Philippine Culture to Be Highlight of Lotus Festival : Events: Weekend celebration offers food and entertainment of Asia and Pacific Islands.

Growing up in California, Joel Jacinto and his wife, Ave, knew little about the music and dance of their Filipino ancestors. But as UCLA students, they began researching the islands’ culture, poring over books and traveling to the Philippines to talk to experts.

“We had to find some way not only of retaining, but rediscovering, our culture,” Joel Jacinto said.

Marshall Wandag and his wife, Adele, already knew the dances of their Kalinga tribe in the northern Philippines when they moved to Los Angeles in 1980. They wanted outsiders and other Filipinos to appreciate them. “I’ll admit, I got obsessed with this,” Marshall Wandag said.

The efforts of both couples will be one of the highlights Saturday at the Los Angeles Lotus Festival when they perform with groups they helped start to showcase Filipino music and dance. The two-day festival, held annually at Echo Park under the auspices of the Los Angeles Recreation and Parks Department, features Asian and Pacific Island cultures. This year, the festival will feature the Philippine culture during opening ceremonies at 1:30 p.m. Saturday.

The Jacintos will appear with a performing arts group, Kayamanan ng Lahi, or Treasures of the People, which they helped start two years ago. The Wandags will perform with a dance ensemble called BIBAK, which they founded in 1990.

With a population of more than 223,000, Filipinos are the second-largest Asian group in Los Angeles County, according to the 1990 census, following the Chinese, who number almost 250,000. Although there are clusters of Filipinos living in the Temple-Beaudry area, Carson and West Covina, there is no Philippine cultural equivalent of a Chinatown, Little Tokyo or Koreatown.

“When we talk about the Philippine community we have nothing visible,” Joel Jacinto said.

The hourlong opening show--which relates the history of the Philippines through music and dance--marks a rare cohesiveness among the Filipino groups who joined together for the program, Philippine Consul Edwin D. Bael said.

“This is important for us, an occasion to bring our community together. We as a people have been disunited,” said Bael, who will narrate the show. He attributed the lack of unity in part to the lingering effects of the 350-year colonization of the 7,100-island archipelago by the Spanish, who pitted different groups against one another. More recently, the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos, which ended in 1986, caused further fragmentation.

“There were pro-democracy groups and pro-Marcos groups and that was reflected here,” Bael said. “We are still trying to transcend it now.”

Even culturally, with scores of tribes and languages, Jacinto said, “We’re so diverse, it’s hard to stereotype.”

The Kayamanan ng Lahi group, which has more than 50 members, focuses on dances and music from the island of Mindanao in the southern Philippines.

The Wandags’ BIBAK group focuses on the mountainous northern Philippines. The ensemble’s name is actually an acronym of the names of five tribes whose music and dance they perform. The group includes doctors, attorneys and other professionals who were tired of “the stereotyping of mountain people by lowland people as primitive,” said Wandag, an employee of the U.S. Postal Service.

Adele Wandag, a registered nurse, said her whole family--including the couple’s two sons and her parents--gets involved, “Everyone needs a cultural identity,” she said.

Her father, Miguel Sugguiyao, 80, is the oldest of the group’s performers. The dances, he said, symbolize such things as tribal conflicts, victory celebrations and even the ancient practice of headhunting. Men and women wear the brightly colored, intricately designed costumes and beads of their tribes.

The festival will take place Saturday from noon to 9 p.m. and Sunday from noon to 8 p.m. in Echo Park, at Glendale Boulevard and Bellevue Avenue.

It features the foods, arts, crafts and music of 14 different ethnic groups, including Japanese, Chinese, Samoans, Tongans, Thais and Hawaiians. Activities include dragon boat races, a flower show and fireworks. A closing ceremony at 7 p.m. Sunday also features Philippine culture.

Echo Park is the traditional site for the 19-year-old festival, city officials said, because the lotus flower is a frequent symbol in Asian cultures and the park has the largest lotus bed in the nation.