has deposited rocks that have decomposed and weathered into rich soil.

Not content with being just farmers, albeit prosperous ones, the more adventurous and enterprising residents of Albay including the Nievas of Camalig engaged in trading in these farm product and putting up plantations elsewhere during the Spanish era. This brought them westward to provinces in the Southern Tagalog region including Batangas, Laguna, Tayabas (the former name of Quezon), Marinduque (formerly part of Tayabas) and Mindoro.They eventually settled in these provinces, growing further in wealth and political over the three centuries of Spanish rule. They became members of the Illustrado class that was considered just below the governing Spanish overlords.

Further proof that the Nievas were originally from Camalig was when sometime in late 1990s. I met a Manila congressmen, Ernesto "Banzai" Nieva. Intrigued by the similarity in our surname, I asked him if he was a native of Tondo, which he represented in Congress. He said his family moved to Tondo from Laguna when he was young but as far as he knew his forebears were originally from Camalig. He was then being groomed by the Liberal Party in Manila (led at the time by his ally and my Ateneo classmate Lito Atienza) for either Vice Mayor or Mayor. But unfortunately he died quite young (only in his late 40s or early 50s at most).

Not all the Nievas have left Camalig for parts beyond though. To this day, there are still residents of town who carry the Nieva surname. One time, while on a tour of the Bicol region with some friends, we passed by Camalig on the way to Legazpi and I saw houses with signs on which were written Attorney this or Doctor that. My research also showed that Nievas have occupied local government positions over the years or owned businesses such as gaming cock farms and the like.

I've also seen photos of some Nievas in Camalig over the Internet and noticed that they were invariably good-looking, which must prove that this must have been a common Nieva family. Said good looks have been bolstered and further enhanced through intermarriages with men and women from other races like the Spaniards, the Chinese, and even the French.

Personal Note: I have met more than a hundred of Macrine's relatives here in the US and in the Philippines . They are not only good looking, smart but also humble. Most of them have accomplished lives and successful financially. Of course, there are a few exceptions. If you are following this series, do you know the ancestry of your surname? I will be glad to hear from you.

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Guest Article from Susan Creamer Joy

In The Silence, by Susan Creamer Joy.

Today's guest article is from Susan Creamer Joy. Susan is one of my favorite authors in the ViewsHound community. Susan writes, draws, paints and cobbles together art from found objects making a variety of creations from jewelry to religious shrines. She frequently sports burns on her fingers from her soldering iron, paint on her palms and ink under her fingernails, but her hair is usually combed. When she is not losing time in the creative vortex of her studio, she is likely to be putting her knowledge of metaphysics and esoteric principles including Tarot, numerology, astrology and graphology to good use in consultations. Her children are grown, her husband still works and her four dogs believe she needs serious help. The title of her article is "A Matter Of Love And Death". Thank you Susan.

By the time they reached my bedroom door, I was already sitting up – my stomach ratcheted in the tense grip of an unnamed anxiety; my pillow, unburdened of my drowsy head.

To this day I cannot explain how I heard them coming up those stairs in their bare feet or how I knew that my father struggled to hold his composure as my mother unnaturally clutched at the folds of her dressing gown and followed him through the dark just a little too closely.

As the wooden groan of those old stairs tore into my bones that morning like a hacksaw, all I could see between the predawn shadows was the letter I’d written just hours earlier to my boyfriend, Chris, propped against the lamp on my desk across the room awaiting an envelope.

I had not slept well. It was late November and there had been so many changes since the middle of August when he left for the Air Force in Texas to begin basic training and I began my third new school in as many years.

The conspiracy between fate and the last surge of the Vietnam draft had broken apart the every-waking-minutes of our two-year union with unceremonious indifference. All that night my sleep had been infested by difficult dreams and by the illogical fear that truth and reality were merging into a darkness only a martyr could grasp; and at sixteen, martyrdom seemed reasonable only for the nuns among the poor in Bangladesh

I tried to remind myself that he would be home on leave for Thanksgiving in another few days. It was the only tether to calm I could find, but reviewing the facts offered little relief from my baseless fears.

Chris had been girding his pacifist sensibilities preparing to fight in an unpopular war that had not yet slaughtered its last innocent. I was hovering just over the line of inclusion at an exclusive girl’s school – missing him – and finding myself at odds with these young women and their attachment to propriety and with the prep-school veneer that blinded them to the fact that they were no better than anyone else.

