Having been out of Cebu for nearly four years now, my wife showed me an online photo in The FREEMAN of a now-pretty-and-hardly-recognizable street in the neighborhood of the Basilica Minore del Santo Niño owing to its major facelift. Both the roadway and the sidewalks have been laid over with bright rust-red bricks and gone were the carenderias and sidewalk stalls that used to make passage constricted and difficult.
But it was not the new beauty of a very old street in the oldest city in the Philippines that took hold of my attention. Instead, my more than 40 years of experience as a journalist drew my focus to a word that, to me, stuck out like a sore thumb in the photo's accompanying caption. The word was alleyway. A mere alleyway was how a very historic street had been described. I was horrified.
I quickly texted some of the top honchos of the paper, old friends who I know I can always talk to. I said a quick correction needed to be made as what had been described as a mere "alleyway" is actually a real street with an official name honoring a very significant personage in Philippine history. The name of the street is P. Zamora, for Padre Jacinto Zamora, you know, of the Gomburza we were made to memorize in grade school.
Gomburza is a portmanteau of the surnames of Filipino priests Mariano Gomez, Jose Burgos, and Jacinto Zamora who were executed by Spanish authorities in 1872 for advocating more rights for Filipino priests, among other things. Their execution helped fan the flames of nationalism and Jose Rizal dedicated El Filibusterismo to their memory. Streets in their honor are precisely near the basilica, bastion of Philippine Catholicism.
The FREEMAN swiftly corrected the caption. One thing that makes this paper great is its ability to always do better, its resiliency a major factor in its breaching the century mark, making it the oldest existing newspaper in Cebu and perhaps the second oldest in the Philippines, a testament to trust and reliability. It not only did away with the demeaning "alleyway" by correctly identifying the street, it added more info about it.
In the modified caption, P. Zamora Street is now described as the shortest street in Cebu City with a length of just 70 meters. I myself did not know that and I am both humbled by the new information as well as grateful to my old buddies in the paper for going the extra mile. Now you know why The FREEMAN is Cebu's paper and I am very proud to have spent almost my entire working life with it.
As to P. Zamora Street, it too had been a part of my life, in many of its various phases. In grade school at the Colegio del Santo Nino, it was in Zamora that childhood disputes were settled. An old Aboitiz warehouse in Zamora was where we arranged to have our fistfights since fighting in school meant suspension and repeated offenses led to expulsion. If not at the Aboitiz warehouse in Zamora, fights were arranged at the Cathedral nearby.
Zamora had been a convenient walking shortcut between The FREEMAN office two blocks away and to and from the basilica for Friday novenas, unless it was raining, in which case Zamora would be real messy way. Many times, when the longing for "kinawboy nga kaon" overtakes me, I would plop myself down on one of the benches at a Zamora carenderia and, literally rubbing elbows with humanity, eating the eat of a Cebuano.
And that meant "kan-on mais nga duha ka-takos," either of "utan bisaya, utan mongos" or "tinola" plus of course the ubiquitous crispy pork adobo of the cheapest kind, which is to say "murag pulos na lang tambok sa li-og sa baboy." I can almost cry missing this kind of food, not only because I have not been in Cebu for quite a while, but also because, from the photo, I can see the carenderias are no longer in Zamora.