First of two parts
LAST July 1, 2026, fellow Manila Times columnist, historian and history professor Dr. Xiao Chua and I, together with fellow faculty member Dr. Ivan Kaye Bantigue jointly held an educational tour for our university students at the Museo ni Dr. Pio Valenzuela (in Valenzuela City), the Chinatown Museum (in Manila) and the Museo del Galeon (in Pasay City). Most of the attendees were Contemporary World course students, so we wanted to highlight globalization and the Philippines/Filipinos in the said tour.
We originally meant for our students to tour the Iglesia Ni Cristo (INC) Museum in Quezon City. However, our service provider Lavera Tours (under the steady hands of Ms. Tess Trusa and Ms. Susan Yamson) was later informed through email that the museum was going to be closed on that day “due to scheduled activities for our personnel and tour guides.”
We planned to visit the museum because the INC is a religious group founded by a Filipino in the Philippines that has become quite globalized. According to the iglesianicristo.net website:
“Iglesia Ni Cristo has an international membership comprising 152 racial and ethnic backgrounds. It maintains nearly 7,000 congregations and missions grouped into more than 178 ecclesiastical districts in 168 countries and territories...”
More importantly, the INC’s main language for religious work is Filipino. Thus, when Executive Minister Br. Eduardo Manalo presides over religious service overseas, he often does so using the Filipino language, which is translated to foreign languages through headsets for those who are not conversant in the language. Through this, Filipino cultural nuances embedded in the Filipino language are transmitted globally through the pastoral work of Iglesia Ni Cristo.
When the INC Museum became unavailable to us due to unforeseen circumstances, Xiao Chua contacted his bosom friend and colleague at the Philippine Historical Association board, Jonathan Balsamo, the head of Valenzuela City’s Cultural Affairs and Tourism Development Office, which supervises the Museo ni Dr. Pio Valenzuela. Balsamo and the museum graciously and generously opened their doors to us on very short notice. Mabuhay po kayo!
Pio Valenzuela is an important historical figure because of his involvement in the Kataas-taasang Kagalang-galangang Katipunan ng mga Anak ng Bayan (Katipunan) movement that spearheaded the 1896 Revolution. He was among the top Katipunan leaders who realized the importance of mass media in the dissemination of revolutionary ideas and ideology among Filipinos during the 1890s through the publication of Ang Kalayaan, the organ of the revolutionary movement. Among the pieces published by Ang Kalayaan is the polemical “Ang Dapat Mabatid ng mga Tagalog” by Andres Bonifacio to exhort Filipinos to rebel against colonial authorities. The essay explained that Filipinos originally embraced Spanish colonialism because of its persuasive promise of development for the archipelago. However, the failure of the Spaniards to deliver on their promised development, which they egregiously tried to mask through violent repression of Filipino political aspirations, drove our ancestors to rebel.
In his native town of Polo (i.e., the original name of the municipality), where he served as municipal presidente or town mayor, as well as in the province of Bulacan (where Polo was a part of before being incorporated into Imelda Marcos’ Metropolitan Manila in 1975) that elected him governor in the 1920s, Pio Valenzuela, according to Balsamo, was more fondly remembered as a medical doctor.
Pio was eyewitness to the industrial transformation of his bayan through the piecemeal construction of the Manila North Road during the American colonial regime. According to the report of Charles Elliott, secretary of Commerce and Police in 1912:
“Satisfactory progress has been made on the North Road, which will eventually be a... highway about 500 kilometers in length from Manila to the town plaza of Bangui, Ilocos Norte... The location of the entire road has been definitely determined, and construction is proceeding by sections as the funds become available, and the separate local projects, each of which is a link in the final chain, are justified. A considerable portion of the layout is now completed as first-class road, and several new sections will be added during the coming dry season. Its route is through the Provinces of Rizal, Bulacan, Nueva Ecija, Pangasinan, [La] Union, Ilocos Sur and Ilocos Norte. The plan is to build it as a first-class road from Manila to Laoag, and as a second-class road from Laoag to Bangui.”
Thus, information posted online (in Valenzuela’s Wikipedia entry) that the Manila North Road was “built in sections beginning in 1928” is erroneous. However, the assertion that the Manila North Road was instrumental in the industrialization of Polo headlined by the establishment of the landmark Balintawak Beer Brewery in 1937 is nevertheless quite accurate.
Not to be underestimated in its contribution to this development was the Polo train station of the Spanish-era Ferrocarril Manila a Dagupan (Dagupan Railway) dating back to 1892, which continued to operate as the Manila Railroad Company during the transition of the town to (part-) industry during the American colonial regime and onward.
Bantigue, Chua and I reminded our students during this part of the tour that globalization, which according to George Ritzer, is a “trans-planetary process or set of processes involving... multidirectional flows of people, objects, places and information” meant that the world was coming to the Philippines and the Philippines was going out into the world. Conventional wisdom holds that the Philippines of Pio Valenzuela was caught in the middle of what economic historian Benito Legarda Jr. called the first wave of economic globalization of the late 19th century and early 20th century.
However, by recalibrating this perspective a little bit, it will be evident that Valenzuela’s (and Jose Rizal’s, Andres Bonifacio’s, etc.) generation of national heroes met the onrushing current of global flows into the Philippines with the immortal flames of patriotism forged by a brutal revolutionary history that was nevertheless tempered by a tender and nurturing culture seeking to create the developmental foundations of the modern Filipino nation I previously discussed in my “mejora” series for this paper.
To be continued
