Caravan cultures throughout the world depict stories of real journeys, discoveries and exploits. They also account for the construction of local histories, territories and market societies. At best, caravan routes map the geoeconomic and the ethnohistoric trail of peoples on the road towards venture capitalism in the earlier centuries. But in the 21st century, the history of caravan cultures remain only in the people’s memory as artifact (or artifice?) and which has been romanticized into bioepics or heroic adventures of legendary men caught in the age of material adventurism from the 13th to 16th centuries. In this day of global network and cyber transactions, it is fascinating and at the same time remarkable how the caravan culture still persists in the Philippines.
Its persistence as a vestige of feudal past in an era of intensified commercialization and industrialization is indeed indicative of uneven modes of development, as it is symbolic of intersecting diverse cultures where the rural locale ventures into the national and into the global with far reaching implications on issues of ethnicity and cultural import.
The cattle caravans of ancient Caboloan continue to peddle their bamboo-based products from the province of Pangasinan to the highways of Metro Manila. These are the ubiquitous cattle-drawn carriages selling hammocks, bamboo chairs and bookshelves we see around Metro Manila.
More than just a cultural icon for tourists, the cattle caravans trace its origins to the ancient Caboloan, an interior ethnic state in the province of Pangasinan. Caboloan refers to a place where bolo (a specie of bamboo) is abundant—which explains why the cattle caravans up to this day peddle goods made from bamboo and rattan. These bamboo-based products are traded in prehispanic times with the coastal villages, especially in "Panag-asinan," where salt was produced. This interior (alog)-coast (baybay) dichotomy and its accompanying trading relations were obscured by the colonial mapping of Spanish Augustinian missionaries, who coming from the coastal town of Bolinao named the entire region as Pangasinan. This prehispanic cultural relations between the interior-coast dichotomy of Caboloan-Pangasinan noted by Scott and Keesing to be vital in the paper of ethnohistories, continue to exist through the living artefact which is the cattle caravan trade.
Locating the cattle caravans of ancient Caboloan is also an attempt at reconstructing local history. Journeying through the caravan routes from the heart of Caboloan to Metro Manila, the cartwheel connects culture and commerce from the village to the metropolis. The cattle caravans’ anachronism in today’s world market economy becomes an assertion of locality and ethnicity in the face of the hegemonic ethnonational and the reifying global system. While the province of Pangasinan is valuated in political terms because of its significant voting population, its ethnocultural history and reality is perceived to be merely part of the mythic kingdom of the Greater Ilocandia. Thus, the cattle caravans serve both as a romantic symbol of an ancient Caboloan culture and as an ethnocultural text amidst the flux of emerging societies and economies.
The Philippines is said to be a "bamboo country" because of its swampy coasts and rivers. Historian Isagani Medina lists several place-names which pay tribute to the bamboo such as Meycauayan in Bulacan, Pasong Kawayan in General Trias, Cavite, Cauayan in Negros Occidental and Caoayan in Ilocos Sur. To add to this list is Caboloan of the interior plains of Pangasinan. While the bamboo industry is spread out in different parts of the archipelago, it is only in Caboloan where the tradition of transporting bamboo-based products through the cattle caravan persists up to this day and age.
Tourism takes delight in this seemingly quaint, exotic, museum piece of cattle caravans parading at the outskirts of Manila, which are occasionally used to attract foreign tourists. The Tourism office however fails to look at the caravan beyond its cultural significance.
In summary, this ethnocultural mapping is deemed important because it privileges the articulation and the life ways of the folk and how their stories, narratives and thought patterns intersect in the elite construction of Pangasinan history. With this presentation, I hope that it deepened somehow your understanding of the popular cultural archetypes such as Princess Urduja and the Virgin of Manaoag. It provides a sense of pride in terms of our roots and origins through the anachronistic cattle caravan and the earlier historical and trading relations between the coastal Panag-asinan and the interior Caboloan.
The Filipino exile abroad will only become alone if he has been totally uprooted from his native soil. But if his soul brings him to his roots even in a foreign land, he will forever remain Filipino or Pangasinan wherever he may be.
( www.asianjournal.com )
Balikbayan
Caravan cultures throughout the world depict stories of real journeys, discoveries and exploits. They also account for the construction of local histories, territories and market societies. At best, caravan routes map the geoeconomic and the ethnohistoric trail of peoples on the road towards venture capitalism in the earlier centuries. 
