My most cherished possession is a turn-of-the-century watch. It’s a gold Omega pocket watch, with the name of its distributor, Levy Hermanos, and their store, La Estrella Del Norte, printed below the Omega logo. The back of the case is filigreed with flowers and a Swiss chalet. The watch belonged to my maternal grandfather, Horacio Reynado Estrada, who inherited it from his maternal grandfather.

I received it when Lolo died in 2006. He placed it in a wooden box, with a note saying it should go to me, his eldest grandson, and he gave it to my mom for safekeeping. Tucked into the backend of the watch—where men often kept portraits of beloved women—is another folded note—a short Reynado family tree in his handwriting.

I once saw the watch as reflecting a symmetry of familial affect. Lolo Horacio, a medical doctor and professor of Pharmacology at the University of the Philippines, was raised mainly by his grandfather, Ramon Reynado, a local politico who was one of the founders of Bautista, Pangasinan. I, in turn, grew up in Lolo’s faculty housing at UP Diliman. And for as long as I can remember, Lolo Horacio displayed a photo of his Lolo Ramon above his work desk. When I moved to my present office at UC Berkeley, I placed a photo of Lolo Horacio on my desk. He watches over me now as I write—cigarette in hand, in a V-neck wool sweater and a silver tie.

We all live by family fictions, and here was my family fiction: Lolo Horacio’s decision to betray his class made us who we are—thinkers and academics instead of oligarchs. And Lolo became the person he was because of his maternal grandparents. I imagine many other scions of the principalia live by similar fictions, either out of sentimentality or misplaced self-importance. Whitewashing historical family sins can also justify present-day privilege. It’s a reason why the Filipino elites commission biographies of their ancestors—a way to head critical historians off at the pass.

We rarely interrogate our family fictions because they are often passed down to us by people we love. Even when that love frays, we hang on to these fictions because they are frozen in comfort-coated time. We have neither occasion nor reason to challenge these fictions. But what happens when one is forced to revisit these fictions by profession and circumstance? Last year, I discovered that Ramon Reynado was a criminal—not just a criminal but someone who exploited the less fortunate for personal gain.

My family fiction was quaint at its best and moralizing at its worst. The Estrada family was of old wealth, related to some of the most recognizable names in Central Luzon, most notably the Aquinos of Tarlac. Lolo was the sixth of seven siblings (four boys and three girls), and he was odd by comparison. Lolo’s siblings married within their class and parlayed local power into national influence. Lolo’s sister, Eva, wed Teodoro Kalaw Jr., and became an opposition senator during the Marcos administration. His other sister, the poet and playwright Nina, married into the vast wealth of the Puyat family. These two sisters were prominent, but not as prominent as their primo, Ninoy, for whom they tied yellow ribbons around the city in 1983.

Lolo was not exactly the black sheep. Medicine was a respectable profession. And he seemed to have been comfortable with his wealth as a young man; Mom tells stories of him and his brothers being some of the first Pinoy men to ride big bikes. But for a few years, Lolo resented his family, who disapproved of him marrying the daughter of a Manila fishmonger.

In anger, Lolo retreated into academia. Together with my Lola Rita, a psychologist and philosopher, they built a life away from the Estradas in the narra-canopied faculty housing of Diliman. By the time Mom was growing up, resentments had faded, but class differences remained. Mom and her siblings were the Estrada charity case, doted on and patronized, particularly by Nina, who had no children of her own. She took my uncle on a world tour as a teenager. Mom was forced to attend dinners in Nina’s Apo Street mansion, and made to dine with eligible bachelors. Mom, then a Communist, was neither impressed with nor comfortable amid such gentility.

I came to understand how different we were from the other Estradas. As a teenager, I once talked about how much I disliked airline food at a family reunion—a comment received with blank stares from second cousins who thought it was perfectly edible. I soon discovered they never flew economy. There were subtler differences as well. Lolo Eva sometimes asked me if I would one day run for office or if I had already joined the Freemasons. Estradas, she explained, were Masons and public servants.

We didn’t resent being poorer; it was, in fact, a source of pride. Lolo Horacio didn’t value money like his relatives, so he never fought with them over spoils. As a young father, he refused to tap into his family’s wealth and raised his kids on a professor’s salary. Lolo’s siblings trusted and respected him for his principles. When they set up a family corporation to manage their wealth, Lolo became its president. And when he died, Mom took over.

