Chapter 3 – Agno and Burgos

 

The Origin of My Family and a Brief History of the Town
of Agno (Excerpt from the book)

 

     The municipality of Agno is the westernmost town in the province of Pangasinan. Agno could also be the westernmost town of the island of Luzon. The town was originally settled mostly by the ethnic tribal group called Zambals. This ethnic tribe, the original Agnoans, are now generally concentrated in a barrio south of the town near the mouth of the river that flows to the South China Sea called Aloleng. My mother and her siblings spoke the Zambal language very fluently and thus, I believe, our mother’s side of the family, the good-looking Navarretes, have Zambal blood running in their veins. Still embedded in my memory are the almost birdlike sounds of that language when to clarify a point my mother would say, “Say wam-mo say cungco!”  (what you have said to me!) or when angry, would say, “Cay cad-sen!” (get away from there!)

 

     When I was doing researches on the origin of my family, one of my sisters residing on the island of St. Croix in the Caribbean sent an e-mail to me in Toronto, informing me that the family of our mother did not only have the blood of Spanish conquerors but also the blood of Portuguese, British, and Chinese explorers.

 

     I was, of course, taken by surprise! People tracing their ancestry in the Philippines often discover a Spanish friar somewhere in the family tree, their own “skeletons in the closets”, although no one seems to be ashamed about having a friar for an ancestor, some have accepted this revelation as a fact of life. It is actually the same situation that you have read in the famous books of our national hero, Jose Rizal, which historians believe started the Philippine revolution against Spanish domination and remember that he fully used in his novels the Noli Me tangere and El Filibusterismo his main characters Padre Damaso and Maria Clara. As for the other blood lines, it is a fact that the Philippines has more than 7,000 fascinating islands, endowed with very rich natural resources, occupied by friendly, alluring, and attractive inhabitants situated in the vastness of the Pacific Ocean and these islands are easily accessible to foreign explorers and adventurers.

 

     The Navarrete-Najera clan has now spread around the globe and due to intermarriages of the younger generation with other nationalities, the family has become global in pedigree. We now have German, Polish, Mexican, and South American blood in our roots.

 

     I dream of the day when members of the clan could get together in our native town of Agno and our townsfolk and relatives who would link up with us there will be surprised to see an assembly of utterly foreign-looking people, some as tall as the young coconut trees (an exaggeration, of course), noses as sharp as the young bamboo shoots, fair-haired with blue eyes and fair-skinned claiming to be native Agnoans and still boasting of their original famous Zambal and Ilocano blood of their ancestors running in their veins. The clan, in fact, has started the mechanism for the grand reunion to be held in the latter part of 2006, with the author as Chairman of the Planning Committee.