Fourth of a series
IN the vocabulary of contemporary Ilonggos — including my 84-year-old father — “mejoras” are improvements consistent with the usage of the “ilustrado” lawyer Gregorio Sancianco from 1881: a focus on improvements in the material and moral lives of the people.
Curiously, for the Sakdalistas of the 1930s, “mejoras publicas,” or public improvements, were a device or tool the American colonizers used to lull the people into a false sense of security so as to forget about their ardent agitation for national independence. Public appropriations for roads and public improvements (i.e., “... salapi upang gamitin sa mga lansangan at sa mehoras publikas”) were being used by the Americans to keep a segment of the country satisfied while the suffering people (i.e., “bayang nagdaralita”) slowly withered away without their freedom (i.e., “... pamatay ... sa bayang walang makain halos, sa bayang ni isang panyo kung minsan ay wala nang magamit upang pahirin ang kanyang pawis”).
The distinction between public works and mejoras publicas is consistent with the debates inside the constitutional convention of 1934 that drafted the 1935 Constitution. In the debates regarding pork barrel, for instance, during the session on Dec. 11, 1934, delegate Pablo Lorenzo of Zamboanga — father of business tycoon Luis Lorenzo Sr. and Zamboanga City mayor and lawmaker Maria Clara Lorenzo Lobregat — also distinguished between the two concepts:
“Entiendo, por tanto, que debemos inaugurar el nuevo gobierno eliminando de la Asamblea Nacional toda facultad de aprobar consignaciones para obras publicas y mejoras permanentes (emphasis mine) a menos que estas formen parte integrante de un programa nacional y comprensivo que solo el Departamento Ejecutivo del Gobierno puede proponer; un programa que no solo tenga en cuenta el estado economico del Gobierno en relation con otras actividades del mismo, sino sobre todo que este en armonia con las necesidades verdaderas de todo el pais.”
(Rough translation, courtesy of Google Translate: “I understand, therefore, that we must inaugurate the new government by removing from the National Assembly all power to approve appropriations for public works and permanent improvements (emphasis mine) unless these form an integral part of a comprehensive national program that only the Executive Department of the Government can propose; a program that not only takes into account the economic state of the Government in relation to its other activities, but above all that is in harmony with the true needs of the whole country”).
I earlier wrote that INCTV’s invitation for me to talk about the Iglesia Ni Cristo (INC) Museum as “mejora” spurred me to do some digging on the history of the term. I found out that in the internal vocabulary of the INC, mejoras is translated as “edifices,” as seen in a YouTube video from the INC Museum’s account of Feb. 28, 2021, titled, “Mehoras: Kahalagahan at Kagandahan (Edifices: Value and Resplendence).” This was written in the video description:
“This episode features the scale models of chapels and other buildings owned by the Church which are located in the Edifices section of the Iglesia Ni Cristo Museum.”
I surmise that the distinction between obras publicas/public works and mejoras publicas/public edifices was artificially created because during the American colonial era, the Bureau of Public Works was initially focused more on land transportation infrastructure for budgeting purposes. In those days — as opposed to the contemporary period, which relies heavily on private contractors — that bureau often undertook the construction of land transportation infrastructure, for which, as previously mentioned, former governor-general W. Cameron Forbes distinguished himself, thus earning for himself the nickname “El Caminero,” or “road worker.”
Stanley Karnow is worth quoting at length in relation to this:
“Another legacy of Spain’s neglect was the desperate need for roads. At the time of the American arrival (i.e., 1898 — VY), the entire archipelago had only about three hundred miles of what were generously termed ‘first-class’ rural roads. The rest were dirt tracks that turned into impassable bogs during the wet season. Sir John Bowring, a British traveler of the 1850s, eloquently described the countryside under the torrential rains: ‘I have seen beasts of burden struggling in vain to extricate themselves, with their loads, from the gulf into which they had fallen, and in which they were finally abandoned by their conductors. I have been carried to populous places in palanquins whose bearers, sometimes sixteen in number, were up to their thighs amid mire, slough, tangled roots, loose stones and fixed boulders.’ John Foreman, a British resident of Manila, reckoned forty years later (i.e., 1890s — VY) that rain regularly closed sixty percent of the roads to vehicles. Emphasizing the obvious, (Governor William) Taft declared that without roads ‘people are necessarily savages, because society is impossible and ... real progress is retarded.’”
“El Caminero” Forbes was at the forefront of the aggressive American colonial-era land transportation infrastructure agenda during his tenure as proconsul from 1904 to 1913, when he was unceremoniously replaced as governor general by New York’s then-House representative Francis B. Harrison.
Considering the poor state of roads in the country in the early 20th century, it made sense for initial notions of improvements to be focused primarily on roadbuilding. By the 1930s, however, obras publicas/public works were treated separately from mejoras publicas, now primarily understood, as in the contemporary usage of the INC, as edifices or buildings.
After World War II, as my father grew into adulthood in Iloilo City, the distinction between obras publicas and mejoras publicas merged under the more generic term of mejoras in the sense of public improvements in the community landscape, representing the great thirst of the Filipino people for national development.
Thus, it is unsurprising why the rapacious and avaricious trillion-peso public-works corruption scandal of President Ferdinand Marcos Jr.’s administration and his allies in Congress evokes such strong revulsion from the Filipino people. Disgraced party-list lawmaker Zaldy Co claims that he personally delivered “maletas” full of dirty money from public-works kickbacks to the residences of President Marcos and former speaker Martin Romualdez at Makati City’s posh Forbes Park, ironically named after El Caminero.
To be continued