After Lolo’s death, I sometimes visited his celebrated sister, Eva, in our ancestral home in Sampaloc, Manila. I asked her about martial law politics, the Liberal Party, her cousin Ninoy. And when I missed the old man, I’d ask her about Lolo. She missed him too. What she missed, she said, was a man unique in his values, someone she and all her siblings admired. “Why was he so admirable?” I asked.

“Hijo, your lolo was raised by our lolo, Ramon Reynado.”

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After Lolo Horacio was born, his mother, Demetria Reynado Estrada, fell ill. While Demetria recovered, Lolo was sent to his maternal grandparents. His Lolo Ramon was a former politician who fell on hard times. But through the hard work of his wife (none of my mother’s cousins remember her name, but she is referred to as ‘Lola Grande’) as an itinerant vendor, they were able to work their way back to the middle class. 

From his grandparents, Lolo learned the value of a simple life and working-class values, an education he could not have received in school. Because of his early childhood travels with his grandparents, Lolo spoke multiple languages of the region, including Ilocano, Kampampangan, and his native Pangasinan. 

Lolo was forever attached to his grandparents, and it proved traumatic when he finally moved back to his parent’s home as a teenager. When Mom was a kid, Lolo hated Christmas. He finally told her it was because his Reynado grandparents often promised to visit him during the holidays but never came. 

The beautiful Omega pocket watch must have been bought before Ramon Reynado’s exit from the upper class. It was sold by the jewelry shop La Estrella Del Norte. Opened by the Levy brothers—Jewish traders from Alsace-Lorraine who came to the Philippines after business failures in San Francisco and New York—its first branch opened on Calle Real in Iloilo. The business expanded to Manila, Hong Kong, Singapore, and New York in the early twentieth century. At one point, their Hong Kong and Manila stores became the sole agent for Patek Philippe. 

Images of La Estrella Del Norte conjure a Philippines no longer familiar to us, more patrician and urbane than we can imagine. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were a period of export-fueled wealth. In the nineteenth century, British trading houses, Chinese middlemen, and a depreciating currency nurtured our agricultural exports. These exports, in turn, fueled the wealth of the inquilino families who would produce our nation’s founding fathers like José Rizal. 

In the early twentieth century, preferential trade with the United States, a fledgling nationalist elite that invested in local industry, and wartime demand sustained our good fortunes. Since then, we have never experienced such a long period of net exportation—what economists call secular export growth. This secular growth created the consumer society that led European Jews to make their fortune in Iloilo and Manila after failing in the US. And it led to the conspicuous consumption of a rural gentry that included the Reynados. 

My watch would have been bought in La Estrella Del Norte’s Manila branch at number 10 Escolta, the city’s commercial center. And it would certainly have been purchased before Lolo’s birth in 1924. 

How did Ramon become an itinerant vendor when the history of Bautista town identifies him as “Don Ramon Reynado,” one of the town’s founders and its first chief executive in 1900? Family history, at least as Mom tells it, is vague: There was a court case, Ramon became indebted, and the family fell on hard times. This was wanting, but it was all we had. 

I filled in a few blanks in 2022 while doing archival research in the Bentley Library of the University of Michigan for a project on American currency policy in the Philippines. I am usually very disciplined when looking at archive indices, and I try to pull out only documents related to my research. But I naturally had to make an exception for a file labeled “Ramon Reynado court case.” 

I was looking at colonial-era documents and had a heroic vision of Ramon, so my first thought was: Lolo Ramon must have fought for the Aguinaldo government against the Americans! I teared up a bit when I read the document’s contents, which told a very different story. It was a summary of a provincial board case against Reynado. It also had a letter from the Chief of the Law Division (the equivalent of the present-day Justice Department) asking a Judge Sumulong to examine the case and comment on its recommendations. (This would certainly have been Juan Sumulong, then a judge of the court of first instance and future grandfather of Cory Aquino). 

In 1907, Ramon Reynado was municipal vice president of Bautista (the elected vice mayor); the president was a Dionisio Galvan. Both Reynado and Galvan were rice sellers and business partners, and their main competition was Chinese merchants. In 1904, the municipal council of Bautista passed standards for measuring and inspecting rice merchants’ measures (weights that ensured standardization of rice quantities). The law allowed local police, upon local government orders, to periodically inspect these measures. This local ordinance was replaced by a new national law in January 1907, which created standard measures for the entire colony. Under this new law, inspections could only be conducted by inspectors of the Collector of Internal Revenue—the colonial antecedent for our present-day Bureau of Internal Revenue (BIR). Despite the new law, Galvan and Reynado continued implementing their superseded local ordinance. The case summary noted that the national law had been well-publicized and that local officials should have been aware of it. In his testimony, Reynado insisted he didn’t know about the new law. 

