Some bystanders came to help, such as a Christian sangley cirujano named Miguel Tigou and a tonelero ⁶ named Marcos Hernández. Fearing that Alangan was at death’s door, some called the Fray Porras. When he arrived at the house, the priest conducted the rituals of the Christian last rites in preparation for Alangan’s imminent death. Unable to speak his confession, Alangan confessed through hand gestures. As a last resort, Fray Porras put a panecito de San Nicolas de Tolentino , ⁷ or a small bread embossed with the image of said saint. After the final sacraments were done, Tigou gave Alangan an emetic concoction while Hernández was pushing his fingers in the mouth of the choking man to induce vomiting. These measures still failed and only made Alangan’s situation worse. He was vomiting a large quantity of blood, oozing out from his mouth and nose. In one final attempt, Alangan put two of his fingers into his mouth and forcefully grabbed the fish by its belly, tore its guts, and pulled it out. Finally, on this last attempt, it was a success. 

Many of the witnesses, astonished by what they had just seen, believed that it was through the power of the saint, channeled through the panecito, which saved Alangan from his imminent death. Fray Porras concluded his investigation by certifying that the miracle was due to the intercession of Saint Nicholas de Tolentino. Like the witnesses he interviewed, Fray Porras was also convinced that a big, scaly, and bony fish like Poyo could only be removed from the throat of Alangan with the help of a divine favor.  

Based on the summary of the manuscript, the purpose of the author, or in this case, the priest investigator, was to praise the success of the Augustinian mission in the islands of Panay. The miracle was one way of reinforcing Christianity among the natives of Panay. In one of the excerpts, we can see how many natives unwittingly became ‘audiences’ of the miracle when they gathered around the house of Catalina Uaysolot. The plot of Luis Alangan’s tale – (silent) cries for help, the arrival of the priest bringing his salvation, the climactic struggle between Alangan and the stuck fish, and his triumphant victory over imminent death – is a narrative that locates the indio into the world of Christian virtues.  Reflected on the Luis Alangan’s act of surrendering his self, wholeheartedly, to Saint Nicholas de Tolentino, fits in the image of the ideal Christian. This reduction of Alangan as an image of the ideal Christian indio is not entirely new. 

The recounting of the 1624 miracle in Panay is reminiscent of the hagiographic and prescriptive religious accounts by missionaries across the Spanish empire produced during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In Resil Mojares’s work on a sixteenth-century historical biography, he argued that the subjects of these “historical biographies” written by religious missionaries are reduced and molded to conform to the religious ideology of their authors. ⁸ However, in this process of reduction and molding, certain ‘voices’ are inevitably silenced, thus, their narratives are absent in the text. Such is the case with our protagonist, Luis Alangan. 

We do not know the details of the very person who lies at the center of this incident. What we know is that he is an indio residing in the pueblo of Panay. Some important details of his life are left for us to infer. For example, we do not know the exact age of Luis. Based on physical appearance, Fray Porras estimated Alangan’s age to be around thirty-five years old.

Alangan never explicitly stated his occupation. Before the incident, Alangan mentioned that he was doing kaingin in preparation for the planting season. Together with his son, Juan, and his slave, Buyayao, the three of them prepared a piece of land for the coming planting season. In addition to doing kaingin, Alangan’s knowledge of the (now unknown) practice of ‘biting the head of the fish’ also shows that he is aware of the common practices of local fishing during that time. ⁹ We can safely assume that Alangan’s livelihood revolved around fishing and planting.