The passing of Modesto Palacios Sa-onoy on September 10, 2026, at the age of 88 marked the loss of one of Negros Occidental’s most persistent chroniclers of its history and public life. Known to many of us simply and affectionately as Tito Mode, he spent decades as a historian, journalist, author, educator and civic leader, documenting the people, institutions and events that shaped Bacolod and Negros Occidental. For me, his passing is both a public and personal loss.

His son, Aufred Paul Sa-onoy, has been a good friend of mine through the years, and I knew his father as so many Bacolodnons did: Tito Mode. But my connection with him was also shaped by a very specific period in my own public life, when I was beginning to understand that serving a city also required understanding its history.

When I was elected to the Bacolod City Council in 2004, running as an independent candidate, I was assigned the Committee on History, Arts and Culture. Years later, I wrote about how that committee assignment led me to study Bacolod’s history more seriously, to work with historians and teachers, to establish the Bacolod History Quiz, to connect with the family of Senator Pedro Hernaez, and to learn more from Tito Mode.

What began as a council committee assignment became an education in historical evidence.

One issue particularly captured my attention: the history of Bacolod’s cityhood and the distinction between June 18, 1938 and October 19, 1938.

The documentary record is clear that Commonwealth Act No. 326, “An Act Creating the City of Bacolod,” was approved on June 18, 1938. Section 1 calls the statute the Charter of the City of Bacolod, while Section 54 expressly provides that the Act “shall take effect upon its approval.” The law itself therefore carries the approval date of June 18, 1938. (Lawphil)

Tito Mode was one of the historians who publicly explained the distinction between that legal act and what followed months later. In a 2011 report, he pointed to Commonwealth Act No. 326 and explained that the city was created when the law was approved on June 18, while the inauguration, swearing-in and installation of the new city officials took place on October 19. (Philstar)

This was important because Bacolod had long associated October 19 with its Charter Day. Tito Mode’s approach was not to erase October 19 from the city’s story, but to return to the legal and historical records and identify what actually happened on each date.

That distinction would eventually be reflected in national law. Republic Act No. 11146, approved on November 9, 2018, declared June 18 of every year as Bacolod City Charter Day in commemoration of the approval of Commonwealth Act No. 326, while expressly providing that October 19 would commemorate the inauguration of the City of Bacolod. (Issuances Library)

For me, however, the significance of this historical question began much earlier.

Researching the Charter led me to Pedro Conlu Hernaez, then assemblyman representing the Second District of Negros Occidental and the principal author associated with the measure creating the City of Bacolod. Hernaez had been a delegate to the 1934 Constitutional Convention and was elected to the National Assembly in 1935. He later became a senator of the Philippines, serving from 1941 to 1947. (Philippine Senate)

My research eventually gave me the privilege of meeting his family. On June 18, 2008, when Bacolod commemorated the 70th anniversary of the signing of its Charter, the City Government invited members of the Hernaez family to participate. A contemporary report published in 2009 records Cecilia Hernaez-Magsaysay, one of Senator Hernaez’s daughters, recalling that it was during that June 18 celebration that she first met me. The same report identified Pedro Hernaez as the principal author of the bill that became Commonwealth Act No. 326. (The News Today)

Related Story: October 19 is A Special Day for Bacolod City

That encounter remains important to me because it transformed historical research into a human connection. Senator Hernaez was no longer simply a name appearing in the history of the Bacolod Charter. I was meeting his family seventy years after the law creating the city had been approved.

History, in that moment, became personal. At almost the same time, I was attempting to make local history meaningful to another generation through the Bacolod History Quiz.

I established the quiz in 2004, during my first year on the City Council. The purpose was straightforward: I wanted high school students in Bacolod to study the history of the city and the province more seriously and to understand that local history was not merely a collection of names and dates recited during anniversaries. It involved laws, institutions, communities, personalities, public decisions, old photographs, newspaper records and events that continued to shape the city they inhabited. My own 2021 account places the creation of the Bacolod History Quiz directly within this period of historical research.

By October 12, 2009, it had reached the 6th Bacolod History Quiz. We know this from Tito Mode himself. In his Tight Rope column published in the Visayan Daily Star on October 15, 2009, he wrote that he had been at the venue of the sixth quiz and described it as having been organized by me “since year one.” He also noted the presence of high school contestants. (Visayan Daily Star Archives)

That brief contemporary reference is important because it independently establishes that the competition was already in its sixth edition by 2009 and that Tito Mode was physically present at the program.

But his involvement was more important than attendance, he served as our historical arbiter. When a question required clarification, when an answer was challenged, when competing versions of an event had to be reconciled, or when we needed to determine which historical account was sufficiently supported by the record, we relied on Tito Mode.

That role was particularly appropriate because of the kind of scholar he was. The point of an arbiter in a history competition is not merely to decide which contestant receives a point. The arbiter must understand sources, chronology, historical context and the possibility that what is popularly repeated may differ from what the documentary record establishes. Tito Mode brought decades of work in precisely those areas.

