Location
Palermo
Start Date
26-6-2025 3:30 PM
End Date
26-6-2025 4:30 PM
Description
The Bocaue Pagoda Festival has been celebrated annually in the Philippine province of Bulacan since the 1850s to honor a miraculous event in history, where a local woman was saved from drowning in a river by holding onto a floating cross. Since then, the fluvial parade, which consisted of ceremonial barges held every first Sunday of July, steadily gained popularity and attracted pilgrims from within and outside the locality. On July 2, 1993, however, an unfortunate event struck when a large pagoda carrying hundreds of pilgrims and devotees sank due to overloading that resulted in the deaths of 266 people. For twenty years, the traditional river festival was suspended as a safety measure to prevent any similar incident from happening again. Ultimately, festivities were reinstated in 2014 in the hope of reviving the glory of the pagoda festival.
This study is a narration and exploration of events that transpired in Bocaue town from 1993 to 2025 as a result of the so-called “Bocaue Pagoda tragedy” in the local vernacular. This paper will identify the different preventative courses of action enacted by the local, provincial, and national government to address crowd control and dynamics during the actual occasion. It will also analyze the effectiveness of various measures currently in place aimed at mitigating risks and hazards during celebrations. Central to this paper is the use of collective trauma theory as the main framework of study. The author will perform a document analysis of the existing literature about the Bocaue Pagoda Festival and conduct semi-structured interviews with key informants and pilgrims as principal methodologies. More than thirty years since the tragic event, there is now a need to revisit the past and draw some reflections as people collectively learn from human errors.
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DOI
https://doi.org/10.21427/17j3-q002
Included in
E1) Revisiting the Bocaue Pagoda Tragedy in the Philippines: Personal Reflections and Lessons Learned Thirty Years After
Palermo
The Bocaue Pagoda Festival has been celebrated annually in the Philippine province of Bulacan since the 1850s to honor a miraculous event in history, where a local woman was saved from drowning in a river by holding onto a floating cross. Since then, the fluvial parade, which consisted of ceremonial barges held every first Sunday of July, steadily gained popularity and attracted pilgrims from within and outside the locality. On July 2, 1993, however, an unfortunate event struck when a large pagoda carrying hundreds of pilgrims and devotees sank due to overloading that resulted in the deaths of 266 people. For twenty years, the traditional river festival was suspended as a safety measure to prevent any similar incident from happening again. Ultimately, festivities were reinstated in 2014 in the hope of reviving the glory of the pagoda festival.
This study is a narration and exploration of events that transpired in Bocaue town from 1993 to 2025 as a result of the so-called “Bocaue Pagoda tragedy” in the local vernacular. This paper will identify the different preventative courses of action enacted by the local, provincial, and national government to address crowd control and dynamics during the actual occasion. It will also analyze the effectiveness of various measures currently in place aimed at mitigating risks and hazards during celebrations. Central to this paper is the use of collective trauma theory as the main framework of study. The author will perform a document analysis of the existing literature about the Bocaue Pagoda Festival and conduct semi-structured interviews with key informants and pilgrims as principal methodologies. More than thirty years since the tragic event, there is now a need to revisit the past and draw some reflections as people collectively learn from human errors.