The social media sites Facebook and YouTube have become the venue for heritage advocates and enthusiasts who are seething mad over the alleged pronouncement of Engr. Marlon Marollano, chief planning officer and project engineer of the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH), regarding heritage as a hindrance to development.
I have seen Ka Bino Guerrero’s reaction to what the engineer was alleged to have said, “Kung magsige ta’g pasilong anang heritage-heritage, dili ta ma-develop!” (If we keep on brandishing heritage, we will never develop!). Ka Bino is quite a figure in heritage circles in Cebu. It was he who exposed the misuse of the beloved hero Lapu-Lapu the other year in an advertisement by a diaper manufacturer who was eventually forced to withdraw the television commercial. Marollano expectedly got a dressing-down from Ka Bino during the public hearing.
On hindsight, the engineer should have been more circumspect in his statement, considering that the public hearing called for was sure to have heritage advocates from Boljoon and from the city of Cebu in attendance. That hearing was concerning the defacement of Ili Rock and the alleged illegal reclamation project of the white sandy beach in sitio Talisay, barangay Poblacion where this huge limestone bluff is located.
Engr. Marlon Marollano’s statement was not an honest mistake, I believe, given the record of DPWH in vis-à-vis heritage structures and sites. In fact, I would not be surprised if his view of heritage as an enemy of progress and development reverberates in the halls and offices of the DPWH considering that without doubt, there is quite a record of battles being fought in recent years between government engineers and heritage advocates all over the country.
But one must also not forget that in 2008 or thereabouts, the Cebu Provincial Tourism and Heritage Commission had been working closely with DPWH engineers and had in fact handled two region-wide training programs on culture and heritage. This was carried out by our very own Committee on Sites, Relics and Structures with architect Melva Rodriguez Java, Prof. Ruel Rigor, among others, as resource persons. Either Engr. Marollano was absent during those trainings or he was not yet in the DPWH Region VII at the time.
Be that as it may, the cat is out of the bag, as it were. When Ronald Villanueva, designated tourism officer of Boljoon town, asked for help through Facebook in getting DPWH to stop what it was doing to Ili Rock about two weeks ago, my immediate reaction to him was that maybe the DPWH was just trying to do a short terracing of the sides to prevent landslides, something I found understandable. As a heritage advocate, I saw logic in that. But then I also added that this should not have been carried out, even so, without a public hearing. Now it appears that no such public hearing was ever held. Worse, the DPWH appears so uninformed about the pending nomination and inspection of Boljoon and its church for inclusion in the prestigious World Heritage Site registry of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (Unesco).
Unfortunately for the engineer, Ronald is no stranger to heritage having almost single-handedly developed the Boljoon Heritage Trail, one the projects he successfully completed as a scholar in the Professional Diploma in Heritage Conservation offered by the University of San Carlos jointly with the Cebu Province in 2009. He knows that when the Unesco will inspect Boljoon, it will not just look at the integrity of Boljoon church, the subject of nomination, but also its surroundings and, in fact, the entire community and environment surrounding the church. The Unesco will look at, for example, whether Boljoanons are heritage-aware, whether they are willing to stand for heritage and whether they exude a distinctive and palpable sense of pride over their heritage resources. Or, at the opposite end, whether they don’t care.
By foisting the heritage banner vis-à-vis an intrusive, unstudied, undocumented and ill-planned infrastructure projects like the one on Ili, Boljoanons may yet save the day when Unesco will begin to audit the town.
The purpose of putting heritage on the agenda of development is for all of us to ensure that our uniqueness and our unique histories and pre-histories are preserved and not swept away in a world that is becoming predictably uniform. When the whole planet follows one blueprint for development, where all our buildings, airports, roads, highways and the trappings of high modernity all look alike from one country to the next, we have nothing but our own heritage to tell the difference.
That is why even communist China is preserving all that is left of the monarchical period from the Qing Dynasty down to three thousand years of history. No matter how brutal and oppressive those millennia were, they are a part of what China is today.
It is time therefore for the DPWH as an institution to seriously re-educate and remold itself and its personnel. There are so many models for laudable cooperation and collaboration between heritage advocates and structural/civil engineers worldwide. Or, it can simply be renamed the Department of Progress Without Heritage.