His scholarship on Negros was substantial. His “An Overview of the History of Negros Occidental” appeared in the Journal of History in the 1980s, and his book A History of Negros Occidental, published in 1992, became one of the works cited by later scholars dealing with the history of the province. (Google Sites)

His historical work was also practical and institutional. The Philippine Veterans Affairs Office records that the Negros Historical Foundation and Sa-onoy proposed the construction of the Negros War and Peace Museum to memorialize the Second World War experience and the liberation of Negros, particularly the Battle of Patag. (Philippine Veterans Affairs Office)

His presence gave the competition credibility because students and coaches knew that disputed questions could be referred to someone who had spent a considerable part of his life working with the history of Negros.

The quiz itself continued to expand. By October 3, 2014, the competition had reached its 10th edition and was formally included in the MassKara Festival program at the Atrium of Gaisano City. (Philstar)The scale of that tenth edition illustrates how far the project had developed from its beginnings in 2004.

A contemporary Visayan Daily Star report recorded that 58 students representing 29 secondary schools in Bacolod participated. The competition carried the theme “A Decade of Remembering with Love” and was sponsored by the Bacolod City Government as part of the 35th MassKara Festival. (Visayan Daily Star Archives)

Looking at records today, I realize that the Bacolod History Quiz became more than the project I originally imagined in 2004.

For a decade, students prepared to answer questions about the place in which they were growing up. Teachers and coaches had reasons to revisit Bacolod and Negros history. Schools were brought together around knowledge of the city. The competition created an occasion in which local history had to be researched, debated, verified and remembered.

There is an almost poetic symmetry in the fact that one of the best surviving contemporary records of the early Bacolod History Quiz is Tito Mode’s own 2009 column. The historian who helped us determine what belonged in the historical record also inadvertently placed the quiz itself into that record.

His work in journalism followed the same commitment to documentation and public accountability.

On April 12, 1982, Tito Mode joined Ninfa Leonardia and Primo Esleyer in establishing the Visayan Daily Star. The newspaper’s own history recalls that the three journalists decided to establish an alternative publication after becoming dissatisfied with efforts by business and political interests to influence news coverage. Sa-onoy served as the newspaper’s first president. (Visayan Daily Star Archives)

He would also establish Today News and Views, which later became associated with SunStar Bacolod, and he served two terms as president of the Negros Press Club. He helped organize the Negros Historical Foundation, linking his work in journalism with his commitment to preserving the province’s historical record. (Digicast Negros)

His contributions were recognized by both Bacolod City and Negros Occidental. He received the Ang Banwahanon Award and the Outstanding Negrosanon Award, among the highest civic recognitions given by the city and province. He was also active in the Diocese of Bacolod and received a Papal Knighthood in the Equestrian Order of Pope St. Sylvester, later being elevated by Pope Benedict XVI to the rank of Commander in recognition of his service to the Church. (Digicast Negros)

These honors help describe his public stature, but they still do not fully explain why I remember him with such gratitude. He represented a discipline. He believed records mattered.

He understood that the difference between June 18 and October 19 was not trivial because historical precision is not trivial. Both dates are important to Bacolod, but they represent different events: one the legal creation of the city, the other its inauguration. Republic Act No. 11146 eventually recognized exactly that distinction. (Issuances Library)

As a lawyer, I came to appreciate that instinct deeply. As a policymaker, I learned that institutional memory is indispensable. And now, after years of working in ICT, digital transformation and artificial intelligence, I believe Tito Mode’s method has become even more relevant.

We live in a time when technology can generate plausible accounts of the past almost instantly. An inaccurate statement can be repeated thousands of times and appear authoritative simply because of repetition. Photographs, documents, voices and narratives can increasingly be manufactured or altered.

The answer to this cannot be less history. It must be better history. We must preserve primary sources, digitize archives, document oral histories, protect old newspapers and photographs, and teach young people how to distinguish between a claim and evidence supporting that claim.

That is why Tito Mode’s passing also makes me think about our joint legacy: the Bacolod History Quiz.

Perhaps it is time for a new generation to experience what we began in 2004, but expanded for a digital age: students working with archives, laws, old maps, photographs, newspapers, oral histories and digital records, learning not merely what happened but how we know that it happened.

If that program returns, I know whose standard I would want it to follow. The standard of the man who served as our arbiter. The historian – Modesto Sa-onoy.

His son Aufred Paul described him after his passing as many things—author, journalist, teacher, consultant, Army reserve officer and active member of numerous organizations—but above all as a husband, father, grandfather and great-grandfather. (Digicast Negros)

To Aufred, my good friend, to Tita Verobina, and the entire Sa-onoy family, I offer my deepest sympathy and gratitude for sharing Tito Mode with generations of Negrenses. And to Tito Mode, I say thank you.

Thank you for guiding a young councilor who wanted to understand the history behind the committee she had been asked to chair.

Thank you for helping us understand the documentary history of Bacolod’s Charter.

Thank you for being there for the Bacolod History Quiz, not simply as a distinguished historian, but as the person we trusted to arbitrate history with evidence.

Thank you for writing down so much of what Negros might otherwise have forgotten. The historian has now become part of the history he spent his life recording. But perhaps that is precisely why his work must continue.

Tito Mode taught us that remembering is not simply recalling the past. It is doing the work required to establish what is true, preserving the evidence, and passing that knowledge faithfully to the next generation.

That is how I will remember him. Not only as Modesto P. Sa-onoy, the historian of Negros. But as Tito Mode—my inspiration, my guide, and the arbiter who taught us that when history is questioned, we must always return to the record.

Gallery of Photos And Memorabilias for 12 Years of Bacolod History Quiz: