Barangka Drive, Mandaluyong

ILIVE in Mandaluyong off Shaw Boulevard. I need to avoid EDSA as much as possible so I turn into Mandaluyong’s side streets to get me where I have to be. My favorite is Barangka Drive because while it gets me to Makati and back, I feel like I am not in the big city a small community of individual souls walking the streets, making a living, being themselves. It makes for an interesting trip.

Barangka Drive is a fairly long street that goes North to South, or vice versa. While it has a small mall of two stories, a KFC and a McDonald’s and two 7 Elevens (one at each end), the rest is village- level activity. Sari- sari stores, repair shops, small electric stores, little eateries. All run by the owners and their employees, individuals, not corporate giants.

There is a market just off Boni Avenue which perks up in the late afternoon as residents come home from work and do their shopping for the night’s meal. Vegetable stores heaped with eggplants, cabbages, string beans, onions, carrots, potatoes, backed up by dozens of hanging banana hands, to be had just off the sidewalk, if not on the sidewalk itself. The market also has its rice stores tended by young men, its fresh meat section also along the street. Only in a village will fresh meat and limbs of slaughtered animals be hanging about for sale. There are too the clothing stores with the items hanging down, small cluttered groceries, a number of pawnshops, stalls selling hot food and nuts. In the early evenings, a small store displays roast pork, part of a lechon. Bakeries are around exhibiting their goods, always well patronized. All of them stay up late into the night as people still pass and stop by on their way home. Along the sidewalk near the corner of Boni Avenue I always look for the balut vendor with his white dog lying nearby if it is evening time. Both companionably use the sidewalk corner with the homeless woman who is there morning, noon and night, very comfortably lying around. Sometimes she disappears but always reappears. Children are out playing near stores of their families or hanging out on the sidewalk with their friends under the watchful eye of adults nearby tending the stores. There is a life in these streets.

Aside from market goods, Barangka Drive offers barbershops which are busy at night tending to men and young boys who are off work and school. There are also pet stores that groom pets, keep pets for temporary periods and sell pet supplies. I always note the people clutching their tiny dogs or bringing their bigger ones on a leash there. There are chairs on the sidewalk as they wait for their animals to be attended to, just like in a clinic.

There are too all kinds of items for sale from small stores carrying mobile telephones and their accessories, to upholstery shops, clothes alteration shops, shoe repair shops. They are all artisans as they repair telephones, tailor clothes and repair shoes. The shoe repair shop even changes zippers as advertised. It is Mom and Pop still going strong.

There were two vacant lots on Barangka Drive until recently. Now they are turning into gasoline stations. There is also a brewery of some sort making beer on the sec by iron stairs. On Saturdays it has a lot of activity. The latest shop to open on Barangka Drive is a striking orange-painted store that sells was solitary as though people were afraid to come near seeing as how it was so new and so orange; but it is now part of the scenery with customers seen in it.

Barangka Drive also has a huge public school where students come in and out at all hours as there must be double sessions. Mandaluyong has them in uniforms of blue and yellow for the girls and white polo shirts and black pants for the boys.

Somewhere along Barangka Drive there are residential houses enclosed by vegetation or walls. A number of boarding houses for ladies are advertised. There seems to be some sort of factory at one end but can never see what is really going on inside. Maybe it is a warehouse by now. There are still trees along Barangka Drive and I hope they stay there. I would guess there were more when it was purely residential. But this is a street that is transitioning from the residential to the small commercial enclave which means people can still live there even with the small businesses. There are stores with living quarters above them.

To Mandaluyong via the Pantaleon Bridge that connects it to Makati one sees the smaller buildings, the modest storefronts, the life on the streets, the comings and goings of tricycles buzzing their way to small destinations. Students walking home in the late afternoon talking and laughing, their world seemingly bright for them, no cares beyond grades and school activities. Or, see the batchoy shop that it is straight from Iloilo. Farther up are carinderias, with a table or two, always patronized.

Farther up Barangka Drive past Boni Avenue, there is a new bank branch in a new building. Indeed, in this part are new and bigger two-story buildings like the small mall. Also, some condominiums including a new building called El Magistrado which seems to be the residence of a judge, probably retired. But the building is new with imposing stairs and a basement and a title on the outside.

Many eateries are lined up higher on Barangka Drive and they seem to be well patronized by sunset time, either in airconditioned comfort or open- air barbecue places. All of them are modest, unimposing. The modesty and plainness brings in the crowds who are in the same mode. This is a village where people are themselves to themselves and to others.

Outside Barangka Drive lies EDSA with its thronging mass of vehicles, the huge malls of Mandaluyong also on the other side of EDSA, then over the bridge lies Makati, the modern Makati of high- rise condominiums and malls.

But Barangka Drive is an enclave of quotidian activities by people who live around it or in it. They walk the streets in informal wear, they buy their meals, buy small quantities of rice and fruit. Show their pets on the way to the pet supply stores. Students walk around in clusters along familiar pathways to their homes. No one is out of place, in fact everyone has a place. Everyone belongs here.

On my way home, after the demanded of me, when I cross the bridge into Mandaluyong, I feel tranquil, I am on my way home via Barangka Drive looking forward to its life on the streets.