From Fort to Prison: The Production of Iloilo City

The foundation of colonial cities in the Philippines rests on violence. The Spanish policies of the reducción forced the natives to settle in pueblos where colonial power is ensured. The resistance of some natives brought about the divide between tagabayan (town dweller) and tagabundok (mountain dweller)—respective connotations of civilization and savagery (Lumbera and Lumbera, 36). This paper examines how this centripetal-centrifugal force of simultaneous identity-production and displacement is echoed in the metonymy of the fort on which the origins of Iloilo City stand. I navigate how this movement manifests in the consciousness of the city across historical periods represented by two Western Visayan texts, namely, Stevan Javellana’s 1947 novel, Without Seeing the Dawn, and Leoncio P. Deriada’s 1984 short story, “Ati-atihan.” These texts are further juxtaposed with three landmarks: Ed Defensor’s sculpture, Lin-ay sang Iloilo (Maiden of Iloilo); the Arroyo Fountain; and the Iloilo Provincial Jail. Through the constellation of gender, ethnicity, and space, I describe the imaginary of Iloilo produced through spatial practices tied to the global economy. Javellana positions Iloilo as an emasculated city that gripped waterfront laborers at the twilight of the sugar industry. Meanwhile, Deriada shows how the annual Dinagyang Festival attempts at what Antonio Benítez-Rojo describes as the inclination of the Caribbeans to “neutralize violence” (17)—in the case of Iloilo, through the reimagination of the ethnic and myth-making. In both texts, the city serves as an antithesis to the countryside, a reverberation of the tagabayan-tagabundok dichotomy linked ultimately by colonial/global exchanges. Nevertheless, the texts bring forth spaces from which identity can be conceptualized.