Ethel Martinez will be finishing the final illustrations for Maragtas over the next couple weeks and I’ve just completed a final edit of the text. I’ve carried the vision for this book in my head for over a decade and have spent the last 16 months actively working on it. Seeing it so close to completion has caused me to reflect on my intentions in publishing it, my role in bringing the story to a wider audience, and my hopes for the future.

From the beginning, I’ve tried to be clear whenever discussing Maragtas, that I’m creating it for my children. This history is not my own, although it’s one I’m proud to have adopted through marriage. It is my children’s heritage though, and the story of their direct ancestors’ lives. I may not share those ancestors, but as their father I have a responsibility to ensure that they are aware of, and have access to, that part of their heritage. Publishing Maragtas is a means of ensuring they have access to that legacy.

Connecting my children to their family history is truly what this project is about, and my role is just that: connecting people. I see myself not as a creator, so much as a patron and purveyor. I didn’t write the story, it’s been passed down orally for hundreds of years. I’m just the latest link in the chain, trying to pass the story on to my children in my own way. Because the way I want to tell the story – namely, as a picture book – requires that something new (the pictures) be created, it’s been important to me from the beginning that the artist be of Filipino descent.

Ultimately, my function in the creation of Maragtas has been to:

1. Provide the coordination and financial support for a Fil-Am artist to illustrate a Filipino story.
2. Offer my logistical expertise to ensure the book makes it to publication and reaches as many Filipinos and Fil-Ams as possible.

I’m proud of the work I’ve done on Maragtas, but I don’t consider that work to be creating so much as facilitating the creative work of others and promoting that work.

Looking to the future, there is much more I’d like to do. Maragtas took precedence because it is (at least based in) the true history of my children’s ancestors and important to the overall history of the Philippines. My wife and I have already begun our next project, interviewing her older relatives and documenting her family’s history. So much of her family’s immediate history is at risk of being lost if her uncles, aunts, and grandparents should die before it’s recorded. Once that work is done though, there are many more stories from my wife and children’s datu heritage that deserve to be told, if the time and financial resources can be found (I plan on discussing the finances of Maragtas in a future post).

It’s exciting to be so near the end of the Maragtas project, but to still have so much to look forward to.