People Power Monument

Also known as: The EDSA Monument — popular shorthand · The People Power Monument on EDSA — site styling used in protest coverage · Monumento ng People Power — Filipino styling

Places

Definition

The People Power Monument is a monument on Epifanio de los Santos Avenue (EDSA) at its corner with White Plains Avenue, in Barangay Camp Aguinaldo, Quezon City — about 0.90 kilometers from the EDSA Shrine — built to commemorate the 1986 People Power Revolution. (Wikipedia — People Power Monument) The work was made by the Filipino sculptor Eduardo Castrillo in 1993, and stands in his documented catalogue of public monuments between Inang Bayan at the Bantayog ng mga Bayani (1992) and The Heritage of Cebu (1995). (Wikipedia — Eduardo Castrillo, Wikidata) It is a pyramidal composition, 18 meters high, set on elevated ground: the first tier carries a chain of men and women with arms linked — one figure identified with Ninoy Aquino pointing toward the EDSA Shrine and Ortigas; the middle tier carries the revolution’s participants — a musician, a mother carrying an infant, a man making the “Laban” sign, priests and nuns; at the top rises a towering female figure with arms lifted to the sky and unchained shackles, a large flag and staff behind her — in the Intellectual Property Office’s description, thirty-seven figures in all “depicting the various sectors of the Philippine society.” (Wikipedia — People Power Monument) Site register: the monument stands today as both a commemorative work and a protest venue on the avenue whose name is the revolution’s shorthand.

Identities

Source Type	Identity
Wikipedia	People Power Monument
Wikidata	People Power Monument (Q2913846) — “monument commemorating the 1986 People Power Revolution in the Philippines”
DBpedia	People_Power_Monument
ProductOntology	N/A
Wiktionary	N/A
Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH)	N/A
MeSH	N/A
NCBI Taxonomy	N/A
AGROVOC	N/A
Google Scholar	People Power Monument EDSA White Plains Quezon City Eduardo Castrillo 1993 1986 People Power Revolution protest site Ninoy Aquino
ConceptNet	N/A
OpenCyc	N/A

Also Known As

The EDSA Monument — popular shorthand
The People Power Monument on EDSA — site styling used in protest coverage
Monumento ng People Power — Filipino styling

Examples and Analogies

A crowd cast in bronze: the monument’s design principle is the crowd itself — the tiers do not present a hero on horseback but a human chain, the linked arms of the first tier making literal the barricades of February 1986, with the sectors who manned them arranged upward toward the figure of freedom. (Wikipedia — People Power Monument)
Two memorials, one avenue: the monument and the EDSA Shrine stand 900 meters apart and divide the commemorative labor — the Shrine marking the Church’s role at the Ortigas crossing, the Castrillo monument rendering the multitude at the Camp Aguinaldo stretch — so that anniversary rites and protests can move between them along the same stretch of EDSA. (Wikipedia — People Power Monument)
A plaza assembled by protest: the corner has become, by use rather than by design, an assembly point — the state’s monument to peaceful revolution serving as the staging ground of later revolutions attempted, celebrated, and protested. (Wikipedia — People Power Monument, Wikipedia — Burial of Ferdinand Marcos)
Verified site data:
Sculptor and year: Eduardo Castrillo, 1993 (Wikipedia — Eduardo Castrillo, Wikipedia — People Power Monument)
Location: EDSA corner White Plains Avenue, Barangay Camp Aguinaldo, Quezon City; about 0.90 km from the EDSA Shrine (Wikipedia — People Power Monument)
Form: pyramidal, about 18 meters high, on elevated ground; linked figures, protest participants, and a female figure with raised arms and unchained shackles; 37 figures per the Intellectual Property Office’s description (Wikipedia — People Power Monument)
Dedication: commemorates the 1986 People Power Revolution; the 1993 date is carried by the sculptor’s documented works list, but the unveiling ceremony and the President who may have presided are not documented in the sources verified for this entry (Wikipedia — People Power Monument, Wikipedia — Eduardo Castrillo)

Usage Scenarios

1. Commemorating the Revolution

The monument is a fixed station of the EDSA anniversary observances each February — the bronze crowd facing the avenue where the actual crowd stood, and the ceremonies attaching the revolution’s memory to a built work rather than to the shrines alone. (Wikipedia — People Power Monument)

2. Protesting at the Monument

The site has repeatedly been chosen as a protest venue. After the surprise burial of Ferdinand Marcos at the Libingan ng mga Bayani on November 18, 2016, anti-Marcos groups, martial-law victims, and political figures gathered at the monument; on November 30, 2016 (Bonifacio Day) thousands of protesters gathered there again; and on December 15, 2016 about 150 members of the Coalition against Marcos Burial held a mass at the monument. (Wikipedia — People Power Monument, Wikipedia — Burial of Ferdinand Marcos) On September 21, 2025 the monument served as the venue of the “Trillion Peso March” against government corruption, timed to the anniversary of the 1972 martial-law declaration; on June 30, 2026 Iglesia ni Cristo members gathered unannounced around the monument, blocking EDSA and White Plains traffic while calling for government “transparency.” (Wikipedia — People Power Monument)

