PASIG RIVER REMEMBERED

Celeste Legaspi Gallardo, MVP member, and the organization "Riverwatch" prepared exhibits and other consciousness-raising activities for the benefit of Pasig River conservation.

Following the theme of our monthly lecture, we reprint here a little bit

of history about the Pasig taken from the brochure "Pasig River, Alive"

which is by our guest speaker. Although our article ends on a somber note,

many people are working to turn things around and encouraging progress

has been made. You will hear all about it at the lecture. For a personal

flavor, we've asked some Manileños, two of them MVP members,

to reminisce about the river that they and their parents knew.

 

A river of lore and pictures, the Pasig runs a ten-mile course from the salt water of Manila Bay to Laguna de Bai. People lived in small settlements along its banks and called themselves Tagalog from the word taga, meaning originating from, and ilog, meaning river. The word Pasig itself is said to derive from the Tagalog for "sandy riverbanks". Others claim it to be an old Malay word for "the coast", or "strand". Still others maintain Pasig to be a corruption of the name Legaspi.

 

Along the banks of the river Pasig, life was easy and pleasant. There was boating, bathing, swimming and fishing, with some residents simply lowering their lines into the estuaries to bring up fish through their windows. The water was so clear in some places, the swimmer could see right through to the river bottom. Commuter traffic--cascos and paraws--ferrying manufactured goods, drinking water, vegetables, fodder, thatched nipa roofing, earthenware and other products for delivery to markets and warehouses, or for sale to householders living by the river banks, plied the fabled waterway, along with pleasure craft with colorful "basket" sails such as those described by Jose Rizal in his account of the picnic in Noli Me Tangere.

 

The hub of commerce and throbbing with life, the river itself began to die as early as the 1930s. Signs of deterioration abounded, but no one paid much attention. Factories and other commercial/industrial firms proliferated along the banks, dumping waste into the Pasig, believing this would flow out through the river into Manila Bay, where the sea would disperse or absorb it.

 

Then came the squatters swamping the river banks, first in their dozens, then in their hundreds, now in their hundreds of thousands, dumping waste and refuse. And with the population explosion came increased demand on the river's resources until the Pasig became overfished, dangerously polluted. It began to die.

--Excerpt from Pasig River, Alive!

 

I grew up on the banks of the Pasig. It was my grandfather who chose to build his home on the river. He intended to repair boats and needed a slipway by the river. The place was bukid, or open field, far removed from the bustling city.

 

Just as World War II was ending, my grandfather's house was burned down by fleeing soldiers. My father then took over and built his own place, setting up a manufacturing firm near the road and our home behind it, on the riverbank.

 

My mother had a lawn and flowering plants. We were a large family, mostly girls, and we were always in the garden where it was breezy. Mom had steel matting placed at the edge of our garden so that we would not fall into the water. We played ball in the garden and learned how to bike there.

 

There were always boats on the river: tug boats pulling barges filled with sand or silica for factories upriver. The boats blasted their horns every time they passed before rounding the bend further up. There was also a ferry service near us. We could see the banca being rowed by an old man. In the morning he would ferry people to work across the river, rowing them back in the afternoon - about 8 passengers per trip. He was a skilled boatman and only in-terrupted his ferry service when typhoons whipped Manila.

 

There was a time when the river was choked with water lilies. It happened one summer, when they floated down from Laguna de Bay. The river was very wide and swift, yet water lilies collected and stretched from our bank to the other side. The plants were packed so closely together that boys walked on the water-lily-carpet to poke for crabs underneath. This was quite dangerous, though, as a person would be lost if he fell through the plants, like falling through thin ice in early spring.

 

As time passed, river traffic increased, more factories were built on both sides of the river and workmen built shacks near us on every available space. The neighborhood became crowded. My father's friends joked that he was like the giant of fairy tales that kept his daughters hidden in the forest. In fact, my friends in college hesitated to come to Pandacan to visit. But one did, and I married him. I moved away from the river then, but we visited my parents regularly and my own children enjoyed playing by the river.

--Winnie Zarate

In the late 1950s, when I was a young girl, I loved to walk over Santa Cruz bridge, which spans the Pasig river near the Escolta, over to the Manila Post Office and Plaza Lawton. I would stand right in the middle of the bridge and look down into the river wondering how it used to be during the pre-Spanish era. I have been told stories of how important this waterway was to the commerce and livelihood of the people living along its banks. The Pasig river in the 1950s was clean for I distinctly remember some people swimming in it. There was a movie shooting I saw where the leading actors jumped into the river from the middle portion of Jones Bridge. In 1962, I was working with a manufacturing plant situ-ated on the bank of the Pasig river across Guadalupe. To get to our office quickly, we used to ride the small bancas plying their trade of towing passengers across the Guadalupe side to the Pasig side. As I remember, the river was not dirty and smelly, as it is today.

--Elma Baron

 

"It seems that formerly, the river, like the lake, was infested with crocodiles so huge and voracious that they attacked the bancas and overturned them with blows of their tails." Jose Rizal, in El Filibusterismo, begins his account of the legend of a crocodile, a Chinaman and Saint Nicholas. "One day an infidel Chinaman, who until then had refused to be converted, was passing by the church when all of a sudden the devil appeared to him as a crocodile and overturned his banca to devour him and take him to hell. Inspired by God, the Chinese at that moment invoked San Nicolas and instantly the crocodile turned into stone."

 

The legend was also recorded 40 years earlier by Paul de la Gironière, a Frenchman who settled in the Philippines and wrote an account of his twenty years here. (His book, Twenty Years in the Philippines, 1854, became a nineteenth century bestseller.) He went on to describe the feast that sprang up to celebrate the rescue of the Chinese. "At the period when this festival takes place - that is, about the 6th of November every year- a delightful view presents itself. During the night large vessels may be seen upon which are built palaces actually several stories high terminating in pyramids and lit up from the base to the summit ... it is an extemporised Venice! In these palaces they give themselves up to play, to smoking opium and to the pleasures of music ... a species of Chinese incense is burning everywhere and at all times in honour of St. Nicholas, who is invoked every morning by throwing into the river small square pieces of paper of various colours."

 

By the time of Rizal, forty years later, the church was in ruins but the legend had become a miracle and had left physical evidence. Rizal says, "...the monster was easily recognizable in the scattered pieces of rock which were left of it. I myself can assure you that I still was able to distinguish clearly the head.."

 

In the 1960s I spent some weeks working in Mandaluyong, in an area near Guadalupe Bridge, which was called Barangay Buayang Bato (Barangay Stone Crocodile). The residents had never heard of the legend recorded by Rizal and de la Gironière and were fascinated to see the books that recorded it. They presumed the area got its name from a huge elongated stone formation that was called "Buaya" (Crocodile). I could see it clearly near the shore. I returned there recently but the Buaya was gone. In the 1970s, Imelda had a program to beautify the Pasig and the old rock was blasted to make way for a cement walkway. There is now no memory of either the legend, the feast or the stone.

--Marcos Roces