Neither one of us was coping well with the worlds into which we were respectively summoned, and although we both knew that the best hope for any future together depended upon our individual successes apart, it was far from comforting most days.

But in spite of our discomfort, we each did our best; and, of course, there were the letters: Thin, plain-paper sheets with row after row after row of inky blue words penned with the intensity and awkward locutions of a love learned too soon. It had come down to just that little, but without them, I would have had nothing.

Chris was learning to fly. I was learning to drive, and both of us were aching to transport our souls to an earlier time through the hallowed intercourse of memories and dreams. Of course, as with all progress, there was the positive element: We were both clean and drug-free for the first time in years.

Now, without pretense, both healthy cognition and sincere motivation surfaced regularly in my psychology and prompted me to care about myself and to arbitrate against all temptation for a better standing in the world, in school and in my own eyes. I even did my homework.

No longer was I escaping today but, instead, living for my day of escape. Lying still in the dark of my room, I listened to the slow, padded footfall of my parents approaching and looked to the floor and to my history book half hidden beneath the nightstand where I’d tossed it the night before. Even in this early morning dark I could make out the swirls and stars in colored marker and the bubble-formed letters that spelled C H R I S in soft, juvenile curves on the torn book cover I’d fashioned out of a brown paper grocery bag.

I vaguely remembered throwing it there somewhat hastily. I had been doing my homework when a sense of urgency struck and I realized I had not written him as I promised I would and glancing at the clock, I noted it was nine-twenty-three. Why that mattered I had no way of knowing in that strange moment, but within hours, it would be one I would never forget; and although I was becoming drowsy and still needed to finish my work, I felt beyond reason that my letter to him could not wait.

So, I wrote. I would always write. I would always be there. He would always be there.“Suzi."It was my name spoken in the smooth and familiar voice of my mother, although weighted and slow, her head bowed to her chest almost as though she were speaking only to herself.

"Suzi.” She said it again, this time with sharp gravity, like a chisel against stone.

As if on cue, I leaned forward, flanked now by my parents who were sitting on either side of my bed.

I had been waiting for them. I don’t know how. I didn’t know why. The lights in my room remained off, but it seemed that the darkness clung more to them than to me, as though they were holding it there – away from me to give me enough light to see through the next moment. They were crying. My father was crying. My father. “Suzi. We have something very, very bad to tell you." Chris has been in a car accident." And he was killed."

If the world moved forward from that moment, I could not know it. f there were air around me worth breathing, I could not take it in. And if there were another sound beyond the leaden bellow of my own raw grief, I could not hear it.

"Who am I going to talk to? Who am I going to love?” I wailed. Who will love me? In that sodden moment violated by the intrusion of a predawn light that had no business rising, everything I ever believed about happiness, hoped for in life, trusted in or held as my own was annihilated.

After that – there was no after that. After that came months of hollow redundancies that would inform my way of being in the world for years to come. A serial commitment to waking up each morning, remembering he was gone and dedicating the remaining hours to forgetting. To that end I would try anything, drink anything, ingest anything, inject anything. It was a slow and arbitrary suicide by indifference.

Many years later, at 25 years-old and in the midst of a pharmaceutical free-fall leaning dangerously close to terminal, I discovered that I was expecting a child, and after a decade of forgetting, I remembered. I named him Griffin after the legendary winged lion, a symbol of the divine because what he inspired and the miracle that he was, were nothing less. I remembered and I loved again, and I went on to marry and to the gift of two beautiful daughters.

Today my son is struggling not to drown in the same well of drug abuse and apathy that almost swallowed me – his great, divine wings clipped by his own hand; and while it is up to him to restore his place in the sky, I will do my best to help provide an open runway.

In the meantime, I will continue soaring for both of us; bequeathed as I have been, with a determination to fly from a boy whose ragged fate precluded that dream.

Death took one young man from me once upon a dark time. If it has any intention of coming for this one, it will have to go through me. And trust me, it will be in for one hell of a fight.

Note: If you enjoy this article, please let me know.

Monday, July 27, 2015

Chapter 3: Ancestral Roots of the Nieva Clan of Marinduque

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