I visited the Philippines in July 2017 for my Lolo and Lola’s anniversary. I resented my Lolo and Lola for the westernized experience they offered my family, as they wanted to make us more comfortable—on our first day, they brought us to a Greek restaurant. Yet I quickly realized that this westernized world was not unique or hard to find, that I would have had a similar experience whether or not my Lolo and Lola showed it to me. The parallels I saw between the United States and the Philippines were not a coincidence, and they permeated every aspect of public space. I almost felt like I hadn’t left the United States when every other block in Manila had a McDonalds or a similar American fast food chain. 

The Philippines was a former colony of the United States, though the US empire continues to this day. As anthropologist Dana Herrera details, under the guise of Philippine liberation, colonial rule was transferred from Spain to the United States under the Treaty of Paris in 1898. It wasn’t until 1946, post World War II and following a year of resistance, that the Philippines transitioned from an American commonwealth to an independent republic. However, formal independence does not ensure complete separation from the colonial power—and both globalization and gentrification, used interchangeably throughout this essay due to their overlap¹, have developed and maintained Philippine public spaces as ones that are Americanized and colonized. 

Throughout this paper, I will explore how public spaces in Metro Baguio  reflect the remnants and present day continuation of colonial power, and how art is used as a form of public resistance and reclamation of these gentrified spaces, particularly through an analysis of the film Jeepney. I will be supplementing my academic research with my own experience of the Philippines in order to provide a holistic perspective on Philippine colonial spaces and resistance, one that is not only rooted in academia. In order to avoid replicating possibly geographically and culturally distant and alienated research, I have considered where my sources come from, and preferred to cite works by Philippine artists, researchers, and anthropologists, rather than colonial perspectives. 

Baguio, also known as the “City of Pines,” is a mountain town and popular tourist spot known for its cooler weather and scenic views. During my stay in the Philippines, my Lolo and Lola took my family to a resort in Baguio, and I loved it for its cooler weather, so different from the humid heat of the rest of the mainland. Yet as I began my research into colonial public spaces, I came to the realization that this area was a sought after space by American urban planners because of its weather, which was more comfortable and familiar compared to the tropical weather in other areas. Urban anthropologist Seng-Guan Yeoh analyzes Baguio as a place that was formed in the early twentieth century, and has been determined by urban planner David Burnham whose colonial intentions to render the town into a “little America” have shaped Baguio into its current gentrified and neo-colonial state. Under United States occupation, the Americans appropriated the land from the Indigenous Ibaloi people for their own means, terming Baguio the summer capital of the Philippines. According to Yeoh, the colonial site had begun as a hub for European elites, built by the Cordilleran people alongside foreign labor by Japanese and Chinese artisans. 

With the introduction of a foreign working class and the exclusion of the Cordilleran people from their own land, places became increasingly stratified by race and class. One of the few places where there exists some kind of intermingling is through one of the main public markets of Baguio, Session Road, a space where tourists often now go to buy souvenirs from lower class Filipinos and Indigenous people. My own experience of this market has been mixed, because while beautiful, I remember a lingering discomfort in the commodification of Indigeneity. The Cordilleran people were made into public spectacles for tourists, who were a mix of upper class foreign tourists and Filipinos. The Indigenous people wore traditional clothing and danced for the tourists, collecting donations after. It felt like a direct example of the ways in which colonialism enacts itself in the present day, with Indigenous people being fetishized on land they have been excluded from, having to beg upper class peoples for money, who indirectly contribute to the gentrification and colonization of the land. There is a visible hierarchy of “highlanders” and “lowlanders,” terms Yeoh coins as representing the resorts and hotels of the tourist industry and the latter representing where the markets are. 

Yeoh states that the main way in which a distinction is made between “highlanders” and “lowlanders” is through the over-policing of these market spaces. Yeoh writes that while these spaces have “visible material artifacts like buildings, concrete, cement, traffic lights, lamp posts, power cables, signposts and so forth,” they also host the invisible: “an array of city ordinances, planning laws, political agendas, consumer desires and memories.” Yeoh specifically speaks to the American sidewalk and how it has been transposed to the Philippines—through both the unplanned social aspects that can exist within it (as playing areas for children, street vending, etc), but also the regulation of these social spaces through “total prohibition of street vending to confining street vending to stipulated enclosed locations for certain times of the day.” Thus, there is yet another hidden layer to the public life of the marketplaces in that the heavy policing ensures the continuation of spatial stratification and that social mobilization is impossible. This showcases the connections between globalization and policing, in which lower class and Native peoples are increasingly policed in further attempts to ensure colonized spaces remain under the social control of Western powers. 

