Assignment of placenames

The Spanish priests, authorized to appoint civil officials, also assumed the role of assigning names or appellations to missions they opened and helped sustain. The usual practice was to honor places in Spanish where the assigning cleric was from, especially when there were similarities in geography, notably terrains, coastal views, and other natural settings—reasons why places like towns of Monkayo and Compostela, Davao de Oro, were assigned new labels.

Fr. Saturnino C. Urios, a Jesuit priest who founded the Butuan university named after him, has had a string of placenames to his credit. He also founded the towns of Las Nieves, Agusan del Sur, in honor of the Our Lady of Snows, the patroness of his birthplace. Jativa.

Jativa, now a hamlet, used to be a pueblo along Agusan River but was subsumed to become part of the village of Haguimitan, Monkayo, Davao de Oro. Fr. Urios also gave the other settlements he established the names Novelé, Segorbe, Alberique, Alcira, Gandía, Morella, and Sagunto, places inspired by regions in Valencia, Spain.

But during this period, there was also a unique way of labeling places which missionaries adopted and introduced. In Davao Oriental, for instance, to make it easier to recall and to honor the names of village leaders, reductions were named after their tribal chieftains. If Juan was the village captain when the mission was organized, the new settlement was named San Juan, with the prefix ‘san’ as a form of recognition but not as a saintly title.

This practice, curiously, was adopted by Ferdinand E. Marcos Sr. when he created the towns of San Mariano and San Vicente, in Davao de Oro. San Mariano refers to Marcos’ father, a former assemblyman, while San Vicente was supposedly named after the late father of Imelda R. Marcos.

Former Davao del Norte governor Rodolfo del Rosario Sr., Marcos’ minister for environment and natural resources, despite this, saying that as the principal in the framing of the presidential decree organizing San Vicente (Laak), he recommended that the place be named after Vicente G. Duterte, a former Davao governor and father of former President Rodrigo Duterte.

Certain quarters dispute Del Rosario’s claim given that Republic Act 1059, approved on 12 June 1954, bans the naming of sitios, barrios, municipalities, cities, provinces, streets, highways, avenues, bridges, and other public thoroughfares, parks, plazas, public schools, public buildings, piers, government aircrafts and vessels, and other public institutions after living persons. This assertion is erroneous given that Duterte died of heart attack on 21 February 1968.

San Vicente (later renamed to Laak, its original name), was created as a town Norte on April 4, 1979, under Batas Pambansa Bilang 23. The town of San Mariano, meanwhile, was also changed to Maragusan, its traditional name.

Missionary legacy in assigning Spanish names also affected other areas where Jesuit presence was strong. Unlike the practice introduced by Fr. Urios, the other missionaries preferred calling newly organized reductions after the patron saints assigned to them. For instance, Malalag, Davao del Sur, was called Las Mercedes, after the Our Lady of Mercy. Jose Abad Santos, long before the Americans arrived, was known as Trinidad after the Catholic doctrine of the Holy Trinity.

In Davao Oriental, the tradition of synchronizing the name of a place with its patron saint was common but slowly lost luster in favor of the revival of naming of pueblos after their old, indigenous terms but without changing the patrons or patronesses the clergy had assigned.

The use of saintly appellations remains pervasive when one studies the hamlets that comprise many of the surviving towns in Davao Oriental. The municipality of Caraga, for one, is home to barangays Mercedes (Our Lady of Mercy), San Antonio (St. Anthony of Padua, Italy), San Jose (St. Joseph the Worker), San Luis (St. Louis of France), San Miguel (the Archangel), San Pedro (the first Pope), Santa Fe (St. Faith of Conques), and Santiago (St. James the Apostle). (12)