What we got out of the son

Yesterday a small group of local journalists had a rare interview with Lee Santiago, son of the late MassKara founder, Ely Santiago, one of Negros Occidental’s famous artists and a philosopher.

It was a rambling tale of bygone days. The talk often centered on the three important personalities who were, to a certain extent, the brains behind the MassKara Festival, now a world famous Mardi Gras.

During the whole morning table talk at the L’Fisher Hotel’s coffee shop, Lee Santiago whose age at the time MassKara was founded in 1980 was about eight or nine years old, spoke on the three personalities behind MassKara, Ely Santiago, former City Mayor Digoy Montalvo and former Councilor Romeo Geocadin.

We simply let Lee ramble with his supposed reminiscences as a very, very young boy, on the three persons – Montalvo, Santiago and Geocadin.

Lee, although that young then, seemed to remember very clearly that Ely was devastated by the somber atmosphere that had gripped Bacolod post the Don Juan tragedy when the elite families of Negros Occidental lost their off springs, including, those of Digoy, the Mayor of Bacolod.

Ironically, Negros was also in the throes of the devastating impact of the sugar crisis which deprived a lot of Negros elite of their fortunes such that the wives of Negense families often traveled to Cebu to sell their wares and their heirlooms.

In short, the entire province was in grief. Ely was cracking his brains on how to redirect the attention of the Negrenses to something else. That was how MassKara got its first seed. It was interested in trying to focus the attention of Negrense on something more pleasant than what they were then undergoing.

He claimed to have listened to the three – Geocadin, Montalvo and Santiago, discuss well into the night on what to do and how to go about it, apparently still wide awake.

Eventually the mask-making became a through-going endeavor by many Negrenses. They were just paper mache. There were no plastic materials that could be converted into a shiny mask as that we see today, he said.

At that very young age, I quote him as saying, “I often listened to my father lecture to artists late at night until morning at the public plaza. He never got tired explaining the concept behind MassKara. And these artists contributed their share of what could be done with enthusiasm until MassKara became precisely what Daddy had thought about it – our collective stand to forget our sorrows.”

“I’m happy, together with my other brothers and sisters, to know that nobody dared to claim authorship of a great idea of the MassKara Festival”, he supposedly said.

So what more can we wish? What we want is for people to believe that Ely was the first who conceptualizef MassKara which was taken up with zest by Mayor Montalvo and Councilor Geocadin and by the artist and businessmen of Bacolod.

We never asked him, though, who kept the MassKara alive and improving it all those past years.*

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