Save Daigon

Federico Caballero is gone. When the master chanter of the Sugidanon passed away this past August, Western Visayas lost more than a cultural elder. We lost our region’s only Gawad sa Manlilikha ng Bayan (GAMABA) awardee.

Just one. Since the National Living Treasures program began in 1992, an entire island group practically drowning in history has managed to officially validate exactly one master.

The problem is not a lack of local brilliance. It’s our chronic habit of letting our own history slip through the cracks.

Now, cultural experts are eyeing Daigon — the fiercely guarded Christmas caroling traditions in San Joaquin and parts of Antique. Let’s be honest. Most of us don’t view caroling as high art. We picture flattened bottle caps, makeshift drums, and kids rushing through a song for loose change. We treat it as seasonal background noise.

Elevating Daigon to GAMABA status shatters that mindset. It proves world-class artistry doesn’t only breathe inside climate-controlled museums in Manila. Sometimes, it lives on a dirt road in San Joaquin on a cold December night. Validating this everyday heritage forces us to look at our own back porches and realize we are sitting on gold.

But here is the hard truth — academia cannot do the heavy lifting for us.

The GAMABA criteria are brutal. Proving fifty years of unbroken practice and artistic mastery requires more than a handful of overworked university researchers parachuting into a barangay for a weekend. This requires the ordinary citizen. Pull out your phone. Record your local elders while their memories are still sharp. Dig through those damp shoeboxes for old photographs. If we want the Komposo and Binalaybay to survive, we cannot outsource the archiving. We have to map our own history.

This effort is about far more than regional prestige or the PHP 50,000 monthly government stipend designed to keep a master’s craft alive. Pushing for this nomination forces a desperately needed conversation between generations. It demands that the elders stop just performing and start mentoring. It challenges the youth to learn the chords, the Hiligaynon lyrics, and the history behind them. If we keep treating these traditions like fragile museum pieces, they will simply die out.

Panay is a cultural powerhouse. We know this in our bones. Yet, standing on the national stage with only one recognized living treasure makes us look like a footnote. Championing San Joaquin’s Daigon isn’t an exercise in nostalgia. It’s how we build a unified regional identity. It’s how we force the rest of the country to pay attention.

We have the masters. We just have to care enough to hit record before the music stops entirely.