Pistia stratioles. Scientific name of kiapo, a cabbage-like water lily that grows abundantly in the esteros of what is now the Quiapo district of Manila. That’s also where the place got its name, and that’s how we get a clue to how the place looked like when Spanish conquistadores and friars first set foot on its soil.  

 

            During the Spanish colonial period, Quiapo was marshland and fishing grounds, split into small islands by streams and rivulets. The naming of St. John the Baptist as the patron of the early Quiapo by Franciscan missionaries comes, then, as no surprise. As the one who baptized and went before the messiah, St. John the Baptist is known for his baptism and its enduring symbol: water. True to the gospel account, St. John the Baptist has now been displaced to a small chapel to make way for Nuestro Padre Jesus Nazareno, patron of Quiapo, who attracts devotees from all walks of life every 9th of January.  

 

            Eight years after the Franciscans set up their mission station in Quiapo, Governor General Santiago de Vera declared the district a pueblo in 1586 and became a parish two years later. A Franciscan, Fr. Antonio de Nombrella, its first parish priest would say mass and administer community affairs in a nipa and bamboo church. Quiapo was then part of what is now Santa Ana.  

 

            The Augustinians were the next to arrive. Later called the Recollects because of their strict observance of the Rule of St. Augustine, these priests built in 1622 a chapel in honor of St. Sebastian on the same spot where the basilica now stands. At the behest of Governor General Sebastian Hurtado de Corcuera, the Jesuits took over the parish from 1635 to 1639. An outburst of protests from the secular clergy and natives followed suit leading to the restoration of secular priests as parish administrators.  

 

            Fires, earthquakes, and invasions dot the history of Quiapo. In the Chinese uprising of 1603, Sun Tay, leader of the Chinese rebels, burnt Quiapo to the ground. On November 30, 1645, the church collapsed during an earthquake. The church underwent reconstruction after that, but it was razed again by the fire of 1791. With the British invasion of Manila in 1762, the treasury of Quiapo church was plundered to fulfill the British’s ransom demands. In 1863, another earthquake destroyed the church. A new church of sturdier materials was completed under the supervision of Fr. Manuel Roxas Manio in 1889 until it again suffered terribly from a fire in 1929.  

 

            The story of Quiapo would not be complete without mentioning the personalities and events that have made it the historical landmark that it is today. There’s Julio Nakpil and Gregoria de Jesus, widow of Katipunan leader, Andres Bonifacio, who got married in Quiapo church. Don Ariston Bautista Lin and his wife ,Doña Petrona Nakpil gave sanctuary to the couple in the house they built over the foundation of an earlier house in 1914. This is now known as the Nakpil house which is still there today.  

 

            In the early American colonial period, Quiapo rose to become a center of news publishing. El Renacimiento and Philippines Free Press, to name the most famous publications of the period, had its offices in Quiapo.  

 

            A center of Japanese espionage years before and during the Commonwealth, Quiapo during World War II was “to endure three years of regimentation, press control, miseducation that served the purposes of propaganda, food and dry good rationing, political indoctrination, superinflation, one-party politics, radio propaganda, neighborhood associations, as well as the puppet government of President Laurel” (Andrade, 62).  

 

            Of course, how could the bombing of Plaza Miranda, the area fronting the church, in August 23, 1971 be forgotten? A Liberal Party political rally was taking place when a bomb exploded and injured some senatorial candidates.  

 

            The war waged by the Muslim National Liberation Front in Mindanao in the 1970s also brought with it a migration of Muslims to Quiapo. The present-day mosque where Quiapo’s Muslims now congregate was built in 1977 by the Office of Cultural Minorities. 

 

            Many of these details today lie buried under the grime and grease of commercial establishments that mar Quiapo. Historian, Pio Andrade, Jr., intoned a sad yet hopeful note when he wrote: “Through the current disappointing developments in Quiapo, however, there has been one constant saving grace: the Black Nazarene” (Andrade, 68).  

 

            For all that it has been through, Andrade’s claim holds true. Quiapo today remains a center not only of commerce but also of a people’s religiosity, a stunning display of faith on an icon of the Nazareno, carved by an Aztec artist in his own image and brought by the Recollects aboard a galleon from Mexico many centuries ago.