Every Juana is a Queen Mother
It’s the 110th year of Mother’s Day—a holiday officially decreed by the American president Woodrow Wilson in 1914—and nowhere else is it more more fiercely marked than in the Philippines.
Could it be that’s because we’ve been celebrating mothers for centuries? Some say that the first-ever Filipina mother could have very well been Juana, wife of the Rajah Humabon of Cebu.
Described in Antonio Pigafetta’s famous chronicle of Magellan’s arrival in the Philippines, the newly baptized Juana was described as a mesmerizing creature, more siren than mom. The Italian nobleman turned travel writer would gush: “The queen was young and beautiful, and was entirely covered with a white and black cloth. Her mouth and nails were very red, while on her head she wore a large hat of palm leaves in the manner of a parasol, with a crown about it of the same leaves, like the tiara of the pope; and she never goes any place without such a one.”
Pigafetta would capture her so often in his diaries and in so much detail, he might as well have been Bryan Boy chronicling the wasp-waisted Kim Kardashian at the Met Gala. He wrote, “One day, the queen came with all her state. She was preceded by three damsels, each carrying in their hands three of her hats… she wore large silk veil with gold stripes, which covered her head and shoulders. Very many women followed her, with their heads covered with a small veil, and a hat above that… The queen, after making a bow to the altar, sat upon a cushion of embroidered silk and the captain sprinkled over her and over some of her ladies rose water and musk, a perfume which pleases the ladies of this country very much.”
Even more interestingly, the royal consort would be given the name of one of Spain’s most famous females, no less than the mother of the reigning Emperor Charles V, Juana of Castille. This other royal, by contrast, would have such a tragic life, she would become renowned as “Juana la Loca,” having fallen in love and married the short-lived Philip the Handsome. After his unexpected demise, she would travel the country with his corpse, in the hope that he would somehow be miraculously revived.
This Juana would be the grandmother of the man who would name our destinies—Philip II, after whom these fair isles of the Philippines would be eventually named.
It is unknown how many children the Filipina Juana would actually have, but she would become famous throughout our archipelago as the custodian of the most famous infant in our country, the Sto. Niño of Cebu.
Pigafetta would chronicle that very moment: Juana, he said, “arrived with a retinue of forty women” and would become entranced with the beautiful wooden image of the Child Jesus, the sight of which drove her to tears and a plea for contrition.
It would be another three centuries before Juana would be eclipsed by another saintly nanay, Teodora Alonzo, mother of our greatest hero, Jose Rizal.
It was Teodora perhaps—and not Leonor Rivera—who impressed on Rizal the epitome of the long-suffering Filipina. She endured countless torments, including having to journey by foot from Biñan to Sta Cruz to be judged unfairly and suffered the humiliation of having her youngest son visit her in jail.
Gregoria de Jesus, who celebrates her 150th next year, was the diametric opposite. The Supremo Andres Bonifacio is said to have fallen head over heels for her when he first clapped eyes on her in the Maytime parade. She would have a son by Bonifacio but only fleetingly, since the babe would perish shortly after birth. She is thought of as a Florence Nightingale although family legend tells more of her derring-do, smuggling Katipunan documents sewn in the hem of her saya. She was also a master of the art of knife-whittling, and presumably throwing.
Heroic or long-suffering, beautiful or cerebral, every mother is a queen in her own right.