I mentioned in a previous post about Santa Ana’s hidden treasures, treasures of heritage to be exact. It is fortunate to find out that despite the rapid urbanization going on around the 400-plus year-old city, the old heritage of the city is still alive in this “quieter” part of the city. For someone who appreciates the beauty of cultural heritage, it is a welcome relief to see it somehow alive in the district of Santa Ana. Back during the 19th-early 20th centuries, Santa Ana became known as an enclave of some of Manila’s upper class families. The lush environment and the cool breeze of the Pasig River made living in Santa…
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a little sidetrip to Punta
Located along the northern bank of the Pasig River, just right next door to Mandaluyong, you can not miss finding Punta on the map. Who can miss that piece of land that’s bulging out and surrounded by the rivers of Pasig and San Juan? And if you look at the map below, Punta does have a peninsula-like appearance, which may be why the Spaniards called the place as such, after their native word for point or tip.
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Santa Ana: the community by the river
Located along the southeastern end of the City of Manila is the district known to many as Santa Ana. Or as it proudly states on its welcome marker, “the historic community of Santa Ana.” Santa Ana by itself has a colorful past that has much been overlooked other than its repuation of having a race track which is NOT evenlocated in the area. (and the race track itself today is no longer in operation, but that’s another story)
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commemorating the first shot of the Philippine-American war
At this time, we marked the 111th anniversary of the outbreak of the Filipino-American war, part of a chain of events that began way before of how we ended up being screwed by the Americans who were in the processing of building their own colonial empire and became their “little brown American brothers” regardless of the positives and negatives that were borne out of these events. For those who at least still remember those lessons in Philippine history way before, we were told that the Filipino-American war began on February 4, 1899 when an American soldier named Willie Grayson fired that first shot. Depending on which book you read, Grayson…