Tan-ok Coin and Baluyut’s Death Show Who We Choose to Remember

Two Filipino image-makers, one honored in metal, one mourned in newsrooms.

The Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas doesn’t put just anyone on currency. And photojournalists don’t spend 40 years behind a lens without seeing things most of us would rather forget.

This week gave us both: an Ilokano Tan-ok dancer now stamped on a commemorative ₱100 coin, and the death of Alex Baluyut on February 27, 2026, whose camera documented Philippine life from Marcos to modernity.

When Dance Becomes Legal Tender

The BSP’s decision to feature a Tan-ok dancer on commemorative currency marks a rare moment when folk tradition breaks into the official iconography of nationhood. Tan-ok — the Ilokano term for “greatness” or “zenith” — is a festival in where competing groups perform choreographed epics that blend pre-colonial ritual, Spanish-era drama, and modern stagecraft. It’s spectacular, exhausting, and deeply regional.

Which makes its elevation to coinage all the more pointed.

Philippine currency has long favored heroes frozen in bronze: revolutionaries, presidents, national artists whose contributions fit neatly into textbook narratives. But a dancer mid-leap? That’s a different grammar of memory. It says that culture — not just politics or war — is worth legal tender. That Ilokano identity, often overshadowed by Tagalog-centric nationalism, deserves its place in every Filipino’s wallet.

The coin won’t circulate widely; commemoratives rarely do. But symbols work differently than spending money. They signal what a nation wants to believe about itself, even if the daily reality is messier.

The Man Who Showed Us What We Looked Like

Alex Baluyut spent his career doing the opposite: not idealizing Filipinos but showing them as they were. His lens captured rallies, disasters, elections, and the ordinary exhaustion of survival. Award-winning, yes — but more than that, relentless. Photojournalism in the Philippines is not a glamorous trade. It’s standing in floodwater at 3 a.m., or outside a police station waiting for a family to collapse in grief, or in a crowd where the tear gas doesn’t care about your press card.

Baluyut did it for decades. Sixty-nine years is not old by today’s standards, but it’s a full life if you’ve spent it documenting other people’s worst days.

His death on February 27, 2026, like most journalists’ deaths, will be noted by colleagues and forgotten by the public within a week. There will be no coin. There will be no monument. Kaya lang (but then), his archive remains—thousands of images that, collectively, form a counter-narrative to official memory. While the government mints dancers in metal, photographers like Baluyut left us negatives: the version of history that doesn’t fit on currency.

What This Means If You Care Who Gets Remembered

Here’s the tension: we need both the coin and the camera. The Tan-ok dancer represents aspiration, the best of what we want to be. Baluyut’s photographs represent documentation, the truth of what we were. One is celebration. The other is evidence.

But they’re not treated equally. The state funds commemorative coins. It does not fund photojournalism archives. It honors dancers with ceremonies. It buries journalists with short obituaries.

If you’re raising kids, this matters. What they see on money teaches them what the country values. What they *don’t* see — the strikes, the floods, the faces of the forgotten — teaches them what the country would rather not discuss. Both lessons shape citizens.

For OFWs, the question is even sharper: which Philippines do you carry in your head? The one on the coin, or the one in the news photo? The festival, or the flood? Most of us carry both, uneasily.

Editor’s Take

Sa totoo lang, we’re better at honoring culture than protecting the people who document it. A commemorative coin is easier than journalism grants, pension funds for aging photographers, or archives that outlive their creators. Baluyut’s death should remind us that memory has two authors: the state, which chooses what to mint, and the journalists, who choose what to shoot. We celebrate the first and bury the second. That’s not a coincidence — it’s a strategy. The dancer on the coin is beautiful, and beauty is useful when you’d rather not talk about what the camera saw. But a country that only remembers its best angles will eventually forget its own face.

The coin will outlast the man, but the man’s work will outlast the coin’s meaning.

Sources
How an Ilokano Tan-ok dancer got immortalized on a commemorative P100 coin — Rappler
Award-winning veteran photojournalist Alex Baluyut dies at 69 — Rappler