“In Memoriam” Sabrina Mae A. Sarandi, ARTS1 X5 CSS, Bass History [email protected] July 19, 2019

“In Memoriam” Sabrina Mae A. Sarandi, ARTS1 X5 CSS, Bass History [email protected] July 19, 2019 Rationale July 16, 2019 marked the 29th anniversary of the infamous 1990 Luzon Earthquake that devastated numerous population centers in Northern Luzon. Perhaps the most famous and most devastating center to be hit was the summer capital, Baguio City. In the midst of the calamity, high rise hotels toppled, roads cracked and were rendered impassable, and people were buried and trapped under heaps of rubble and debris. Bags of corpses lined the streets, the bodies waiting to be identified and claimed. As the earthquake destroyed Kennon Road and Marcos Highway, Bgauio City was isolated from the rest of the country for a whole seven days. Living in the city for 5 years and being steeped in its history, it’s the stories of the residents that truly made this a home for me. A cab driver taking me through South Drive and past the Beneco building once recalled how he and his family slept in the streets the night after the quake, too afraid to sleep under a roof that might kill them. An old soldier in PMA said that he could still remember the smell of Loakan Airport as he and his division piled up the bodies on the tarmac. A friend’s mother and grandmother still remember taking their family to sleep in the tents in Burnham Park. And yet, despite the earthquake being a fundamental memory for the city and its people, no official memorial stands today to honor the dead and still missing. The thousands of tourists coming to Baguio annually pass through the city idly by, ignorant of the death, rot, and trauma that places within the city have witnessed. They would go to Burnham Park not knowing that the Melvin Jones Stand as the home of many Baguio residents for weeks where they lacked food, water, and medicine. They would go to Skyworld for being the most known ukay ukay place along Session Road not knowing that it was once a high rise condominium that catered to cadets on leave with their families, with the ground floor bustling with shops and cafes where young couples would go on dates to. But regardless of the lack of a physical tribute, the residents of Baguio that survived the quake themselves serve as the monument which makes the stories much more than just another headline from nearly thirty years ago. Their stories are the testaments and monuments to the collective trauma which the city and its inhabitants have suffered through. The Baguio Hilltop Hotel in the aftermath of the earthquake and its current state “In Memoriam” would then seek to serve as a more physical manifestation of these memories. It is the hope of this map of Baguio that both the residents and the tourists coming to the city that these memories be safeguarded and kept alive through the passing of time. More than this, it is the hope of this map that Baguio City be treated with a respect to its history and its traumas, especially by the people that only see the city as a bragging right to post on their social media pages. Visual Method As such, this work has collected pictures from newspaper articles taken from the University of the Philippines Baguio Cordillera Research Section and the Baguio City Public Library. These pictures, showing the devastated state of the selected parts of the city, were then photographed and compiled to form the following work. The work itself consists of a map of the city with markers on the sites wherein the structures in the photos were depicted. Along with the photos, descriptions of the structure and its former purpose are also included. The work was done using MapHub, an online map making website which crowdsources people from around the internet to make maps more visually engaging and interactive for the modern age. The interface of the website overlays from actual street maps created using satellite visual imaging in order to create an accurate representation of the topography of an area. As such, the map created is an overlay of the actual streets of Baguio thereby creating a relatively accurate representation of the places included. However, as not all stories can be mentioned here, the landmarks and markers are limited to what has been researched. Further, some of these stories are sourced from first hand, primary accounts, and not academic sources and may contain a certain level of exaggeration from such sources Concluding Remarks .This project has helped me to remember the events, stories, and the collective trauma of Baguio surrounding the 1990 Earthquake. Looking at it from a map shows how connected all these things were, that while each story told has only one narrator, these stories connect to make a picture of the horror which Baguio had gone through nearly thirty years ago. Further, from a topographical perspective, it shows how close together these collapses, deaths, and stories of it truly are. As a father’s friend once told me, to him, it felt like the apocalypse – the end of the world as he knew it: Baguio was bathed in darkness, faint smells of fire and rot in the air, crying, and shouting, it truly felt like the end. Yet the Baguio-ite endured, carrying with them stories of the earthquake, of human resilience and endurance, of victory over hopelessness, of the ability of the human spirit. The project is most definitely not complete, it still has stories from countless other people, but since the map making website is only in its beta testing stage, only one person can make a map at a time. Perhaps in the future, once crowdsourced mapmaking websites have been completed, the stories of the earthquake can come together in cartographical form. .

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