Las Piñas: jeepney town

Title

Creator

Frades, Mener

Language

English

Year

1969

Subject

Jeep automobiles

Las Piñas City -- History

Industrial relations -- History

Rights

In Copyright - Educational Use Permitted

Abstract

Las Piñas is one of the most vigorous industrial community in Rizal province. Only a quarter of an hour drive from manila, this town booms with beach resorts and jeepney building shop. The advent of the jeepney gave the town the push that moved it forward to progress.

Fulltext

LAS MORE than two hundred years ago, which is how old it is. Las Pinas town was just a beach. Fishermen from Parana que town used it as a starting point for their nightly fishing ex peditions. The Recollects won’t even consider the “sitio” a parish although it had some thousand or so inhabitants at the time. It was a poor man’s village. Today Las Pinas is not only a rich town, it has become world famous because of an ingenious bamboo organ in the town’s Catholic church. Moreover, the town’s over 20, 000 inhabitants had during the postwar years energetically trans formed this shoretown into an industrial community. It is not infrequent, for example, that one hears of Las Pinas referred to as the “jeepney town of the Philip pines.” There are many other more industries, of the cottage industry variety, that make it among the most “forward mov ing” communities in the country. Fishing is still a major industry,_ but the hard-working townspeople are also engaged in farming, and other allied and productive undertakings. For a time Las Pinas had even its own townspeople worried over its future. Unscrupulous opera tors had taken advantage of the peaceful climate in the town for fast-buck activities that tended to destroy the moral fiber of the community. The determined drive of the people to clean their town and to direct their efforts to more productive pursuits prevented its decay and assured its continued progress. The town had seen calamities of all sorts, earth quakes, typhoons, epidemics, drought, war, prostitution, and vice. For some time, it seemed PI^AS: the town would never recover from these destructive forces. Today, Las Pinas is one of the most vigorous industrial commu nity in Rizal province. Only a quarter of an hour drive from Manila, this town booms with beach resorts and jeepney build ing shops. The advent of the jeepney gave the town the push that moved it forward to .prog ress. Widely known is the fact that the country’s largest jeep and jeepney manufacturer, the Francisco Motors ’ Corporation, operates from Las Pinas with an assembly plant that sprawls over a 2-hectare lot. Sarao, another name in jeepney-making, is also a Las Pinas based company. There are many more small and independent jeepney builders, and they contribute to the title FMC jeepney assembly is 100% Filipino labor. The famous bamboo organ. of Las Pinas as “jeepney town.” It is estimated that Las Pinas as semblers alone supply over 70 per cent of the jeepney units now operating in the country. Francisco Motors is a good ex ample of the town’s character. The firm’s owner, Anastacio T. Francisco, was a farmer before he ventured into the business of making jeepneys and jeepney bodies. .As a matter of fact it is the only firm in the country that assembles jeepneys, light trucks and cars, in one assembly plant. No other plant has a similar in tegrated operation. Together with his brother, Fernando and Jorge, Mr. Francisco had helped tremen dously in getting Las Pinas better known not only as the bamboo organ town, but also as the “jeep ney town of the Philippines.” And the town is proud to be called the homebase of the jeepney — the industrial era's “vehicle of burden” just as the carabao was the beast of burden in the early stages of the country’s agricul tural development. FM 2 PHILIPPINE MAGAZINE, MARCH 15, 1969

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