Kapampangans are still debating whether malls are good or bad for the local economy. The debate may as well apply to what they do to local culture.

The Giant Lantern Festival of San Fernando, lubenas of Angeles City, the Candaba’s Malaya Lolas book launch, the Pampanga Arts Guild exhibits—these are just some of the cultural events that may not have happened at all had SM, Robinson’s and Nepo Malls not sponsored them. By picking the tab, the malls saved these traditions from extinction and ensured that Kapampangans will continue seeing them for years to come.

However, there’s just this little thing that the malls are asking in return: can these sponsored events be held in the mall grounds? These modern-day parks ensure a big audience and take care of collateral worries like marketing and technical production. Problem is, the people who go to malls go there to shop, not to watch a cultural show. Thus, they merely stop and stare at a basulto singing contest in one of the mall’s halls, for example, and then leave.

The heavy traffic of shoppers gives organizers the illusion of patronage. Secondly, a folk tradition that is uprooted from its natural habitat and staged in an artificial environment may not be a good thing. Bandurias and acoustic guitars are electronically enhanced or they’d be drowned out by disco music blasting from the centralized speaker system and by the din of the noisy crowd reverberating across the cavernous mall. Because shoppers have not been as psychologically preconditioned for a cultural show as ticketed patrons are, folk festivals held in malls leave no lasting impression on their viewers, and therefore fail in their objective to create cultural awareness. They may continue surviving for many years but that’s all they will do, survive. Failing to take root, they will eventually wither and die.

Malls should push their good intentions one step farther by dropping the condition in the contract and by agreeing to sponsor the festival right in the community where it originated. The community, for its part, should ask only for partial, not total, sponsorship from big business and rely on its own resources.

One good example is Sapangbato’s sabat santacruzan that the Center for Kapampangan Studies asked Nepo Mall to co-sponsor last May. This unique version of the May festival, featuring costumed performers reciting Kapampangan verses in the street as they interrupt the santacruzan, had been sustained by the David Family every year until they could no longer do so starting five years ago. The Center, furthermore will assist the organizers in converting the tradition into a community project in which other Sapangbato families and successful residents donate money, time and resources to revive it and stage it not in the city proper or in the mall but in the streets of Sapangbato where it began God knows how many decades, even centuries, ago.

The Kapampangan Region—Pampanga, Southern Tarlac and a few towns in Nueva Ecija, Bulacan and Bataan—is on the threshold of becoming a part of the expanding orbit of the Tagalog Metro-Manila. Its unique traditions, from the limbun of the northern towns to the libad of the southern towns, are in real danger of being forgotten by a population that has allowed its tastes, lifestyles and priorities to be defined by the giant malls.

Last year, when Robinson’s built the world’s largest lantern in response to SM’s Giant Lantern Festival, Kapampangans finally realized that malls support culture only to the extent that culture supports the malls, i.e., far from being altruistic, malls are in reality after benefits such as the fiesta-like atmosphere that cultural activities create, and the good image they help the malls to project.

Cultural workers and artists may be lured to take advantage of the availability of funds but with the Robinson lantern standing forlornly in the middle of the empty parking lot like a homecoming queen that missed her own parade, they are beginning to wonder if accepting the malls’ offer is worth commercializing, adulterating or uprooting culture.

Malls can only provide the life-support that will prolong the slow death of local culture; they can never restore it back to health.

Here’s a catalogue of those charming, peculiar but vanishing folk festivals: