All Souls Cemetery, Vallejo: A Mass for Tess and the Ligao Brothers Who Rest There
All Souls Cemetery, Vallejo: A Mass for Tess and the Ligao Brothers Who Rest There
Five years ago, two generations of the Perseveranda-Putong family gathered at a Vallejo cemetery for a mass — then walked together to the graves of two brothers born a world away in Ligao, Albay.
Five years ago today, we drove to a corner of Vallejo that doesn't show up on anyone's tourist map of the 707 — All Souls Cemetery, a name that reads almost too on-the-nose for what we were there to do. We'd come for a mass for Tess. We stayed for something we often did: a walk, right after, to the graves of two brothers who were born in a barrio in Ligao, Albay, decades before any of us were a thought.
That's the strange grace of a Filipino American cemetery. It holds more than one grief at a time, and more than one generation. By the time the mass ended, my three kids, my sister Joy, her husband Vince, and their children were all standing together over three graves that had nothing and everything to do with why we'd driven out there in the first place.
In the Philippines, Undas — All Saints' and All Souls' Day, November 1-2 — is when families converge on the cemetery, candles and all. In the diaspora, that calendar rarely cooperates with work schedules, flight costs, and relatives scattered across states. Fil-Am families gather at the grave whenever the family can actually be in the same place — which is exactly what an August mass at a cemetery literally named "All Souls" ends up being.
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Magkapatid — mahg-kah-pah-TEED
Siblings — brothers or sisters of the same parents. Marciano and Emiliano were magkapatid in Ligao before either one ever imagined a grandson standing over both their graves on the same afternoon, an ocean and three generations later.
A Mass for Tess, and Then a Walk
The mass came first, the way it always does. Tess has been gone since December 2020, and the masses we hold for her are never really about the cemetery — they're about making sure my kids grow up knowing their mother was mourned properly, publicly, and often, not just once and then folded away. That part of the day belongs to her, and it stays hers.
After the mass, we did what we usually at the cemetery— Visit our family's that don't get visited nearly often enough. And tell stories.
Marciano and Emiliano — Two Brothers from Ligao, Albay
Lolo Marciano Perseveranda is a name that already lives on this site — he's the grandfather who raised my father's generation in Manila, born and raised in Ligao, a town in Albay in the Bicol region, before the family's roots eventually stretched to Marikina and then to the United States. What hadn't made it into the record on this site is that Marciano had a younger brother, Emiliano, also born and raised in Ligao. Two brothers, same barrio, same province, and — improbably, decades and an ocean later — the same cemetery in Vallejo, California.
I think about Ligao, Albay a lot these days. I've told my kids an item on my bucket list is to visit Ligao and Oas with them. Then take a photo of us with Mayon Volcano in the background. Where their great-grandfather was born and raised. Ligao is a small town most Americans will never hear named in their lives. And yet here in the 707, two brothers from that town are buried within walking distance of each other, and their descendants can still show up on a Saturday and stand where they rest.
Tito Ed — My Father's Brother
The third grave belongs to Tito Ed, my father's younger brother. He's not part of the Ligao generation — he's closer to my own father's story, the branch of the family that built its life stateside. Standing at his grave the same afternoon as Marciano and Emiliano's collapsed two different chapters of the family history into one visit: the Bicol-born grandfather generation, and my father's own Manila-generation, both represented in the same plot of ground in Vallejo.
Three Generations, One Photo
The photo itself is the whole point of this piece existing. My three kids and me, Joy, Vince, and their children — all of us standing together at the graves, freshly out of mass. It's the kind of photo that means nothing to a stranger scrolling past it and everything to a grandchild of mine reading this in 2070, trying to understand who stood where they now stand.
Would this hold up if my granddaughter read it in 2070? A photo of her family, standing at the graves of people whose names she's never heard, taken on a Saturday nobody thought to make a big deal of at the time — yes. This is exactly the kind of thing PinoyBuilt exists to keep.
Why We Still Go Back
Nobody in my family needed a theology lesson to know why we went to those three graves after mass instead of straight home. It's not really about doctrine. It's about the plain fact that Marciano, Emiliano, and Ed can't tell their own stories anymore, so the people standing over them that afternoon are the only ones left who can. My kids didn't know Marciano or Emiliano personally — how could they, born a continent and a generation removed from Ligao — but they know now that the names on those stones are the reason they exist at all.
That's the whole tradition, condensed to one Vallejo afternoon: mass first, for the grief that's still recent. Then the walk, for the grief — and the gratitude — that's old enough it doesn't sting anymore, just anchors.
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Founder & Editor
J.F.R. Perseveranda
J.F. (Jonjo) left the Philippines at age nine, spending a lifetime bridging the gap between his Marikina roots and his Chicago/Vallejo upbringing. A proud Hogan Spartan from East Vallejo and resident of LA/SF, he founded PinoyBuilt not just as a digital archive, but as a cultural compass for his three children to navigate their heritage, language, and identity with Pinoy Pride.
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