Pangangaluluwa: The Filipino Ritual That Came Before Trick-or-Treat

Today in Barangay 667, Ermita, Manila, kids lined up outside a building on UN Avenue for an annual Halloween trick-or-treat — costumes, a line at the door, a bag for candy. Daily Tribune ran the photos this afternoon, and if you scrolled past them, the scene probably looked completely familiar: it's the same ritual American kids run every October 31st, transplanted wholesale. Carved pumpkins, store-bought costumes, candy runs — most of what gets called “Pinoy Halloween” today arrived here through decades of American pop culture and colonial-era schooling, not through anything older.

Here's what those photos leave out: Filipinos already had a version of kids going door to door after dark in costume, asking for something from their neighbors. It just wasn't about candy.

It's called pangangaluluwa — literally “souling.” In Tagalog towns across Quezon and Rizal, the custom traditionally ran around October 31 through November 1, after families came home from visiting the cemetery for Undas (All Saints' and All Souls' Day). Groups — often children — went house to house singing as if they themselves were souls trapped in purgatory, asking households for kakanin, sticky rice cakes, or small alms to carry back to the dead. In Sariaya, Quezon, the custom nearly died out before the local tourism council revived it in 2005, modernizing it a little — rented costumes, advance notice to the households being visited — and using the proceeds to help fund the town's December belen festival. A local historian quoted by the Inquirer at the time still called it “the Filipino version of America's trick or treat,” even while noting that fewer and fewer kids were doing it on their own.

And it isn't one uniform national tradition, either — which matters, because it's tempting to flatten “Filipino Halloween” into a single story the way outsiders sometimes flatten the whole archipelago into one. Pangasinan has its own parallel custom, panagkamarerwa, named for kamarerwa, the Pangasinan word for soul. How a community remembers its dead changes island to island, language to language, the same way nearly everything else here does.

Pangangaluluwa itself sits on top of something even older. Pre-colonial Filipinos didn't need a Catholic feast day to tell them to honor the dead — they were already doing it. In much of Luzon, ancestor spirits, ninunò, were grouped under a broader term, anito, that was simply part of daily life: spirits that lived in rocks, trees, ancestors, the people around you. Visayans used a different word for comparable spirits — diwata — with their own pantheon and their own rituals, led by their own babaylan or katalonan shamans. The vocabulary shifted by region and language, the way it still does, but the underlying instinct — that the dead are owed remembering, not silence — ran through the islands long before anyone built a church on them.

When Spanish missionaries arrived with All Saints' and All Souls' Day, they didn't erase that instinct. They gave it a new calendar date and a new vocabulary — purgatory, souls, saints — and the old practice of honoring ancestors kept going underneath the new name. Centuries later, American-era pop culture added one more layer on top: the costumes, the candy, the commercial Halloween most of us know today. Three layers, stacked on top of each other, and the oldest one — the part that actually remembers — is the one that rarely gets mentioned in an October Instagram caption.

This is the layering Ugat Clothing exists to point at. We're not anti-Halloween — trick-or-treat is fine, genuinely fun, no notes. But we're more interested in the ritual Filipinos already had before anyone had to import one: the one that remembers where we came from, not just what's trending every October. That's the whole premise of a brand built on pre-colonial Filipino pride — not rejecting what came later, but refusing to let it be the only story anyone tells about who we are and what we've always done.

So wherever you are this week — barangay or diaspora, Manila or San Jose — the candy run is fine. Just know there's an older ritual running underneath it, one that was never waiting on anyone else's holiday to exist. Carry that one too.

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