ARNDT Catalogue Manila

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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
is an adventure to go to Plaza Miranda, which once was touted as the local version of Hyde Park but now occupies the dingier subsection of the Dickensian universe. Two notorious acts of political violence occurred at Plaza Miranda. In 1947, a barber hurled a grenade at a platform where President Manuel Roxas was delivering a speech. A quick-thinking general kicked the yet-unexploded grenade from the stage onto the crowd; no one really remembers the name of the two people in the crowd who were killed by the resulting blast. In 1971, yet another grenade exploded during a political rally at Plaza Miranda. This time there was no one to deflect the grenade, so several dignitaries were injured. All of the nine persons who died were killed offstage as they stood among the throng. One of those injured in the 1971 Plaza Miranda bombing was Ramon Bagatsing, then a Congressman opposed to the rule of President Ferdinand Marcos. The bomb cost Bagatsing one of his legs, but helped gain him election that year as Mayor of Manila. Within a few years, Marcos had imposed rule by martial law, with Bagatsing by now a Marcos stalwart who remained mayor of Manila until three days after Marcos was ousted in 1986. Bagatsing remains the most prominent Filipino of Indian decent to achieve high political office. His constituents, predictably, called him “Bumbay”; a nickname which he accepted with aplomb despite the racist overtones; Filipinos have been calling émigrés from the Indian subcontinent “Bumbay” ever since the first Sepoys arrived in Manila, as part of the British invasion force that arrived in 1762. It may come as a surprise to learn that for two years (1762-1764), Manila formed part of the British Empire, an afterthought of the Seven Year’s War. Manileños were unmoved; they continued with afternoon siestas instead of high tea. The Spanish, though, were unnerved by the exposure of their vulnerability. After regaining Manila, they reorganized the city’s defenses, eliminating several districts by relocating their population. Towns in Manila such as Bagumbayan, San Juan and Santiago disappeared even from the collective memory. The rest of Manila withstood several attempts at elimination. Almost every resident developed smallpox, and the survivors lived with the scars. There was a plague in 1628 and in 1645 and earthquake so catastrophic that hardly any buildings were left standing (The Spanish did not bother to record how many Filipinos had died in the quake). Another earthquake in 1863 destroyed the main cathedral and the Governor’s palace among others. The blow from which Manila nearly did not survive was the eponymous battle waged over it between the Americans and the Japanese invaders, in the closing months of the Second World War. The strategic destruction by the Japanese of key bridges left the most affluent districts of Manila isolated, ripe for the killing. Those who were trapped were slaughtered where they stood, or herded into dank prison cells or churches where they were slaughtered where they knelt. Even the President of the German Club was sliced with bayonets as he invoked the eternal friendship of Tojo and Hitler. While the Japanese killed the people; the Americans destroyed the buildings with bombs. The walled city of Intramuros, once the heart of Spanish rule over the islands, ceased to exist after nearly four hundred years. Only one structure remained standing after the American bombs did their worst: San Agustin Church. It had been deliberately spared so that American G.I.s navigating through the ruined city would have one visual point of reference that identified where they were. Today, San Agustin Church is the oldest surviving building in the Philippines. Immediately after the war, the newly independent Philippines, through its Congress, voted to build a great memorial that would commemorate the lives and legacies lost in February of 1945. No such memorial was ever built. The great Manila Cathedral, reconstructed just eighty years before, after the great 1863 earthquake, remained for years a massive ruin. In time, refugees from much less massive ruins rebuilt their lives within the rubbles of the church. They were eventually driven out when they rebuilt the grand church, but they relocated elsewhere in the city, bearing the same lack of hope. Manila soon teemed with slums of the sort that was fodder for fundraising appeals by humanitarian groups. Once, there was a grand dame named Imelda who was seen fit to be installed as governor of Manila. Her solution to the slum problem was to build high walls that sheltered the informal settlers from the prying eyes of her jetset friends such as George “Zorro the Gay Blade” Hamilton and Van “Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1” Cliburn. Manila has more people now, in part because contraception is not readily available and public health advances now allow more people to live into their sixties. The slums remain, as with the rich and the aspirants to be rich. Manileños of vastly unequal states have come together, as always, in an unsettled but necessary co-existence, not only with each other, but also with the ghosts of many more who, if given another stab, would have much preferred a life that was not unfair. Oliver X.A. Reyes
Page 1 and 2: MAYNILA MAALINSANGAN ANG GABI, MAHA
Page 3 and 4: Working in contemporary art is a pr
Page 5 and 6: “PLEASE ALLOW ME TO INTRODUCE MYS
Page 8: MIKE ADRAO In an age enamored with
Page 12: NORBERTO ROLDAN “Every act an art
Page 16: JOSE LEGASPI Jose Legaspi knows the
Page 20: ZEAN CABANGIS A ruin can generate s
Page 24: JOSE TENCE RUIZ Recalling the seven
Page 28: DEX FERNANDEZ Graffiti has always b
Page 32: ALFREDO ESQUILLO Quiapo has long in
Page 38: acknowledgements and credits Photos

ARNDT Catalogue Manila

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