Opening Remarks for "Contested Waters: Review of Literature on Water Contestations"

A pleasant Saturday morning to everyone in attendance.

My relationship with Mr. Ryan Dave Rayla goes back at least a decade. He’s one of two people I discreetly refer to as “ex friends,” meaning I was friends first with a former significant other of theirs before I had the privilege of meeting their acquaintance. Ironically, while I don’t really keep in touch with the aforementioned significant others anymore, I have since cultivated quite the fruitful and intellectual friendship with these “ex friends” of mine.

I first met Ryan, or “Ryry” to many of his peers, when we were both undergraduate students at what was then USC’s College of Arts and Sciences in the Talamban Campus. I was a Linguistics and Literature major, while he was majoring in Political Science. Upon first impression, and I’m sure many will share this observation of mine, Ryan didn’t strike me as the jolly, uppity type. I honestly found this rather odd. We were college students, after all, and we had our whole life ahead of us. We were focusing on disciplines we were genuinely passionate about, we were both performing well academically, and according to government reports and media outlets at the time, the economy was looking promising, which boded well for us millennials who were just about to be churned out into the labor force.

Ryan’s disposition didn’t seem to reflect the optimistic outlook I had of the country and the future of our generation of Filipinos, who were born in the wake of the 1986 EDSA Revolution, and who came of age in the era of Francis Fukuyama’s so-called “end of history,” otherwise known as the apparent triumph of liberal democracy. It was only much later, a few years after we graduated in 2012, that I realized perhaps Ryan, with his constant seriousness bordering on glumness, was on to something. The years following 2016 saw a wave of unconventional politicians, whom many scholars and observers described as “populists,” ascend to the highest office of their respective countries, including our own. With this came interrogations, diminutions, or even outright rollbacks of many basic democratic rights and principles we of the post-EDSA generation took for granted. Public servants were suddenly exempted from making crass jokes, for example. Or human rights were seen less as a pillar of modern society and more of a hindrance to law and order. And dark periods in the past were slowly but surely coated with the smelted gold of false narratives.

Many millennials, including a good number of our batchmates and college contemporaries, eagerly allowed themselves to be subsumed by this wave. Our generation, which had been frequently told to keep politics out of discussions, raised to believe that history could never go backward, and weaned on Hollywood movies that were broadcast on local cable channels and reinforced the hyper-individualist values system of the neoliberal era, had developed sociopolitical views that were clouded by our privilege, which in turn prevented us from placing ourselves in the position of our less fortunate brethren, such as, say, drug dependents or slum dwellers forced to vacate their homes to make way for quote-unquote “development.”

Ryan, being the very embodiment of Aristotle’s “political animal” from a young age, which was admittedly quite rare for middle-class millennials growing up, not only watched these unfolding events like a hawk but also ably resisted the allures of twenty-first-century authoritarianism. His being expressly political safeguarded him against the seemingly “pangmasa,” anti-elite rhetoric of certain popular politicians of the time. I, on the other hand, was wavering between bafflement and disheartenment, but like most students of the Humanities, I found some enlightenment in theory. In the opening pages of his seminal text The Political Unconscious, literary scholar Fredric Jameson demands that one must “Always historicize!” In other words, place everything within the greater context of history. In doing so, one not only decenters one’s individuality and humbles him or herself before history, but one also arrives at a realization as to how we got to the present. Once the past becomes clearer and more concretized, then ideally, such knowledge would be used to chart a better course for the future, with the aim of not repeating our forbearers’ mistakes.

When I first learned about Ryan’s grad-school thesis from a mutual acquaintance of ours, Gino Paradela, also of USC, my interest was suddenly piqued. The general topic was on the politics of water in Cebu, and this insight could not have been any timelier. Both Mr. Paradela and I were seated across each other in a classroom in USC’s Downtown Campus, availing ourselves of the electricity and wi-fi there as power and internet lines had yet to be restored in the wake of Typhoon Odette’s onslaught. Another resource that was also difficult to come by during this time, and which was already scarce to begin with in Cebu—judging by the number of times MCWD makes its service-interruption posts—was of course water. To vividly illustrate just how dire the water situation was the day after the typhoon, Mr. Paradela described the scene in downtown Cebu as something straight out of a Mad Max movie, with hordes of citizens wielding containers of various sizes desperately congregating around any source of water they could find.

December 2022 marks a full year from those days of darkness and despair, and I’m certain at the individual level, we have each come away with our own learnings from that experience. But what about learnings and the inevitable decisions that we need to make as a collective, as a society? How do we as Cebuanos, no strangers to water shortages even on regular days, ensure that not only does this precious resource remain abundant but that it also gets evenly distributed?

I cannot promise you that Ryan’s lecture today will answer these questions. But what I can assure you is that, with his mental acumen and years of research, he will definitely shed light on Cebu’s water situation and elaborate on why things are the way they are today. What we do with this knowledge is ultimately up to us.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Vicente Sotto Lecture Series for December 2022. May the next hour and a half be full of newfound knowledge and wisdom.

Daghang salamat!