The Municipality of Talavera is not endowed with naturally picturesque spots or any significant cultural heritage despite being an old town itself. While its early beginning dates back as far as 1846, no specific accounts on its historic development are fully chartered or documented, except for some fragments and rarities that somehow occasion a kind of historic significance to its otherwise complex development. Its early community of Catuguian formed in 1846 is a good starting point nonetheless.

 

An earlier account about Talavera published in 1890 for example, describes it generally as being situated on “flat land and rests on the margin of the river.”[1] Joaquin Rajal aptly characterizes it subsequently as follows:

 

It lacks a church, parish house, court and schools, and their spiritual administration is equally shared with Cabanatuan, as it has not been appointed since it was formed, […] The neighborhood, made up of Tagalogs, is composed of 5,567 souls who are dedicated to agriculture in irrigated and rainfed land. […] its forests are rich with all kinds of wood and its extensive lands are suited for cattle grazing […].[2]

 

It is worth noting nonetheless, following this cited text, that Talavera’s topographic feature is more suited to agriculture and livestock raising. As described, its lineage, the early Tagalogs, are originally dedicated and knowledgeable farmers and tillers, whose rice and fruit produces are sold to Cabanatuan and other neighboring barrios.[3] With its vast agricultural estate, coupled with its extensive forests and grasslands for its livestock, Talavera’s growth and development are surely preordained.

 

It is not surprising therefore for Talavera, in the course of its development and evolution as a component municipality of the Province of Nueva Ecija since its founding, to be declared as the Gulayan Capital of Nueva Ecija. Said declaration, in some general way or other, recognizes clearly Talavera’s essential role in the furtherance of the agriculture industry in the province. As a matter of fact, its gulayan sa barangay program, although not necessarily unique to Talavera, is in itself an improved version of critical urban gardening, whose origin is traceable to the urban gardening movement of New York in the 1970s.[4] Its distinctiveness takes after a sound conceptual background that is essentially built upon the promotion of community health and well-being. Since its inception to Talavera’s roadmap to local economic development, the gulayan sa barangay has made a number of significant awards and citations, which are, by far, reflections of a sound governance and administration framework. It is not overwhelmingly astonishing, therefore, that Talavera is often cited as one of the most competitive municipalities in the country today and one of the leading resources for agricultural products in the province.

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[1] See Joaquin L. Rajal. Memoria Acerca de La Provincia de Nueva Ecija en Filipinas. (Madrid: Establicimiento Tipografico de Fortanet, 1890), 15.

[2] This is a rough translation of the original Spanish text. Rajal, Provincia de Nueva Ecija, 15.

[3] Rajal, Provincia de Nueva Ecija, 15.    

[4] See Chiarà Certomà. ‘Critical Urban Gardening’. In Think Global, Eat Local: Exploring Foodways, edited by Michael Pimbert, Rachel Shindelar and Hanna Schösler, RCC Perspectives 2015, No. 1: 13.