ENGLISH 7 Activity 1

Name:Psalm Andrei B. Franciscp

Date:September,13,2021
Cellphone #:
Facebook Name:Psalm Andrei Francisco

Direction: Read the Passage and answer the questions that follows. Type your answer after the question.
Send this to ograde37@gmail.com. Deadline is on September 14, 2021 at 12:00 Noon.

Kalesa: The Passing of a Life-Style

by Rey Hulog

Were you there—in that crowd that milled about the wrecked kalesa, and the
scratched limousine?
“Street Scene,” Gerson Mallillin,
Philippine Magazine, 1941

In a recent science exhibition in New York, a journalist was drawn to a

quaintly designed vehicle. After admiring the contours of the unusual vehicle,
the journalist, baffled, asked where the engine was. A scientist enlightened
him, saying that the device was contrived to eliminate pollution in the streets
by replacing the gasoline-fueled car. How did it work? An old-fashioned horse
would pull it.

The Spanish Years

Today’s environmental
problems probably do not call for
a solution as drastic as a return
to the horse-and buggy era. But
the prospect appeals to many—
those who are distressed by the
ill effects of the machine, those
harkening to the past, the “good
old days” when the machine
was not an indispensable part of
man’s day-to-day activities.

Those of us who were born after the war are often curious about the past,
we have only vaguely glimpsed in formal history books or in the misty-eyed
remembrances of our fathers and grandfathers.
The Spaniards brought to the Philippines not only Christianity and a
haughty colonialism but also a life-style characterized by aristocratic manners
and morals. In the age of gears and bolts, rockets and computers, the kalesa
remains a poignantly nostalgic reminder of the past which is a blend of the
European and the Filipino.

The Spaniards brought the first horses to the Philippines as early as 1587, only
half a century after Magellan stumbled on the island of Samar while searching
for new routes to the Spice Islands. There were no roads then as we know them
now and transportation was either by carabao cart or man-borne hammock,
such as we sometimes see in calendar pictures of 17th century women going
out on pilgrimages. With the arrival of the horse, the Castilians gave the native
Filipinos their first arrogance. Seeing the supercilious Spanish aboard the first
horse-drawn buggies in the Philippines, our ancestors must have felt much the
same way that their later descendants felt upon the arrival of the first motor car
in the country.

The calash of the 17th century became one of the aristocracy’s first status
symbols. Given what one knows about the early Spanish colonialist’s character,
one can form quite an accurate picture of the street scenes of that century. The
foreign don and his lady sitting haughtily on the calash as they take a relaxed
ride through the dusty roads while the natives, whom they have chauvinistically
labeled indios, stared at them half in envy and half in reverence or, secretly,
irreverence. Later, having been brainwashed by the Spanish colonialists, the
natives, too, looked on the calash as a desirable object, something that would
make them a little less indio than the non-calash owning indios.
Riding through the history on the horse-drawn carriage one finds some
fascinating points. The Muslims, for example, did not use the kalesa. Without
doubt, raiding parties of “Moros” must have glimpsed these horse-drawn
contraptions in the Spanish-occupied cities they invaded. But the fact that
they never adopted it is a tribute to their rugged and stubbornly independent
spirit. The Muslims resisted the Spaniards not only physically but also culturally at
a time when many of the natives had already acquired from the Spaniards the
mentality that gave high value to status symbols.

The kalesa galloped on almost unnoticed by history and at the height of

the Filipino-Spanish era, in the 17th and 18th centuries, it became, like the motor
car later, a vital though largely taken for granted part of Filipino life. Manila’s
everyday history moved on kalesa wheels. It became an appurtenance of the
elite set who numbered among its preoccupations the pleasant late-afternoon
rides on the paved streets of the Escolta.
These Spanish-style paseos permeated the fashionable life of Manila at
one time. Dons and Doñas both of the Spanish aristocracy and the ilustrado
class paraded their calashes, coaches of different designs that sometimes
verged on the bizarre. The carriages were made not just of plain wood but of
rare and expensive ones; the seats were upholstered with fine and expensive,
frequently imported leather; the angles and curves of the calash became
sophisticated as rich families tried to out-status one another by installing bronze
and silver decorations on their carriages, I imagine in the same way that many
car owners take pride in their cars’ hub caps.

Louis Manigault, an American plantation owner of French descent from

South Carolina, visited Manila in the 1850s and came upon the milieu of the
kalesa of that time. He wrote in his journal: “The City proper is built much in the
old Spanish style, houses with their little projecting balconies, streets not very
wide, and Churches at almost every corner... My favorite walk in Manila was
over the old-fashioned bridge across the Pasig River (connecting Binondo and
Manila) into the Calsada. Here I would generally find the Country Indians and
Mestizos coming to Manila (the Manila of that time was limited to Intramuros,
the walled city) with fruit & c. for Market, large trees are planted on each side of
this ‘Public Walk’ under the whole shade of which are to be seen old drummers
initiating the young boys into the use of the drum, trumpeters are also puffing
away, their discordant notes plainly heard at a distance.”