Reynado’s ignorance was convenient. The old law allowed local police to inspect rice measures, and since the police acted on Galvan and Reynado’s orders, they could use the police to harass their Chinese competitors. According to witnesses, police inspectors came once every two or three weeks. And they arrived at inconvenient times, just as sellers unloaded rice into the stores. Other witnesses alleged that police only allowed sellers to unload rice by boat directly in front of Reynado and Galvan’s stores. Witnesses also claimed that rice sellers trading with Chinese merchants were required to pay extra taxes and produce extra paperwork. One claimed that Vice President Reynado would wait on the roads leading to Bautista and tell rice dealers they would not have to pay taxes if they sold their goods directly to him and Galvan. 

The case against Galvan and Reynado stemmed from an incident on February 14, 1907. The complainant, Co Cuayco, alleged that, on that date, the police came to his store while there were ten customers inside. “The policemen wanted to take me and the measure to the municipal building and I asked him [sic] to wait until we had finished unloading,” he told the court. In response, the policeman shot at Co Cuayco, but the bullet hit a sack of rice (the bullet was produced as evidence).

A week later, Vice President Reynado (Galvan was away) sentenced Co to a fine and fifteen days imprisonment for resisting the police. This seems to have occurred after a sham trial where, the Law Division report notes, Co and other accused did “not appear to have counsel and were evidently forced to testify as witnesses for accusations in their own trial.” It adds that “The sentence was immediately carried out” and that Co “was not permitted to go under guard to his store to close the safe and take care of the money on hand.”

There is little more than that, but it was hard to justify Reynado’s actions, however much I wanted to. I was forced to agree with the Law Division’s letter to Judge Sumulong, which said, “Permanent disqualification is none too severe for officials who are willing thus to exploit their helpless constituents.” 

If I had been researching the Reynado case for a book or a peer-reviewed article, I would have tried to find out what happened next. At the very least, I would have checked to see if there was a reply from Sumulong. But I didn’t have the time to dig. In any case, who would care? I sent the document to my parents, my brothers, a cousin, and an aunt. I doubt they read it. I’ve also realized I didn’t want to find out more. Had I found more information, I’d have to continue thinking about Reynado historically. Yet, as a great-great-grandson, I wanted the balm of fiction. 

I watch a fuzzy next chapter in my mind’s eye: Reynado loses his job and source of wealth. Embittered but repentant, he wanders Central Luzon and becomes an honest man. He repays his debts and reestablishes financial stability, and this experience teaches him the value of honest work. In the 1920s, his sick daughter sends him his grandson, Horacio. Determined not to have his grandson repeat his mistakes, he turns him into the Lolo Horacio I knew and the Lolo Horacio I remember through rose-tinted glasses. In this version of the story, I get to keep Lolo. 

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***

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Lolo kept the watch running for his entire life. It’s well-maintained, and it still works. Mom tells me I should eventually use it on formal occasions, once I have more gray in my hair—or lose it entirely. She thinks it befits an older gentleman. It’s missing a chain, but I could buy a Victorian-inspired Albert chain with a bar that would attach to a suit’s buttonhole. 

When I was a teenager, Lolo had the watch repaired at the old UP Shopping Center—the one that burned down in 2018. “Doc, balikan niyo na lang po ito ’pag natapos,” the repairman told him. Lolo refused to leave the watch behind and insisted on watching the entire repair process. 

Memories like these made me believe the watch had more than just sentimental value. At the time, I thought I’d make money if I sold it, even if I had no plans to. While writing this piece, I Googled the watch and found similar ones sold or bought for roughly 30,000 pesos. Not nothing, but not what I imagined. The watch’s value is perhaps fictional. Fictional because I’ve made up exorbitant prices in my head, and fictional because it has allowed me to tell and make up stories. 

I wonder what the future of this watch will be. I don’t have children and don’t plan to. It should probably go to my eldest nephew or niece. It’s had a bit of zagged history anyway; I only have it because Lolo became estranged from his eldest son. 

When I pass it on, I wonder what kind of fictions it will create. If the next owner comes to love me, maybe they’ll tell nice stories about me. 

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