Undas: Where the Word Came From, and How Filipinos Honored the Dead Before Spain
Undas: Where the Word Came From, and How Filipinos Honored the Dead Before Spain
Undas comes from a Spanish word for funeral honors, but Filipinos were burying and remembering their dead thousands of years before Spain arrived. Here is what the record confirms, what it does not, and a visit to a Marikina cemetery on 11/1/1999.
I landed in the Philippines on 10/31/1999, sixteen days before the wedding. On 11/1 I took Atet, who would become my wife on 11/16/99, to Loyola in Marikina to "meet" my Lola Rosita. It was Undas, and on Undas the living go to the dead.
Rosa Camposano Perseveranda, Lola Rosita, was born in Oas, Albay, in 1914, and her baptismal record turned up on FamilySearch. This piece asks two questions about the day we spent with her: where does the word come from, and what did Filipinos do for their dead before Spain brought the church calendar? I checked every claim below against a primary source or an official document, and where I could not confirm something, I say so.
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The Filipino name for the Nov 1-2 season of remembering the dead. It is a Spanish loan: honras, funeral honors, reshaped into a word that now names a whole season. It was already in print as Ondas in 1889.
The Word: Funeral Honors
Undas is not a native Tagalog root. It is a Filipino reshaping of the Spanish honras, the honors paid to the dead. The earliest printed attestation I could document is from 1889, when Isabelo de los Reyes published El Folk-Lore Filipino in Manila. In a section titled Ondas, he records that this is what people in Malabon call the Commemoration of the Faithful Departed, and he traces the word to honras fúnebres, funeral honors. He also remarks on the way an r can turn into a d in Filipino speech.
That last point is worth slowing down for. In Spanish the written h is silent, so honras was already pronounced onras. The step from onras to ondas is the r becoming a d, not a lost h. Another dictionary entry may exist from before 1889, but I will not claim it until I have seen the page.
What matters for the reader is the shape of the thing. A word for a ceremony became the name of a season. A loan from the colonizer's liturgy became so thoroughly ours that most of us never hear Spanish in it. That is how decolonization usually looks in the language: not a clean break, but a word taken in and made to do Filipino work.
The Calendar: How Two Days Became One Season
The Catholic calendar gives us two days. November 1 is All Saints' Day. November 2 is the Commemoration of All the Faithful Departed, All Souls' Day. Vatican sources trace the second to Abbot Odilo of Cluny, who made the observance obligatory in the monasteries under his authority in 998, which is not the same as the whole Church adopting it overnight. The calendar reached the islands with Spanish missionaries after colonization began in the 1560s. I could not find a document naming the first Philippine celebration, so I will not give you one.
Here is a distinction worth keeping. Church teaching points the living toward prayer for the dead, the Mass, almsgiving, and works of penance. It does not prescribe feeding the dead. Yet families across the islands still bring candles, flowers, and other offerings to the grave. The liturgy is the Catholic Church's. What families built on top of it is local practice, and where each piece of that came from is a question the evidence answers only in part.
Before Spain: What the Ground and the Chroniclers Say
What archaeology shows
The National Museum of the Philippines documents a wide range of mortuary practice long before any friar arrived. A cremation burial at Ille Cave in Palawan dates to roughly 9,500 to 9,000 years ago. Flexed burials at Bubog Cave in Mindoro are about 5,000 years old. Secondary burial, in which bones and teeth were moved into containers, is documented, and so are boat-shaped coffins at sites dated from the 12th to the 15th century.
The best-known container is the Manunggul Jar from Palawan, a secondary burial vessel conventionally dated to 890-710 BCE. Its lid carries a boat with two figures, commonly read as the soul of the dead and the one who steers the passage. The anthropomorphic burial jars of Maitum, Sarangani, are another secondary-burial tradition the museum holds. As with the Laguna Copperplate Inscription, the record before Spain is richer than the colonial story admits.
What the friars wrote down
For the Tagalogs we also have a colonial eyewitness. In 1589 the Franciscan Juan de Plasencia described the deceased being buried beside the house, with a chief placed beneath a little house or porch built for the purpose, four days of mourning, and a boat serving as coffin or bier. He was a missionary writing for the Crown, and he describes Tagalog practice specifically, not the practice of every Filipino. Read him as a witness with an agenda, not a neutral camera.
What none of this proves
| Evidence | What it shows | What it does not show |
|---|---|---|
| Manunggul Jar | A voyage-of-the-dead image on a secondary burial vessel at one Palawan site | One theology for the whole archipelago |
| National Museum burial record | Cremation, flexed burial, secondary burial, and boat coffins across thousands of years | That any of it was ancestor worship, or a direct ancestor of Undas |
| Plasencia, 1589 | Tagalog burial and mourning as a Spanish friar saw them | Anything about a fixed November date |
| Ifugao bogwa | A distinct Ifugao ritual for the dead | A November 1 observance |
A popular claim online says Undas replaced a precolonial festival of the dead held in November. I could find no primary source for it, and nothing above supports a fixed November date before Spain. What the evidence does support is adaptation: older ways of tending the dead and a Catholic calendar met, and families made one season out of both. Whose power set the terms is easy to see here. The Spanish calendar set the date. Filipino families decided what to do on it.
