BY EDITORIAL CULTURE / EL PILÓN
In a crowded burial that took place in the Central Cemetery and with the presence of many personalities from the city, last Monday the vallenatos said their last goodbye to Rodolfo Montero Castro, known as Romoca, who was considered a guardian of the emblematic Plaza Alfonso López .
Montero Castro, who died last Sunday after spending two months in the ICU of a clinic in the capital of Cesar, stood out for being one of the most well-versed and cultured people in the region.
Romoca, a forest engineer by profession, was an empirical political scientist and a great defender of the Historic Center of Valledupar.
This is how he recalled, in dialogue with EL PILÓN, the announcer and folklorist Jaime Pérez Parodi who pointed out that with Rodrigo Montero Castro you could start conversations on any topic and recalled that he was the one who created the famous gathering ‘Romoquismo’, in the house of Amantina Castro , located on the western side of the square.
“With famous people like Jaime Araújo, Poncho González, Raúl Lafourie, Lácides Daza, the ‘Turco’ Pavajeau, we discussed politics, music, sports… everything. I say that the Plaza will never be the same without Romoca”, points out Pérez Parodi.
SAVED THE ‘PALO’E MANGO’
One of the traces that Romoca left in the emblematic place in the center of Valledupar was to save the popular ‘palo’e mango’
that during the government of Pepe Castro it was drying up.
Pérez Parodi recounts that the then mayor sent for a forester and it was Romoca, with his knowledge, who “saved him.”
“They had put asphalt on the roots of the stick, Romoca immediately said: ‘Put fertilizer and water on it.’ The stick was drying up, it was losing its flower. They had added hot asphalt to the roots and as soon as they removed the asphalt, they recovered the stick”, recalled ‘Jimmy’ Pérez.
For Efraín ‘Mono’ Quintero, current vice president of the Vallenato Legend Festival, Rodrigo Montero was “the great tutor and caretaker of the square and a friend from the center of our history.”
“His gatherings were very important, everything was debated there, the cabinet, who were going to be councilors or deputies, within that desire to take care of the city,” recalls Quintero.
The ‘Monkey’ recalled the controversy generated around the remodeling of the traditional stage Francisco El Hombre de la plaza in 1987 and which had Romoca as the main opponent.
At that time, the stage was considered the central symbol of the colonial Plaza Alfonso López, a ‘sacred temple’ of Vallenato folklore.
Rodrigo Montero Castro collected signatures to oppose the construction. Among the arguments to oppose it, they raised the inconvenience of building public toilets next to the stage, as the project provided.
“Our opposition was not so much because of the new stage but because of the public bathrooms on the sides because we knew that the mayor was not going to be able to control that and it would become a big problem,” Romoca said at the time in a note published by the newspaper TIME.
Pérez Parodi added that Montero Castro was a defender of the Historical Center. “When there were constructions that were outside the normal historical parameters, he was the one who protested, I remember that he stopped the Bank from a construction that they were doing. He did not accept anything that would change the original appearance of Plaza Alfonso López, as soon as he saw a construction that was going beyond the parameters, he would cry out to heaven, go to the curatorship and stop the construction, ”he points out. And he concluded by saying: “Orality is lost, the gathering is lost, that pleasant gathering in the Plaza.”