Quickly now, can you name all the addresses you’ve lived in?
That’s probably easy, even for older people who have had several addresses. Our homes are important to us, and the addresses are tags for the many memories, happy and not so happy, of particular stages of our lives.
Now if I were to ask you if you knew who or what your streets were named after, I suspect many of you will find it more difficult to answer. The names of streets, districts, towns and cities are beyond most people’s control, yet they are important as we try to create a sense of place, for ourselves and for our children.
My column today was actually intended as an Independence Day piece, because we’re going to see how street names even relate to our sense of nationhood. To explain this, I’m going to use perspectives from cultural geography, which looks at spaces and places.
Look around you and you will see many spaces, which we think of as “empty” because they have no meanings. When we give meaning to those spaces, they become culturalized, the spaces now transformed into places. A corridor is empty space, but when students begin to sit in those corridors, as they like to do in universities and colleges, those corridors become tambayan, hang-out places.
When we move into a house, or an apartment, it’s really nothing more than a structure built on a space, and filled with spaces. As we move in furnishings, and live in it, those spaces take on meaning, and become a home.
A street, too, is just space, even with houses, until people move in. The street names then become significant, telling us not just who live there but what that place means to people.
In rural areas street names aren’t too important because everyone knows everyone. But even then, names are given to particular places, usually drawn from local flora and fauna—for example, Manggahan, a place with many mango trees. Often, too, an address is directly tied to a person: “kina Mang Teban,” Mang Teban’s place.
With urbanization people and places are always in danger of getting lost. Street names were assigned to bring order into the spaces. One way to go was to sequence the streets by numbers (1st, 2nd, 3rd) or by the alphabet (A, B, C). It was dull, but quite efficient.
Many street names, though, end up being named after people. Our older cities are full of streets named after Spaniards, many of them lost in time. The American occupation brought in new names, not just of people but of places in America—for example, an entire area in Malate is named after American states like Nebraska, Arkansas and California. The Americans liked Rizal, so we ended up with streets named after him all over the country, often a main street running through the town center.
San Juan
After we regained independence in 1946, we began to get more streets named after Filipinos. Malate’s American states are gone now, replaced by Filipino statesmen (and one stateswoman). Elsewhere it’s been a mixed bag of heroes and the far from heroic. Subdivisions often got carved up and filled with street names of “Dons” and “Doñas,” named after the family members of the landowners.
My own hometown, San Juan, reflects our continuing schizophrenia, with colonialism and class distinctions converging in our place names. The lower-income areas have Filipino names while the middle- and high-income areas are called Little Baguio and Addition Hills. There was once a cluster of streets called Kitchener, Somme, and Mons—all European sites where fierce battles were fought during World War I between the Americans and Germans.
Today, San Juan’s Greenhills still has streets named after American states like Connecticut and Missouri, and American presidents from Washington down to Kennedy. Fortunately, we were spared Nixon and the Bushes.
Marlboro, Takipsilim
The other week I was looking for a street around the Batasan area in Quezon City and got distracted by the street names around Commonwealth, which reveal a lot about nationhood and our sense of place. There were the subdivisions full of Dons and Doñas and saints. But there were also subdivisions with more mundane names. There was one, perhaps reflecting our many overseas workers, with streets named after currencies of the world: Riyal, Dinar, Yuen (should be Yuan), Yen, Rupee and, of course, the former mighty Dollar.
In a country that doesn’t quite appreciate classical music, I was surprised to find two subdivisions named after the classical masters. One, close to Zabarte, had street names totally devoted to European composers. A smaller one, closer to Commonwealth, at least had one street named after a Filipino composer, Abelardo, which starts at Bach, crosses Strauss, Verdi, Wagner, Rossini and ends with Liszt.
One subdivision that caught my eye had streets named after cars, some of which are not that well known or are now vintage (Hillman, Hunter, Dart, Valiant, Mercury and others). Still another subdivision was named after cigarette brands, all foreign: Marlboro, Pall Mall, Dunhill, Kent, to name—cough, cough—a few.
I’m not lobbying for a Filipino name like Bataang Matamis street; I think cigarette brand names just aren’t appropriate for streets. But I’m not arguing either for changing streets named after Spaniards or Americans. I agree Dewey Boulevard had to go; it was perverse that such an important thoroughfare was named after the head of an invading foreign power. But I would not have objected if we kept España to remind us of the mixed colonial legacy of Spain.
In the same token I would keep the name Clark in Pampanga, even as its street names are renamed after Filipinos. When I was there last month driving through with my kids, I explained this used to be an American air force, pointing out the long perimeter fence encircling the former base. “Clark,” as American as American goes, tags the way Filipino space was marked off as American.
There are many street names that better place us as Filipinos. UP Village’s streets can be made into a thesis on Filipino values, with names like Masunurin (obedience) and Matipid (thrift). All the “ma” adjectives can get unwieldy, and I wonder how many of the residents themselves have made sense of all the street names.
We need to be boldly Filipino in our street names. If we could give awards to street names I would nominate a small cluster near Mindanao Avenue: Wedged along British street names are Silangan, Habagat, Hilaga, Bituin, Sinagtala, Bagong Buwan, Madaling Araw, Takipsilim and Bahaghari. (Do I see raised eyebrows with that last name?)
Street names “place” us, linking us to the past with stories and narratives. But they are also works in progress, opportunities for us to make history, to create heritage through places we can call, and name, as our own—atin ito.