Soul-Singers at the Door
The same 1889 passage that records Ondas also describes visitors called kaloluas, souls, who in Malabon dressed in black, rang a small bell, and sang at open doors on the night of November 1. That is the oldest documented form I could find of the custom now known as pangangaluluwa, and it is a useful correction to the idea that it was always an October 31 midnight ritual.
The custom did not vanish. Reporting in 2022 documented house-to-house souling in places including Cavite, and the Sariaya Tourism Council in Quezon has worked to revive it as a fundraising event. A revival is not proof of an unbroken tradition, and I did not verify any law protecting it. If your lola's town still sings at the door, tell me in the comments.
What Other Languages Call It
I went looking for the name of Undas in every major Philippine language and tried to match each one to a published dictionary or to reporting. Most of what circulates online could not be matched to a printed entry, so this table holds only what I could confirm.
| Term | Language | What I could confirm |
|---|---|---|
| Undas / Ondas | Tagalog | Name for the Nov 1-2 season; spelled Ondas in Malabon in 1889; from Spanish honras |
| Pangangaluluwa | Tagalog | The soul-singing custom; kaloluas at the door in 1889 Malabon; revived in places like Sariaya today |
| Kalag-kalag | Cebuano | The name for the All Souls observance in Cebuano-speaking areas, in current use in Cebu press |
| Bogwa | Ifugao | A separate ritual for the dead, not a November 1 observance |
For Bikol, Hiligaynon, Waray, Ilokano, Kapampangan, and Pangasinan I could not confirm a printed entry. That means not verified. It does not mean there is no word. My Lola Rosita was from Oas, Albay, and I would rather hear Bikol from a Bikol speaker than guess at it, which is the lesson of the Maganda and Magayon piece. If your family has a word for it in any Philippine language, put it in the comments, with your town. Keeping those words is also part of why every Filipino American family should keep the language alive.
Undas in 2026
The law is exact this year. Proclamation No. 1006, signed on September 3, 2025, lists Sunday, November 1, 2026 as a special non-working day and Monday, November 2 as an additional special non-working day, to give families more time for the traditional All Saints' and All Souls' observance. Whether that produces any specific number of travelers, I cannot tell you; the proclamation states a purpose, not a count.
For Fil-Am families the observance moves where the family is. A 2024 report in the Hawaii Filipino Chronicle describes Socorro Maniquis Painter of Livermore, California, visiting the tomb of her parents and grandmother at Skylawn in San Mateo, at a cemetery program that included a Mass. That is one named Filipino American account, not a survey, and I will not stretch it into one. Closer to my own home, my Lolo Marciano and his younger brother, Lolo Emiliano, rest at All Souls Cemetery in Vallejo.
Back to Loyola
On 11/1/1999 I stood in a Marikina cemetery inside all of it: a Spanish word for funeral honors, a church calendar, a soul-singing custom older than any dictionary I could open, and burial traditions in Philippine ground that are thousands of years deeper than the rest. Lola Rosita lived on Carmine Street, the same street where I grew up. Her husband, my Lolo Marciano, rests in Vallejo. She rests in Marikina. Undas is the one day a year that closes that distance.
For Nica, Jian, and Chesca: when someone asks you what Undas means, tell them it is a Spanish word that Filipinos made their own, and that the dead it names were being honored in these islands long before the word arrived. Your great-grandmother is at Loyola in Marikina. Your great-grandfather is at All Souls in Vallejo. Go to them on this day.
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- Isabelo de los Reyes y Florentino, El Folk-Lore Filipino, Tomo I (Manila: Tipo-Litografía de Chofré y C.ª, 1889), Project Gutenberg #57550. gutenberg.org
- Republic of the Philippines, Proclamation No. 1006, s. 2025, "Declaring the Regular Holidays and Special (Non-Working) Days for the Year 2026," September 3, 2025. lawphil.net
- National Museum of the Philippines, "Pre-colonial Burial Traditions," November 2, 2021. nationalmuseum.gov.ph
- National Museum of the Philippines, Archaeology Collection, "Burial Jars." nationalmuseum.gov.ph
- Cultural Center of the Philippines Encyclopedia of Philippine Art, "Manunggul Jar." epa.culturalcenter.gov.ph
- Juan de Plasencia, "Customs of the Tagalogs" (1589), in Blair and Robertson, The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Vol. 7. Wikisource
- Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraphs 1030-1032 (Purgatory and prayers for the dead). vatican.va
- Vatican News, "Commemoration of All the Faithful Departed (All Souls' Day)." vaticannews.va
- GMA News, "The dead need prayers, not food, says priest." gmanetwork.com
- Philstar, Cebu Lifestyle, "Kalag-kalag," October 30, 2015. philstar.com
- Atlas Obscura, report on Philippine souling traditions, October 24, 2022. atlasobscura.com
- Hawaii Filipino Chronicle, "Undas Reconnects Families to their Departed and Offers Healing," November 9, 2024. thefilipinochronicle.com
- ICHCAP (UNESCO), account of the Ifugao bogwa ritual. ichcap.org
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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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