THE ANGELES CONNECTION OF THE AQUINO OF TARLAC

The Angeles Connection of the Aquinos of Tarlac
[Written for and published in Issue 2 (25 Nov-25 Dec 2000) of Kapampangan Magazine.]
POSTED BY MARC NEPOMUCENO

Tarlac Vice-Governor Hermie Aquino, Rep. Butz Aquino, Sen. Tessie Aquino-Oreta, and Rep. Noynoy Aquino, as everyone knows, belong to the Province of Tarlac’s distinguished family which has long had a tradition of public service—the Aquinos of Tarlac. A lesser known fact, perhaps, is that this tradition started even earlier than 1885, which was when their male forebear, Don Braulio Aquino, began his two-year term as gobernadorcillo or municipal mayor of Concepcion. The tradition started in fact 90 years or three generations earlier, back to a barrio of San Fernando, a barrio which is now the City of Angeles. How and why this is so is certainly worth examining, especially during this month of November, the birth month of the Kapampangan Region’s greatest modern-day martyr, Ninoy Aquino, Don Braulio’s great-grandson.

It all started when Don Braulio, on 4 February 1873 in Angeles, married Antonina Petrona Aguilar, the great-granddaughter of the two couples who had first cleared and settled what was then the barrio of Culiat, the northernmost outpost of San Fernando. These two pioneering couples were Don Angel Pantaleon de Miranda and Doña Rosalia de Jesus; and Don Severino Henson and Doña Placida Paras.

Don Angel began serving the public, as far as the records show, when he was elected capitan or municipal mayor of San Fernando in 1795. In 1797, he also held a position in the Urban Militia of Manila and was the captain of the Hussars Squadron of Pampanga, which assisted the government in the preservation of local peace and order. The de Miranda couple had six children, only three of whom survived to maturity, namely: Mariano, Ciriaco, and Juana.

The public service record of Don Severino is, at present, more scanty—he was elected capitan of San Fernando in 1815. The Henson couple had three children, namely: Josefa, Mariano, and Maria.

While the de Mirandas were the ones who initiated the creation of a new town north of San Fernando and are considered the founders of Angeles, the political emancipation of Culiat from her matrix, San Fernando, in 1829 would not have been accomplished without the help of Don Severino’s son, Mariano. By then Mariano was already the de Mirandas’ son-in-law, having married their only daughter, Juana. By then, too, he had already been conferred a doctorate by the University of Santo Tomas. In fact, Dr. Don Mariano Henson, LL.D., in 1824, was the first lay Filipino Doctor of Laws.

The de Mirandas’ youngest child, Ciriaco, served as the first capitan of the new town of Angeles from 1829 to 1830. He was married to Carlota de Leon of Guagua, the daughter of another pioneer in the field of educational accomplishment—Dr. Don Pedro Leon de Arcega, Ph.D., the first lay Filipino doctor.

Dr. Don Mariano Henson and Doña Juana de Miranda had eight children who survived to maturity. The sixth of these was Juana Petrona, born on 27 April 1834. Sometime in the early 1850s, Juana Petrona married Dionisio Aguilar y Hipolito, probably from San Fernando.

The couple had four children who survived to maturity, the eldest of whom was Antonina Petrona, probably born around the same month and day as her mother. It was this Antonina Petrona who married Don Braulio on 4 February 1873 in Angeles. Although Antonina Petrona’s baptismal record has not been located, it is possible that she was only in her mid-teens at that time (Don Braulio himself was only about to turn 20 years of age). A little more than a year later, the couple’s eldest child, Servillano (the future revolucionario) was born in Angeles. As was quite common at that time, there probably followed many other children, but only three more survived the high infant mortality rate, namely: Brigida, Felisa, and Maria.

As for the background of Don Braulio, he was a schoolteacher, born on 20 March 1854 in Angeles, the son of Don Hilario Aquino and Doña Isabela Lacsamana, both from Magalang. What they were doing in Angeles at the time of his birth will probably never be known with any degree of certainty, but perhaps they had evacuated to Angeles after Magalang disappeared, together with the newly created town of Concepcion, in the flood of 22 September 1853. According to one eyewitness, the flooded area “seemed as if it were a lake.” [It was only in 1863 that both Magalang and Concepcion were re-established on their present sites.]

Don Braulio, as mentioned earlier, served as gobernadorcillo of Concepcion from 1885 to 1887. It is not known whether he was still in office when he died in Angeles on 6 Jul 1887 at the age of 33, or if he had completed his term and had returned to Angeles. He was survived by his four minor children by Antonina Petrona and one minor child (Elena) by his second wife. It is not known when exactly Antonina Petrona passed away, or if he was again a widower at the time of his death, but what is certain is that a testament executed in 1892 by Doña Monica Henson de Dizon confirms that she (Doña Monica) had adopted the four children, with Servillano the eldest at the age of 18 years of age, and had made them her sole and legal heirs. [Doña Monica was their grandmother’s eldest sister who had outlived her husband and their two children, and additionally had no legitimate heirs.] Four years later, the Philippine Revolution against Spain broke out.
Posted 25th June 2013 by marc nepomuceno