Pangasinese Erotic

The Pangasinense are the people of the salt — the name of their homeland and their language both come from asin, the word for salt, a reference to the coastal flats along the Lingayen Gulf where salt-making has been a livelihood for centuries. They occupy the western half of the central Luzon plain in the Philippines, a stretch of fishponds, rice paddies, and river deltas hemmed in by the Cordillera to the east and the South China Sea to the west. They are one of the larger lowland Christian groups of the Philippines, but they are not a particularly loud one in the national imagination — overshadowed in tourism by the Ilocanos to the north and the Tagalogs to the south, and accustomed to that position.

The Pangasinan language is Austronesian and belongs to the small Northern Luzon branch, which makes it a distant cousin of Ilocano and Kapampangan rather than a dialect of either. It is its own thing: a language with a literary tradition that predates Spanish contact, and one of only a handful of Philippine languages with an unbroken record of native poetry — the tagaumen and other oral forms still surface at weddings and town fiestas. The language has lost ground in the twentieth century to Tagalog and English in school and to Ilocano in the northern uplands, and a sizable minority of ethnic Pangasinense now speak Ilocano at home. This linguistic squeeze is one of the quiet anxieties of the region's cultural institutions.

Catholicism arrived with the Spanish in the late sixteenth century and is the dominant religion, though the older Aglipayan church has a real foothold here, a holdover from the revolutionary nationalism of the late 1800s. The town fiesta — patron saint, procession, brass band, gambling tents at the edge of the plaza — remains the organizing event of the social year. Pangasinan was also the staging ground for the Palaris Revolt of 1762 against Spanish rule, a fact that locals tend to mention and outsiders tend not to know. The economy still leans on what the geography offers: bangus milkfish from the gulf's brackish ponds, rice from the central plain, and the salt that gave the place its name. Daet, Dagupan, and Lingayen are the towns that anchor it; the rest is farmland, jeepneys, and the long flat road north.