Love in the Rice Fields

A Brief Biography of Macario Pineda

A Brief Biography of Macario Pineda (1912–1950)Macario Pineda was born in Malolos, Bulacan on April 10, 1912 and died on August 2, 1950, at the age of thirty-eight. His mother, Felisa de Guzman, died when he was very young and his father, Nicanor Pineda, eventually married Marcelina Alcaraz who gave birth to seven daughters. The early death of his mother was a trauma that seemed to have shaped the way Pineda viewed women in general, and mothers, in particular.

Pineda finished high school at Bulacan High School where he excelled in writing and basketball. He eventually worked as a telephone lineman and later, as a municipal clerk. Although his mother owned land, Pineda did not become a farmer. Instead, he chose to become a writer. When he was twenty, he got married and settled down in Barrio San Juan, Bigaa, Bulacan. He and his wife had seven children.

The Second World War as a Defining Moment

When the Second World War broke out in 1941, Pineda earned a living in the early part of the war by selling palay in the towns of Bulacan, a difficult job that wrought havoc on his health. He later joined the local guerilla movement where he did propaganda work in the company of fellow writers such as A. C. Fabian, Mabini Rey Centeno, Brigido Batungbakal, Clodualdo del Mundo, among others. The years spent with the guerilla movement further weakened Pineda’s already fragile constitution.

But this crucial period, 1941–1945, when hundreds of thousands of Filipinos died, when a few fattened themselves up while hundreds of thousands lost their lives in battles, where evil and treachery were unleashed upon a land, caught in the war between two powerful countries, when through trying moments, people sought to survive and lived to tell horrendous tales, had such an impact on Pineda’s consciousness that again and again, he mined the recent past and shaped his fiction through the prism of the disastrous Pacific War.

Writing in the 1930s: The Impact of American Rule

Pineda’s writing career began in the 1930s when he published his short stories in English in Graphic magazine, where he came to know A. C. Fabian, then the magazine’s literary editor. Among Pineda’s English stories were “Auntie Writes the Ending,” “Five Minutes,” “Nila,” and “Cita.” In the 1930s, English was viewed as the language of prestige among the country’s educated middle class. Three decades of Americanization had produced two generations of Filipinos educated within the system designed by the American authorities as part of their social engineering in the colony. The education given to the Filipino students introduced their minds to basically Western ideals meant to promote the interests of the colonizers in their language.

It was through his westernized public school education that Pineda first learned the craft of fiction as practiced by well-known fictionists as Guy de Maupaussant, Sherwood Anderson, O. Henry, to name a few. Filipino writers such as Jose Garcia Villa, Arturo B. Rotor and Manuel Arguilla, Salvador Lopez, among the prominent products of the University of the Philippines, were making waves as writers proficient in the craft of writing in English, even as they dutifully followed the principles of good writing. Young writers were encouraged by their mostly American teachers to observe restraint in the use of language, work through suggestion and indirection to create meanings, construct more complex characters, refuse to wallow in sentiments, avoid direct moralizing, strive to create a “unity of impression” where every detail in the story was deployed to bring about a single effect. Gradually, norms for good writing were being formed, and eventually utilized as instruments for evaluating the work.

However, taking note of the tendency among the English writers to slavishly imitate American and English poems and stories, in both content and technique, the American professors exhorted the Filipino writers to tackle what was uniquely Filipino, to turn their attention away from life in the United States to the minute particularities of life in various places in the Philippines. Mark Twain and Bret Hart were only two of those who produced fiction in the tradition of “local color.”

It was no wonder then that Pineda, then a young father, schooled under American tutelage, decided to write in English in 1935. The alternative for him then was to write in Tagalog, but in the 1930s, the literary scene was dominated by such traditional writers as Iñigo Ed. Regalado, Jose Esperanza Cruz, Fausto J. Galauran, to name a few. Much writing in Tagalog was characterized by some tendencies that, according to prevailing Western norms, ought to be rejected. These features included a convoluted and often meandering plot, an excess of characters who would appear and disappear, the injudicious use of language to describe feelings and emotions to the death, the often “flat” or two dimensional characters, the forced resolution or deus ex machina, authorial intrusions doling out direct moralizing, and other perceived weaknesses.

The Rise of Panitikan: The Revolt of Young Writers

By 1935, the simmering resentment held by the younger, western-educated Tagalog writers surfaced with the founding of Panitikan led by Teodoro Agoncillo. The group opened itself up to western influence and held up as models western stories and poems. In their zeal to obliterate the influence of entrenched Tagalog writers, the powerful clique blamed by the younger writers’ for the latter’s failure to see their works published in the leading Tagalog magazines, the Panitikan writers burned the works of Lope K. Santos, Rosalia Aguinaldo, to name a few, in 1940.

