THE word "guagua" appears to be a word of universal application. In China, it means the "sound of frogs and ducks." It's also used as a surname, like Mao, Deng and Xi. In places like Cuba and Puerto Rico, it refers to a "bus." In Argentina, Chile and Uruguay, it means "baby," or the sound a baby makes.
In the Philippines, Guagua is a town that, for centuries, has been the hub of commerce in western Pampanga, which was influenced by two major factors. One is that unlike its neighboring towns that were largely agricultural and feudal — Lubao, Floridablanca, Porac — Guagua had no episodic bursts of agrarian-fueled unrest, and that allowed it to engage in uninterrupted commerce. The other is that the early Chinese settlers, who were met with hostility in other parts of western Pampanga in the early half of the last century, were given the proverbial red-carpet treatment there. I started high school in Lubao in the mid-1960s, and until that time, there were no Chinese grocery and sari-sari store owners in a vast sprawl of more than 40 villages. In Lubao during that time, "palengke" meant a jeepney ride to Guagua to buy the most basic needs from the traders, who were mostly of Chinese descent.
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