ARNDT Catalogue Manila

MANILA: THE CITY THAT WOULD NOT WEEP
In geological terms, Manila lies on young swamps, created from
the pressure exerted by basaltic magma beneath the earth’s crust,
emerging from the womb of the Pasig River only within the last
1.7 million years, or 62 million years after the dinosaurs massasphyxiated.
For 99.95% of its history, Manila was occupied by
Stegodons, then elephants. Christ, Caesar, and Confucius had been
dead for over a thousand years before the (so far) earliest traces
of humans in Manila were discovered. The discovery was made in
the 1960s, in the now low-key Santa Ana district, beside one of the
very few old Manila churches that had survived the Second World
War. A mass grave site was unearthed, with over two hundred
bodies buried together with over one thousand pieces of Chinese
earthenware dated to around 1000 to 1200 CE. Some of these
bodies were found with Chinese plates inverted over their faces
and over their sex organs. No one knows why, though modern-day
minds might assume that some sort of Christian modesty had an
influence. The graves are likewise oriented in a scatter of directions,
except towards the East. Again, no one knows why.
The etymological story of Manila skews towards the pastoral, rooted
in unremarkable mangrove shrubbery that once dominated the
shores of Manila Bay. Scyphiphora Hydrophyllacea in Linneanese,
nila in Tagalog. “May nila,” (there is nila), a helpful native once told
an imperious stranger who demanded to know where he stood.
Filipinos have always been known for their kindness to strangers.
It was strangers from Spain who undertook the organization of
Manila as a city, with all the formal paperwork that was involved.
The Spanish were not the first Westerners to set foot in Manila; the
Portuguese had already been engaged in trade with Manileños.
Rajah Soliman, the young ruler of Manila, had heard of the Spanish
conquest of other islands in the archipelago. He sought to bide
time. When the first Spanish warships sailed into Manila Bay, he
entered into a pact of friendship with Goiti, the leader of the armada.
This pact, as with a disturbing number of prominent contracts in
Philippine history, was sealed in blood. Soliman, however, had every
intention of slaughtering his new fair-skinned friends but thought it
prudent to await first the arrival of the rains in June. Fatefully, Manila
in June of 1571 remained dry, and the forces of the just-as-devious
Goiti attacked first.
The kingdom led by Soliman was pacified in short order. The
considerable Chinese community, which had already settled in
Manila, proved more difficult to regulate. The new Spanish overlords
confined these Chinese residents (whom they called Sangleys) into
a ghetto known as Parian. Due to occasional Sangley revolts, the
Parian would be destroyed then rebuilt in 1581, 1583, 1588, 1597,
1603, 1629, and 1642. After each pogrom, author Nick Joaquin
says, “Manila would find itself without masons, cooks, barbers,
carpenters, cobblers, tailors, smiths, scribes, printers, cowboys and
accountants.” In the end, the Sangleys would be relocated into a
new district known as Binondo, which still stands today, claimed as
the oldest Chinatown in the world.
The saving grace of the Spaniards was that they did not bring
with them the same communicable diseases that wiped out 90%
of the peoples they conquered in the Americas. Or perhaps the
Malay stock was just sturdier. The Spanish also brought with them
Christianity—of the muscular sort honed from the centuries-long war
of liberation of the Spanish homeland from the Moors. The Catholic
prelates appear to have been especially perverse towards the wellbeing
of the natives to whom they preached. The Philippines is the
only former colony of Spain today where Spanish never took hold as
the common popular tongue, in large part due to the refusal of the
friars to have Filipinos learn the language. A succession of secular
Spanish municipal governments installed in Manila were frustrated
by the insistence of the Church to maintain control; one Governor-
General found himself at the receiving end of a murderous lynch
mob stoked by most unpacifist friars.
There is no escaping that despite the constitutional wall that divides
church and state, the Philippines remains Catholic to the bone. Every
television station pauses programming at three in the afternoon to
broadcast a prayer dedicated to the Divine Mercy of Jesus. Every
government office has a Catholic altar at worst, a Catholic prayer
room at best, perhaps to help mitigate the stench of corruption
that otherwise pervades. The most attended events inside even
the toniest of shopping malls are the Sunday masses. Yet Filipino
Catholicism is a brand that developed with minimal interference
from faraway Rome, more susceptible to the influence of old animist
instincts than of the European doctors of the Church.
Go to Quiapo Church, home of a much-touched, much-kissed Black
Nazarene statue. Unless the doors are shut (and they rarely are), the
scene inside is of constant frenzy. There are the walkers roaming
from venerated icon to venerated icon; the stationary kneelers
offering thanksgiving sometimes, desperation more often; and the
walking kneelers going down the center aisle at glacial pace in the
belief that the greater pain inflicted on the patella, the greater the
heavenly gain.
The public square that lies outside Quiapo Church, known as Plaza
Miranda, features an unorganized market of hawkers selling a wide
variety of herbs and potions, none of them coming with a seal of
approval from a government regulatory agency, but each of which
comes with a guarantee of better health, if not bowel movements. It