Barili’s 400 Years

The town of Barili on the southwestern coast of Cebu will mark its 400th year as a parish over the weekend. Any visitor to the town will immediately notice now the renovation of the parish church whose patroness is Sta. Ana.

Amid the cacophony that will surely accompany this festive celebration is the more cerebral contribution by one of the town’s daughters, Azucena ‘Baby’ Pace, who will be launching her latest book entitled, “The Story of the Parish of Barili”, a 240-something volume which traces, as the title suggests, the story of the parish, from its very beginning 400 years ago.

I managed to wrangle from Baby Pace a copy despite being told that these were limited only to Barilihanons and those who sponsored its publication. When I posted on Facebook the brief and private signing “ceremony” we had last Friday at her home, a number of my friends soon started asking how they could get hold of a copy. Fortunately, other than my forcibly persuasive grabbing of a copy from Baby, she has donated a copy to the Cebuano Studies Center at the University of San Carlos for non-Barilihanons to read.

The book has 33 chapters in it, based on both archival research as well as interviews that Baby Pace conducted over time. It helped tremendously that she spent three decades of her life in Spain and as a translator and interpreter at that. Her years visiting the archives at Valladolid are finally paying off. And her knowledge of archaic as well as modern Spanish makes her a jewel in town if not in this entire province. For she can read handwritten archival documents with ease.

Interesting are the stories and information that the book provides, especially in regard to the early missionary endeavors of Jesuit priests in the 1600s as well as the chapter by chapter account of parish priests starting with Fr. Cipriano de San Jose in the early 1800s down to the present. There is also ample discussion on the ecclesiastical treasures of the parish, or whatever is left.

This is, of course, not Baby Pace’s first book on Barili. Some two or three years back she came out with “Barili: the Town, the People, the Years, A History”, which was about 70 page less than this latest one. In between, she wrote monographs detailing the ancestral families of the town, the town’s rituals and beliefs, and the history of the town’s barangays.

The path to this concern for the past was already planted over a decade ago when, upon her return from Spain to take care of her mother, Baby opened a museum, the Barili Folk and History Museum, along the lines of the late 19th century cabinet or curiosity or cabinet of wonder that is now making a comeback in many private abodes in Europe.

Truly, Baby Pace is one woman every town or city in this country cannot do without. And Barili is truly blessed that, by shying away from the path of politics blazed by her mother, she chose instead to devote time to writing about her town. Her mother, the late Librada Pace, whose 33 years in office makes her the longest serving municipal mayor in Cebu and a woman at that, must not be disappointed that she chose this avocation instead.