Culture and heritage: The unfinished agenda

My congratulations to Lapu-Lapu City Mayor Paz Radaza and Balbino “Ka Bino” Guerrero for winning in the war against the diaper commercial that denigrated and trivialized the Battle of Mactan. The National Historical Commission of the Philippines has put its foot down. As I had written in my previous column (“Ka Bino’s Diapers”), let no one play around with our heroes. Let the voices of the heritage keepers be heard and be upheld.

The next struggle is now for Lapu-Lapu City to campaign to make the Battle of Mactan a national holiday. I agree that it is time we also celebrate victory in war side by side with the defeats and death anniversaries that we always commemorate each year.

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Before the gods in Malacañang decided to play politics and suspended Gov. Gwendolyn Garcia as election fever began to heat up, the Committee on Sites, Relics and Structures which she established had been quietly conducting final meetings with local tourism and heritage councils all over Cebu. These councils, a private-public organization in each of the towns and cities of Cebu, were established way back in 2004 when the governor issued an executive order for mayors to create such a council that would help in the conduct of cultural mapping and other heritage documentation activities in preparation for a massive local awareness and promotion program that eventually blossomed into the heritage tourism component of Suroy-Suroy Sugbo.

We had been busily conducting what was supposed to amount to an “exit interview”, writ large, with all the members of the councils clustered into contiguous towns and cities. The ultimate purpose of these meetings, held between October and December last year, was to gauge the impact of the councils’ activities on their locales and constituents especially with regard to whether they perceived a heightened sense of pride of place and a desire to preserve remnants of the past, both tangible and intangible, amidst economic growth and development.

A second purpose of those meetings was for the councils to be able to assess what they failed to carry out and why and then to submit a laundry list for the next elective officials to ponder on and, hopefully, to continue the work that was started by these same councils. The scenario we had in mind was to present this laundry list to local and provincial candidates and have them sign on and commit to pursue them should they win in the upcoming elections.

Alas, the meetings never reached all the councils. In fact, we had been busy preparing for a meeting in Pilar, Camotes when news broke out that the ugly hand of politics was unfolding at Capitol as Christmas approached.

Now, as I work with my students accessioning and cataloguing another 10,000 more artifacts here in San Remigio, I cannot but express my regret that we were not able to finish the work; that we no longer have the resources of the province to finally call on a Cebu-wide heritage congress to gather all the councils to sound a final hurrah to the work they carried out that made, for example, Suroy-Suroy Sugbo a resounding success for cultural heritage promotion.

There was even the plan to launch a coffee table book on the heritage sites, tangible objects and intangible traditions and beliefs of Cebu. A printer had in fact been awarded to carry this out.

And then there is the extremely important Cebu History Writing Project, where each town and city of Cebu would have its own official, well-researched historical account. This would have been launched by March this year had not the overtly political suspension of the governor ensued.

In short, there is still something left to be done and the elections are an opportunity to ponder on the gains in instilling pride of place that Gov. Gwendolyn Garcia had pursued through her 8.5 years in office.

Come election day, I sincerely hope that the electorate will see whether those gains need to be forwarded, the programs and project continued or not. For me, of course, the answer is obvious. There is no turning back. To do so would be to once again relegate the past and our Cebuano heritage to a dark corner to be forever forgotten as we continue to modernize and look like any other modern city anywhere in the world.