The import of the struggle waged by the Panitikan writers to make Tagalog writing change its direction, to make it more attuned to western technique, was felt in the war years. This goal was achieved thorugh the direct intervention of the Japanese in the realm of culture. Convinced that an effective way of liberating the Philippines from American colonialism was through key culutral processes, the Japanese authorities led by Ken Ishikawa decreed that henceforth, Liwayway could publish only stories in Tagalog. With the absence of any outlet, writers in English such as Narciso Reyes, N. V. M. Gonzalez, Lina Flor, to name a few, shifted to Tagalog.

Pineda and His Fiction

The group was joined by Macario Pineda whose Liwayway story, “Suyan sa Tubigan,” won second prize in the magazine’s 1943 literary contest. Criticized by Lope K. Santos for being merely “a series of photographs,” “Suyuan sa Tubigan” has been generally acclaimed by critics as a “modern” work of fiction, a short story that displayed a high degree of artistry with its apparently casual utilization of sundry impressions and scattered images. Beneath these apparently unrelated images was a series of narratives that celebrated the very ordinary lives and endless tales of love among the people in a manner which was non-traditional. Pineda’s story proved unsettling for older writers used to another and, in that period, predictable mode of writing.

From 1943 until his death in 1950, Macario Pineda was a prolific Tagalog writer who wrote not only short stories but a large number of novels as well. Among these novels were Halina sa Ating Bukas (1945), Ang Ginto sa Makiling (1947), Magat (1948) and Isang Milyong Piso (1950). He also wrote several feature articles on contemporary topics, a weekly column, “Sabi ni Ingkong Terong,”where Ingkong Terong, the village pundit c*m commentator, dished out his views on different topics with humor and lacerating wit. Pineda also wrote radio scripts for DZPI. Popular weekly magazines such as Liwayway and Aliwan published his works, and so did the “artistic” but short-lived magazines such as Malaya, Daigdig, and Sinag-Tala.

The “modernist” qualities that critics such as Teodoro Agoncllo and A. C. Fabian saw in Pineda’s fiction in the first few years of his career as a writer, and for which he received fulsome critical praise, did not wane in his later years, from 1945 until 1950. However, as a writer and a father with seven children to support, Pineda took to writing stories that could not fully sustain the meticulous and self-conscious artistry of the early works. Nevertheless, Pineda’s later fiction continued to explore most of the experiences contained in his early work—the deep love of country, the celebration of life in the barrio despite some of its inhabitants’ weaknesses and vices, the view of war as a struggle Filipinos were forced to fight because the country was a colony, the belief in the possibilities of life and the constant reiteration to search for Utopia, a generally positive attitude towards the family, and a reverence for women, especially for mothers.

To Remember and to Cherish: Pineda in the Nation’s History

In the end, Macario Pineda remained an interested observer chronicling the changes in the barrio he so loved (the barrio before the trauma of the Second World War and the barrio, as a symbol of the country devastated by a horrendous war), speaking with a generally gentle voice in his stories that mirror the rhythm and cadence not only of the people’s language (it was said that Pineda would look for older people in order to ask them for words that approximated the world of the past), but of their lives, the rituals of birth, youth, romance, disillusionment, betrayal, death, and a promise of resurrection.

Although he was not a farmer (a frail health would dog him throughout his life), Pineda had an intimate knowledge of the lay and history of the land and its historical-cultural specificities that his fictional world has preserved for generations that followed him. His stature as one of the greatest Filipino writers of his generation—located between the period of the American colonial regime until the turbulent years after Second World War—will never dim as long as he continues to speak to us through his writing.

In a short career that spanned less than two decades, Pineda masterfully appropriated the resources from tradition, confronted the present and responded to the complex flux of reality with steadfastness and courage. In the process, he constructed a solid body of writing in Tagalog that explored various faces of the nation’s collective experience, objectifying them through his art

The English translation of twelve of Macario Pineda’s most significant short stories that represent his major thematic preoccupations has, as its objective, to enable more readers to acquaint themselves with the fictive world of this writer from Bulacan. Often compared with the English writer Manuel Arguilla for their mutual interest in the multi-facted life in the barrio, Pineda was a product of the same socio-political context defined by colonialism.

This anthology creates a space where an encounter between a distinguished writer in Tagalog, on one hand, and readers, accustomed to English writing, on the other, is facilitated. The stories thus become a site for generating more meanings that should help the readers make better sense of their lives in the 21st century.

The Stories