Jane Jacobs also makes a point of this in her monograph The Death and Life of American Cities, stating, “Considering the amount of prejudice and fear that accompany discrimination and bolster it, overcoming residential discrimination is just that much harder if people feel unsafe on their side walks anyway.” And what to make of this paradox between safety and the associated solution of increased policing, which specifically works to target marginalized communities? Police brutality and abuse is not a stranger to Philippine politics, especially under the martial law enacted by President Duterte, and its likely continuation under Marcos Jr., son of the prior dictator Marcos who has just been announced as the next president of the Philippines. It is hard for me to wrap my head around his recently announced presidency; I wonder how it could have even been possible—however, many of the reasons surrounding his rise to power can be attributed to the suppression of truth within the Philippine government and the push towards policing as an answer to the high crime rates, which are a result of colonization and its lasting social and economic detriment to the Philippines, as is the case for many postcolonial countries. 

It was difficult for me to find any account of police brutality cases within Baguio, or even much information about the city police, other than their stated mission on their website: “Enforce the law, prevent and control crimes, maintain peace and order, and ensure public safety and internal security with the active support of the community,” using “efficient and effective strategy and innovations,”  which in its vague wording eludes any actual description of how they conduct their policing or are organized. There is, however, a famous recent case not mentioned in their website: victim Harjan Lagman, beheaded and hacked by the city police of Baguio, specifically the Regional Drug Enforcement Unit. Harjan’s mother speaks to the tragedy in an obituary published in ABS-CBN, a Philippine news company based in Metro Manila. She says, “It is painful. But I kept on enduring [the pain]. This is not a game where I can give up.” And Harjan is not the only one, but one of many in a pattern of killings by the police—twenty-nine other bodies having been found from 2019-2021 in the areas of Baguio City and Benguet, all dumped haphazardly with little care for any respect for humanity . The reason behind providing these violent examples is to show the futility of increased policing in what are often termed “crime-prone” areas, especially considering the corruption of Duterte’s martial law, which has been proven to focus on and target the urban poor, or anyone who speaks against his dictatorial rule. Duterte is an extension of colonial, American rule in that the extension of policing is a distinctly colonial form of control, and also in that the crime that he feels compelled to prevent—and that has propelled his campaign, winning over the support of many powerless Filipinos—is a result of the socioeconomic destruction that colonialism has wrought on the Philippines, as mentioned previously. 

Boris Michel, the Head of Delegation of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in the Philippines, speaks of policing similarly, but within the capital of the Philippines, Manila. He notes, “With New York’s Rudi Giuliani and Singapore’s Lee Kwan Yew as role models of zero-tolerance policies, measures in Metro Manila range from demolishing informal settlements or chasing informal street vendors and destroying their goods by sprinkling kerosene on them, to the ban on drying laundry in public.”  Michel’s analysis of zero-tolerance policies in Manila arising from New York and Singapore shows the correlation between globalization and the increased policing of public spaces—especially because the institution of policing as we know it has origins in Western imperialism. And it is clear that the targets of these sweeps are the urban poor—with “informal settlements” and “informal street vendors” being destroyed or ousted. Thus, the interests of the rich and the white are protected, with Natives and poor Filipinos being the most vulnerable. The article “Policing a Pandemic: Understanding the State and Political Instrumentalization of the Coercive Apparatus in Duterte’s Philippines” works to understand how the pandemic has been utilized by Duterte to only further this targeted policing, demonstrating how issues such as the international health crisis of COVID-19 were taken advantage of for the further control of Philippine public spaces. The paper’s author and researcher Kevin Nielsen Agojo writes that the police were given positions of authority within the pandemic response team, thus offering greater opportunities and excuses to wield violence through Duterte’s anti-terrorism and anti-drug law. He states that “Therefore, amid the pandemic in the Philippines, civil liberties were violated, cultures of violence and impunity worsened, and the executive authority of Duterte was augmented.” The policing of markets, mentioned by both Yeoh and Michel, are not separate from these more violent incidents such as the murder of Harjan, but result from the same source. No matter the extent of the violence, they are a product of colonial and corrupt intentions to control Philippine public spaces and, via spaces, populations. 