The American Years

In 1885 the first large-scale transit system was introduced in Manila by the
Compania de los Tranvias de Filipinas, which was based in Spain and owned,
predictably, by Spaniards. This system of trolleys and tramcars was widely used,
yes, it replaced most of the carretela buses that offered rides for two centavos.
But the horse-drawn carriage, the kalesa, persisted as the master of Manila
streets; there were still no motor cars to usurp the kalesa’s primacy as popular
transportation; coaches remained fashionable for private use; cocheros still
earned a comfortable living.

In 1892 while the kalesa was still the king of the road in Manila, Charles
E. Duryea of Chicopee, Massachusetts, produced the first gas-powered
“automobile” in history. This first motor car was so fragile that it looked like a toy
to many, and none dreamed that the history of the automobile industry had
begun. Fewer still realized the drastic impact that the invention was to have on
the lifestyle of the next century.

This event was comfortingly lost on the kalesa riding Filipino and Spaniard
of the time, particularly the cochero who earned his living with the kalesa. Spain
then was waning as a world power and did not have, unlike the United States,
inventive men who would propel the world into the age of technology and
provide the vital edge needed to win wars.

In 1898 an American naval force led by Admiral Dewey demolished the

sitting-duck Spanish navy at Manila Bay, the sound of American guns heralding
the end of one colonial era in the Philippines and the beginning of another. As the
Americans took hold, the face of Philippine city streets began transformation—
from the ciudad of the Spanish to the complex urban community of the
Americans. The American thoroughfare system was adopted, improving and
also complicating conditions. But the shift from the Spanish to the American
way was not as sudden as some people sometimes suppose. Three centuries
of Spanish domination cannot be swept away in a decade; most historical
changes do not take place as momentously as the climaxes of dramas.

The Decline

The years following 1910 saw the beginning of the decline of the cochero
and kalesa. The steady rise in the number of automobiles brought into the
country displaced the kalesa more and more. The motorized invasion had
begun; by 1938 there were more than 50,000 motor vehicles in the country,
while the people’s acceptance of the American life-style provided greater
impetus to the decline of the kalesa. The calashes and the carretelas were
being overtaken by the speedier Fords, Chevrolets, Dodges, Internationals,
Buicks, Plymouths, and Nashes.

The kalesa barely survived the Japanese Occupation. Its diminishing

popularity inspired the nostalgic overtones in the Sunday Tribune Magazine
column of Pedro Aunario, in the April 11, 1943 issue. Wrote the columnist: “A
nephew of Rizal, Don Mauricio Cruz, a keen observer of the realities of life,
once told us that during the Spanish regime, Taal Lake was among the places
most frequented by tourists because of its proximity to Manila. In those days the
roads were stony and winding, and full of ruts, making trips hard and tiresome.

The tourists made the trips on Batangas horses. Mostly foreigners, the visitors
could not help but admire the spirit and endurance of well-cared-for and wellfed
Batangas horses.”

The kalesa folIowed the decline of the horse.

The number of kalesas since the war ended steadily dwindled. It was
a battle between the horse and horsepower; the fight of the Spaniards was
confronted by the gift of the Americans. The result was predictable. The
American jeepney pushed the Spanish kalesa out of the bigger streets even as the
American soldier pressed the Spanish conquistador out of the Philippines.

The old-time carrocerias and stables have given way to jeepney garages and
auto repair shops.

The Present
Today a handful of kalesas still make the rounds. But only the nostalgic
give them a second thoughtful glance. Once the king of the road, the kalesa
now has a very small domain: the market streets of Quiapo, Binondo, and
Divisoria. They are used mostly by marketgoers who cannot load their goods in
jeepneys or buses and find taxis too expensive. Today’s kalesas are no longer
sophisticated in design although most are built sturdier; the upholstered seats
and silver-plated adornments are gone.

The horses have become thinner, mirroring the increasingly difficult life
their masters are living. Sometimes you see these animals laboring hard to pull
the kalesas, panting and frothing at the mouth. Many years ago, I saw a horse
fall down on its forelegs out of exhaustion on Claro M. Recto Avenue when
it was still Azcarraga. The cochero, looking as harried as his horse, climbed
down and gently rubbed the horse’s head and struggled to help it up. I cannot
remember a more poignant scene so accurately portraying the plight of the
Philippine kalesa.

Perhaps it is mere coincidence, but in my observations of the cochero

and the horse, I have not seen one cochero smile or engage in boisterous
joshing with another cochero as jeepney and bus drivers often do. The cochero
has become some sort of a burdened dreamer, a Don Quixote without armor
fighting a desperate battle against the technological future. A few years ago,
there was a proposal to harness the kalesa for the tourist trade, to spruce it
up and preserve its history. As far as I know, these suggestions have not been
taken seriously.

At the beginning of this article there is an excerpt from a poem; the

following are the last lines:

The policeman took down the names of the chauffeur and the cochero,
and on the black pavement the blood of the dying horse traced ominous
cyphers.

Answer the following questions.

1. What do you think is the explanation behind the words used in the title?
How is the kalesa described during its introduction to the streets of Manila?
2. What parallelism does the author point out between the arrival of the
kalesa and the arrival of motor cars? When does the clash between the
kalesa and the motor car started

3. What kind of mood does the author establish throughout the essay? How
does the ending make you feel about the kalesa?

4. How does the quotation at the beginning and end of the essay add to
the overall tone and meaning?

5. Can you think of any traditional activity, object, or practice that is

becoming obsolete these days? Do you think that such things should be
revived? Why or why not?