I spent my elementary school vacations at my best friend’s home in Los Angeles, California. We grew up in Historic Filipinotown, an enclave home to the city’s first wave of immigrants from the Philippines. Her home had avocado and orange trees, abundant kudzu, and plenty of leaf cover surrounding it. For a little girl with an urban sensibility like mine, her place was a forest of exploration. On some afternoons we took my dad’s volumes on Philippine medicinal plants and searched for live materia medica in her backyard. We collected leaves that looked similar to the ones drawn in the books, not knowing that certain Philippine plants simply didn’t grow in L.A.’s semi-arid environment.
Bayabas illustration from
An Illustrated Manual of Philippine Materia Medica (1980) by Hermes G. Gutierrez
An Illustrated Manual of Philippine Materia Medica (1980) by Hermes G. Gutierrez
What I recall searching and searching and searching for was bayabas or what we commonly know in the United States as guava. My search in my friend’s backyard was never successful, but bayabas was plentiful in our youth as canned juice. Kern’s Beverages still produces a questionably pink yet delightfully pulpy guava juice that was a treat to consume then.
Birds also like bayabas. Photo credit: Scot Nelson.
It took some 20 years before I tasted the actual fruit myself in the Philippines. The first bayabas plant was introduced to the Philippines during the Spanish colonial period from South America along the galleon trade. Today, the fruit has major economic utility for local farmers and for regional export. Major delicacies and dishes are derived from parts of the bayabas plant, and its high pectin content makes it a prime addition to various Filipino desserts. Because of its antiseptic qualities, bayabas leaves are commonly employed to fight dysentery, tooth decay, and infected wounds.
In the 1990s, the Philippine government was encumbered by its import-dependent pharmaceutical industry. Due to the country’s reliance on imported drugs from transnational pharmaceutical firms, the government established an agency, the Philippine Institute for Traditional and Alternative Health Care (PITAHC), to protect the indigenous materia medica of the archipelago and the knowledge held by traditional health practitioners. In 2012, PITAHC endorsed ten medicinal plants of the Philippines with evidence-based curative value, of which bayabas was listed. This endorsement was to inspire less reliance on Western pharmaceuticals and a greater public investment in the abundant flora of the Philippines.
I’ve spent the last many months in Manila conducting research on the history of botany in the Philippines. The research has been deeply personal. A plant like the bayabas not only carries rich history and contemporary utility, but also personal significance as I wrap up my time in the field. In May of 2018, I joined a Filipina anthropologist to visit a collective of textile weavers in the town of Santiago in the northern Philippine province of Ilocos Sur. My dad came along on the trip. At the collective, only a few weavers actively produce textiles now since several have had to retire in order to provide childcare for grandchildren. On the day we visited, a weaver unfurled a massive textile, one made up of four individual tapestries sewn together to produce a large heavy blanket. Its pattern was that of bayabas leaves.
Detail of bayabas blanket woven in Santiago, Ilocos Sur,
from the workshop of master weaver Corazon Agosto
I fell in love. The size of the blanket alone spoke to the labor and skill of the weavers. While floral iconography like bamboo shoots and pine trees appear in northern Philippine textiles, this bayabas design in particular caught my heart.
The bayabas has been an important plant to my studies, something I continually unearth in Spanish and U.S. archival records on Philippine plants. My dad encouraged me to purchase the blanket not for simply intellectual reasons, but for personal ones, too. He said its red color was for warriors. If there were ever an heirloom worth passing down, he added, it would be something like this. The blanket is with me now. As I spend my last months finishing up my research, the bayabas makes me reflect on the time spent with my best friend in Los Angeles, with my dad in the Philippines, and among sources that have documented weavers and healers who have used the plant creatively and medicinally. I come full circle to my childhood in a different place, a different time, through this special plant.
Detail of bayabas blanket woven in Santiago, Ilocos Sur,
from the workshop of master weaver Corazon Agosto
Specimen of Psidium guajava collected in 1889 by JJ Walsh in St. Lucia.
Photo Credit: New York Botanic Garden via SEINet.
Author: Kathleen Cruz Gutierrez is a doctoral candidate in Southeast Asian studies at the University of California, Berkeley.