3. Reading Castrillo’s Public Work

Students of Philippine public sculpture use the monument as a late-career example of Eduardo Castrillo’s constructivist monument-making — the welded-metal vocabulary of his 1970s works applied to the democratic commemoration of the restoration era, a few hundred meters from the camps whose defection the monument recalls. (Wikipedia — Eduardo Castrillo, Wikipedia — People Power Monument)

4. Navigating the EDSA Memorial Landscape

For visitors and researchers, the monument anchors the EDSA memorial geography — Camp Aguinaldo on one side, the EDSA Shrine 900 meters east, Camp Crame across the avenue — the physical setting of the 1986 uprising converted into commemorative sites. (Wikipedia — People Power Monument)

Strategies

Commemorate by multiplication: rather than a single hero figure, the monument’s thirty-seven figures distribute the revolution across society — the design strategy of representing a mass movement as a mass. (Wikipedia — People Power Monument)
Site the memory on the site of the event: placing the monument on EDSA itself, near the camps the crowds defended, ties commemoration to geography — the avenue is the exhibit, the monument the label. (Wikipedia — People Power Monument)
Let the monument be recruited: the site’s strength as a protest venue comes from the recognition its subject commands — protesters at the People Power Monument invoke the precedent of 1986 by standing where its bronze crowd stands. (Wikipedia — Burial of Ferdinand Marcos)
Commission the established monument-builder: the choice of Castrillo — already the author of Spirit of Pinaglabanan, Rajah Sulayman, and Inang Bayan — placed the revolution in the hands of the country’s most visible public sculptor of the era. (Wikipedia — Eduardo Castrillo)

Security and Safety Measures

Traffic-exposed site management: rallies at the monument sit astride one of Metro Manila’s busiest avenues; the June 2026 gathering blocked EDSA and White Plains traffic, and event security at the corner is fundamentally traffic and crowd management on a highway median site. (Wikipedia — People Power Monument)
Structural upkeep of an elevated work: an 18-meter monument of welded figures on elevated ground carries the standing maintenance obligations of exposed public sculpture — typhoon, earthquake, and vibration from the avenue it faces. (Wikipedia — People Power Monument)
For researchers: the monument’s 1993 date is documentary (the sculptor’s works list); accounts of an unveiling ceremony, its exact day, and the officials present circulate but are not verified in the sources gathered here, and should be sourced before repetition. (Wikipedia — Eduardo Castrillo, Wikipedia — People Power Monument)

Historical Context

The monument belongs to the post-restoration wave of commemoration. The revolution of February 1986 had already been marked liturgically by the EDSA Shrine, completed in 1989 at the Ortigas crossing; the secular state’s monument followed in 1993, when Eduardo Castrillo — whose martial-law-era works had made him the country’s most visible monument-builder — set the bronze crowd on the Camp Aguinaldo stretch of the avenue. (Wikipedia — People Power Monument, Wikipedia — Eduardo Castrillo) The work’s afterlife has been as a stage: from the anti-Marcos-burial gatherings of November 2016 through the Bonifacio Day protest of November 30, 2016, the mass of December 15, 2016, the Trillion Peso March of September 21, 2025, and the June 30, 2026 gathering that stopped traffic on the avenue — each event recruiting the monument’s authority for a new dispute, the bronze crowd of 1986 facing the living crowds who cite it. (Wikipedia — Burial of Ferdinand Marcos, Wikipedia — People Power Monument)

Challenges and Controversies

The Marcos Burial Protests

The monument’s most consequential protest episode followed the burial of Ferdinand Marcos at the Libingan ng mga Bayani on November 18, 2016 — a burial kept from public notice until done. The monument, with Luneta, became the standing venue of the objection: gatherings in November 2016, the thousands of Bonifacio Day, and the December 15 mass by the Coalition against Marcos Burial — the revolution’s monument used to contest the rehabilitation of the ruler the revolution removed. (Wikipedia — Burial of Ferdinand Marcos, Wikipedia — People Power Monument)

A Venue Without a Curator

Because the monument is an open roadside site, its use as a protest venue is governed by police permits and traffic authorities rather than by any commemorative custodianship — the tension between sacred commemoration and open assembly recurring each time the corner is occupied. (Wikipedia — People Power Monument)

The Unverified Unveiling

Popular accounts attribute the monument’s unveiling to the Ramos administration, whose years matched the work’s 1993 date; the sources verified for this entry document the year and the sculptor but not the ceremony, and the attribution of an unveiling to any particular official remains unverified. (Wikipedia — People Power Monument, Wikipedia — Eduardo Castrillo)