A way out of the margins

My column for this week's issue of Vox Bikol.

FOR about five days now, I've been running a survey on the following question: "Are you in favor of changing the name of Plaza Quezon to Plaza Arejola?"

Polls like these are unscientific, with my mostly anonymous readers being the universe of respondents, and actual respondents being equally unknown, except for those who explained their votes, like Bikolano writer Maryanne Moll and Irvin Sto. Tomas, a masteral student specializing on the Filipino language who I believe runs the most popular blog hereabouts.

Nonetheless, the verdict is loud and clear: as I write this with two days to go, only three of the 27 respondents (11%) agreed with the proposition; the rest thumbed it down.

Let me offer two reasons as to why this is so, after conversations with people like neophyte Councilor Nathan Sergio, Inquirer correspondent Johnny Escandor, his Bicol Mail editor Joe Perez and Ben Barrameda: One, Gen. Ludovico Arejola, a native son of Naga who led the resistance movement against the American invaders more than 100 years ago, remains a largely unknown figure in this city; and two, some people know him too well to believe he is not worthy enough to displace the late President Quezon from one of Naga's most important seat of honor.

The first reason is sad, reflecting a weak sense of local history which I discussed in a previous column. While blog-hopping, I chanced on this quote from Luis Bunuel, a Spanish filmmaker considered one of the masters of 20th-century cinema. It appears in Sonny Pulgar's weblog, which I think is most apt to our situation:

"Memory is what makes our lives. Life without memory is no life at all. Our memory is our coherence, our reason, our feeling, even our action. Without it we are nothing."

"As time goes by, we don't give a second thought to all the memories unconsciously accumulate until suddenly one day we can't think of the name of a good friend or relation -- it's simply gone, we've forgotten it. In vain we search furiously to think of a commonplace work -- it's on the tip of our tongues but refuses to go further. Once this happens, this and other lapses, only then do we understand the importance of memory. Our imagination and our dreams are forever intruding our memory. And since we're all out to believe in the reality of our fantasies, we end up transforming our lies into truths."

The second is understandable, but debatable. My conversation with Ben in particular brought to the fore certain unwritten accounts surrounding Naga's liberation from the Spaniards, which seem to diminish the bravery shown by our local heroes. That century-old urban legend probably explains why Felix Plazo was honored with a peripheral street -- that only gained significance lately when the LCC Group put up its mall in the area -- much unlike his colleague Elias Angeles.

But I don't think it detracts from the heroic role they played in securing our freedom from Spain and in trying to protect it from the new foreign invaders who were just as vicious, if not more. And it distracts us from the bigger issue of who should really occupy the highest seats in our local pantheon.

With the Sanggunian recently thumbing it down, on the heels of the National Historical Institute's (NHI) take on the matter, the name-change issue is already moot and academic. But I happen to believe in this marginal position, like Nathan who failed to convince his Sanggunian colleagues to force the issue if only to test the limits of our autonomy, that we should begin to value local heroism by rescuing it from the backseat.

If many influential people have discovered that the hope of our country is in the countrysides, in what Manolo Quezon called the New Philippines, we should believe no less. We should start believing that our own heroes, most probably flawed in the same manner that Rizal and Quezon were imperfect, were capable of the same heroism they showed and of the same greatness, albeit on a smaller context.

There may be sense in the basic unfairness of imposing the opinion of one generation over another. And consequently our original CBD, the city center of our three plazas, may have been taken for all intents and purposes. The new Central Business District might provide the way out, and a General Arejola Coliseum does not sound bad at all.