SPANISH COLONIAL PERIOD II

There were two imperatives under this order: to obey and believe. Without the strict observance of these imperatives ruthlessly enforced by the local hierarchs, that world would have been collapsed by the weight of its own injustice. For this reason, once a Spanish force took control of a village, they placed it in the name of the king of Spain and also attached the inland which was virtually empty. The governor general, in turn, divided the land and entrusted it to favored members of the expedition who were then called encomenderos. The encomenderos were supposed to bring in the missionaries to baptize the natives living in his property, in line with their duty to the king to spread the Christian gospel. Accordingly, one was taught in church the gospel of strict, unquestioning obedience to superiors. The catechism was a litany of frightening "thou shalt nots." In so many words, one was made to understand that rich and poor, privileged and deprived, and master and servant constituted an order ordained by God. And, of course, the natives had to believe and obey. There were no alternatives.

Makati was no exception to this form of colonization. The process began with the entrada, a penetration mission which was accompanied by the chiefs of previously conquered barangays. Once it was taken over, the village became a reduccion, from the Spanish word reducir, meaning "to reduce to submission," or to put it more bluntly, "to subjugate." It was important that the natives pledged their allegiance to the Spanish king; without it the king could not protect them and guide them into the Holy Catholic Faith.

To save their souls, the natives were put under another colonial institution, the doctrina, which was perhaps the most significant administrative unit in the colonial regime. If the reduccion was to prepare them for government, the doctrina was to process them through indoctrination for their eventual life in a Christian parish or curacy. For this reason, almost every boat sailing to the Islands had carried, as passengers, both royal officials and missionary friars.

The missionary friars belonged to five religious orders: the Augustinian, Franciscan, Dominican, the Recollect and - although not strictly a religious order - the Jesuit. Of these orders, the Augustinians and the Jesuits figured prominently in the evangelization of Makati. But not quickly and easily as they thought it would be.

The delay in their evangelization was caused by the refusal of the natives to be relocated inland. They had long developed a deep attachment to their abodes by the river and naturally they resisted the idea of being uprooted and transplanted and having to start all over again. The Spaniards found their objections petty and failed to comprehend their "affliction to leave their little houses where they were born and have been reared." When the natives continued to be adamant, their pueblo was placed in 1578 under the wings of the old capital, now known as Santa Ana de Sapa, as a visita, or district, under the jurisdiction of the Franciscan fathers until 1670.

In 1589 a sprawling marshland measuring 4940 hectares, a part of which would become the 20th-century Makati, was won at a public auction which was customary at the time. The winning bid of 1400 pesos was placed by Capitan Pedro de Brito, a retired aide to the Spanish army chief of staff, who made a modest fortune in the galleon trade. After his acquisition of the land, Capitan de Brito immediately took steps to "discharge the royal conscience," to fulfill, for the king, his duty to spread the Christian gospel. But he also ran into a brick wall, so to speak; the natives could not be persuaded to move inland.

It took the Calced Augustinians to successfully bring Makati "under the bells." When the natives refused to budge from their homes by the river, they built the shrine and monastery upon a hill in Guadalupe, just a few steps away from the village.

Like most churches in the Islands, the first church to be built in Makati was made of bamboo and nipa palm. The Provincial Chapter, on March 7, 1601, declared the monastery a domus formata, or a house or a community under the advocacy of Our Lady of Grace. On November 30, 1603, the advocacy was changed to that of Our Lady of Guadalupe in response to a petition signed by Spanish and native devotees.

Devotion to Our Lady of Guadalupe spread quickly. People from far and near visited her shrine, which was built on a hill overlooking the pueblo and the plains of Mandaluyong across the river. To accommodate the pilgrims, the friars built a dock on the river and carved a hundred steps leading up the hill to a wide courtyard. Close to the church they built quarters for the pious and the ill.

The Church of Saint Peter and Saint Paul, now known as San Pedro y Paolo Viejo, built in 1620 by Fr. Pedro de la Montes, began as a small chapel on a site marked out by their donor. As the earnings from the land began to fill their coffers, the Jesuits built the church as they had envisioned if from the start: an imposing structure of hewn stone, pebbles, and gravel mixed with mortar. A three-tiered papal tiara dominated the facade, together with keys- the symbols of the papacy, the first being St. Peter, or San Pedro Apostol, titulary of the locality. The natives, blessed even then with a fondness for nicknames, shortened his name, San Pedro de Makati, to either San Piro or Sampiro.

Upstream, the Guadalupe Church continued as a beehive of pilgrims. All day long, from both directions, came an endless procession of cascos, bancas and rafts loaded with Spanish, Chinese, and native devotees. Waterside tiendas were pitched by the river bank and weary travelers, on their way to and from Antipolo, stopped by for a break.

A big earthquake shook the pueblos of Makati in 1658 and caused considerable damage to the Guadalupe shrine. Fr. Alfonso Quijano, during his term from 1659 to 1662, oversaw the repair of the sanctuary. Embellishments of the shrine were continued by Fr. Buenaventura Bejar, the elected friar from 1686 to 1695. A fortification of the church was made by reinforcing it with additional stones from the nearby Manican estate. In 1706 Fr. Juan Bautista de Olarte added improvements on the flooring of the church and completed the belfry. By this time the church has adopted the Neo-Romanesque-Gothic architectural style which was sturdy enough to withstand the tremors caused by the eruption of Taal Volcano in 1754.