A concert in Makati’s St. Peter and Paul Church

This Monday, the City of Makati is sponsoring a concert in the old St. Peter and Paul Church. We are very happy about this because it is high time that our people of Makati get-together and know their city’s past. Makati actually entered history as early as 1593 when the first Philippine Bishop, Fray Domingo de Salazar, O.P. discovered its volcanic tuff. The Spaniards called the tuff adobe, which meant the unburned bricks that provided the building blocks of the first stone houses in what became Intramuros.

There are two accounts as to how Makati got its name. The first is that it derived its name from kati, the Tagalog word for "ebbed beach." This is improbable because if Makati was once a shoreland, it was in prehistoric times. The most plausible explanation is that it got its name from the Tagalog word lamang kati, which means "contents of the earth" in obvious reference to the adobe extricated from its quarries.

The Saints Pedro and Paul Church in Makati is where the traditional baile de los arcos is annually performed.

The San Pedro Church is history arrested in stone. Constructed in 1620, it is Makati’s oldest building, marking the time the Philippines entered the Age of Architecture. It makes an interesting comparison with the high-rise buildings along Ayala Avenue. Sustained by its Walls, the church is structured like a crustacean. Makati’s tall buildings have internal skeletons, like vertebrates. Their different construction methods make one conclude that Philippine architecture has gone in a circle. The old church rose by raising its sustaining walls tier by tier. Contemporary buildings start with a steel framework, which is how nipa huts are constructed, only the frames are of bamboo. In both, the framework sustains the walls and roof.

When the Spaniards conquered the archipelago, dancing was the prayer form of the non-Muslim population. The Church had long ago closed its doors to religious dancing. The only pagan dance relic that survived is the genulflection, which is a sublimated form of the tripudium, a three-step dance that traces back to ancient Rome. It signified humility: "I dance, yet I falter." Two popular reasons were cited for the proscription of dance: one faulted the dance for the decapitation of John the Baptist; the other, maintained that Christ never danced. The truth is that the dance conflicted with the exaltation of virginity. Dance, no matter how prim and proper involved a certain amount of exhibitionism and is a medium for the natural attraction of the sexes. You cannot mortify the flesh if you glorify the body. And so the early missionaries tried to eradicate prayer-dancing in the islands. But dance-devotions were too deeply entrenched in the Filipino psyche. In Obando, the best the missionaries could do was to replace the pagan idols with an image of San Pascual Baylon. That way, they would, at least be dancing to a Christian saint. In Makati, they substituted the danza de los arcos for the pagan prayer dance. Not only did it supersede the heathen dance, it limited the dancing in church to its nine participants.