Module 4 - P. Standefer - “Santa Santita”

Two important themes in "Santa Santita" are the cyclical nature of Filipino life and “Road through Tribulation”. The cyclical nature refers to trans-generational patterns in living, the best example of which is the main character and her relation to her mother and the Filipino people of the distant past. Between her and her mother, the main character is rebellious and prefers the life of a teenager who goes on dates with people that her mother would obviously not think are suitable to a life of religious calling. She runs away from home which causes the death of her mom and sends her into a period of self-questioning. As a means of earning income, the main character takes up her mother’s former position as a prayer woman, or someone who accepts donations from others and prays to God on their behalf. She turns out to be very successful because for some reason, God chooses to answer the prayers that she makes for others, but later she realizes that she has actually lost control of her own life and must be responsible for the needy as an intermediary with God. Towards the end of the film, she truly becomes a mirror image of her mother as she prays sincerely to save the rebellious youth’s, her boyfriend, son but is unable to evoke a positive response from God just as the mother prayed for the main character at the beginning of the film but was unable to evoke a positive response during her own lifetime.

My hypothesis of the cyclical nature of Filipino life, including this mother-daughter cycle is a token example of what happened, and continues to happen, to the Filipinos as a people. Although there was no evidence within the film that this was a long-running cycle other than the fact that the whole female line mentioned in the film became prayer women, I think the filmmaker tried to make this connection. The beginning of this cycle was when missionaries from colonial Spain came to convert the Filipinos. The Filipinos were in a similar rebellious, anti-religious calling state when the “motherly” Spaniards prayed and proselytized for their conversion. The end result was the move from Animism to Christianity, or an overlay of Christianity on top of Animism if you believe localization of religion happened, and that Filipinos essentially became “prayer women” which was passed from those early Filipinos down through generations until it reaches the characters in this film. As noted above, there is very little empirical evidence of this in the film which is why it is just a hypothesis.

The second theme, or “Road through Tribulation”, refers to character development in a story where the character begins in a state of being lost although they do not realize it, then a state of difficulty where many challenges and misfortunes confront them, and finally in a state of being found or at peace with their fortune/life. Most characters in this film are affected by this theme. The boyfriend of the main character is one such example. The boyfriend is in a state of rebellious, bad boy-style behavior when he first meets the main character. During the course of the movie, he kills a person and experiences the death of his son which causes him to question many things, including the existence of God, but finally finds peace after his incarceration.

Moving back to the main character’s predicament after her mother’s death, the viewer sees a certain amount of hypocrisy practiced by the Church leaders, especially the main priest. The main character is essentially an unskilled laborer doing the exact same job as her mother had done and that others were still practicing, but she is denied use of the Church for her new profession. Being a prayer woman or selling rosaries like she did at the outset of the film are the only jobs she knows and can survive with, but the Church denies her even that and so are condemning her to possible starvation. Since the Church by the standards of John 2:12-25 is already a den of iniquity and Capitalism which warrants its complete destruction on theological grounds, the main character’s denial of the use of the Church for subsistence income is an ethical violation rather a moral one.

So the reader does not mistake my condemnation of the Church above for an attack on Capitalism, I would add that after disregarding religious ideals there is not a single system of economics that allows, in my opinion, the opportunity to live ethically more than Capitalism. To qualify that last sentence, I also have to note that the factor of humanity, both the good and bad aspects, is an integral part of this argument. Living ethically requires a goal-oriented life because to live ethically means that a person must put themselves in a position to ensure the survival of those with which they come in contact. This includes both not exploiting others for unneeded profit (like in colonialism) as well as having the means to help those in need. In this argument, to live aimlessly or to waste time/be lazy is actually unethical because by not acquiring money, property, political favors, knowledge, etc. a person is stating their indifference to the plight of people who were not blessed with an easy life.