Today the Philippines celebrates the nineteenth anniversary of the first EDSA revolution. Filipino librarians should know that the highway on which this revolution took place was named after a national hero and former director of the National Library.
For more on Epifanio de los Santos, see his biography.
EDSA, the historic avenue that is now celebrated in song and story for being the venue of the peaceful revolution on February 22-25, 1986, is a circumferential road that was originally named Highway 54 by the American military engineers who built it...
For reasons that are not clear now, when the highway was turned over to the Philippine government, its original name, Highway 54, was discarded. Instead, by legislative fiat, it was named after an obscure librarian named Epifanio de los Santos...
Be that as it may, theologians today see something appropriate in naming the eight-lane highway Epifanio de los Santos Avenue, or EDSA. For, translated into English, Epifanio de los Santos means epiphany of the saints.
--Felix B. Bautista, Cardinal Sin and the Miracle of Asia (Manila: Vera-Reyes: 1987), 188–89. Quoted in Leslie Bataoel, "Globalization: Myth or a Reality?"
For more about the EDSA Revolution, check out Chronology of a Revolution by Angela Stuart Santiago.