A central reason why Filipinos might have voted for and expressed support for Marcos Jr., despite that he is the son of a dictator, is that his wealth allows him to craft a campaign based on disinformation and that has total control over the information Filipino citizens are able to access.  Miguel Rivera, director of the Ateneo Martial Law Museum, states that while nearly everyone is online in the Philippines there is low media literacy and thus Filipinos struggle to parse out what information is accurate, and how to parse through the influx of information from the Internet. Rumors have been spread against Marcos Jr.’s opposing progressive candidate, Leni Robredo, mainly through YouTube, which is deemed his “territory,” and a platform that fosters pro-Marcos conspiracy theories. So, how can the people of the Philippines, the people who do not have the resources (money, time, etc.), work to fight against such an all-encompassing campaign built on misinformation?

Taking into consideration this preliminary background on heavily policed and controlled public spaces, it is consequently interesting to look at art as resistance. Doris Salcedo, a political artist from Colombia, describes the power of art as resistance, saying, “Politically charged public artworks that are presented in conventional, familiar spaces can temporarily transform the meaning of these sites. When they are altered, the narratives of power that have been assigned to them are also changed and so become debatable” (“How Important Is Art as a Form of Protest?”). Salcedo’s quote relates to the context of the Philippines in that much of the policing of streets, as I have mentioned before, is a form of not only physical but social control, which goes hand in hand with disinformation. It is a reclamation of over-policed and dangerous spaces for the people and the local communities, and a reminder of the power of collective activism. 

Francisca V. Mateo wrote her Master’s thesis on Philippine art as resistance, defining Philippine art as encompassing: “Filipino-made visual art, literature, music, and dance intended to promote Philippine culture.”  Through a series of interviews and a qualitative analysis of Metro Manila artists and program participants and organizers, Mateo came to the conclusion that all participants believed Philippine art could be a means of increasing appreciation of Filipino culture as a whole. It also served as a way to garner higher self-esteem in artists and participants/organizers, as the artistic community and their works allowed for a greater variation in socioeconomic status and also a retreat from globalization—that is, the skin-color hierarchy present in mainstream Manila culture. However, there is an acknowledgment that it is increasingly difficult to gain accessibility to Indigenous and Philippine art, first because globalization has rendered these artistic expressions almost invisible, and second because of the class differences in the Philippines. Because of this, I struggled to choose an art form to focus on that was both accessible, political, and distinct to the Philippines—but I finally settled on jeepneys. Jeepneys (Figure 1) are direct relics of colonialism, originating from repurposed jeeps left behind by Americans after World War II. They are now one of the Philippines’ most iconic and popular modes of public transportation, and one I have used before to get around myself. They are loud, colorful, crowded, and definitely a change from New York City public transportation—where you have to yell at the driver to drop you off at informal bus stops, and sit in long benches lining the inside of the jeep. 

Jeepney, a 2013 documentary by Filipino-American filmmaker Esy Casey and filmmaker and artist Sarah Friedland, follows the lives of jeepney artists, drivers, and passengers, and examines the ways in which their lives along the intersections of race, class, and Indigeneity impact their political identities and render the jeepney as a political tool. The film begins by explorings artists who paint and tag jeepneys; though the price of doing so is high, one of these artists explains that these drawings are often a manifestation of the driver’s dreams. They showcase a driver’s family, representations of their character through imagery or words, flags from other countries, inside jokes, etc. as a means of personal expression and reclamation of public space. The colorful nature of jeepneys are a way to be noticed, and while this is said by some jeepney drivers in the documentary to be an economic strategy to get more customers, I also argue that it is a political reclamation of the gentrified and globalized space. Amidst the homogenization and Americanization of the public space, the use of the jeepney for artistic expression is a political statement in its reclamation of individuality—especially when jeepney workers are working class and poor, people whose identities are otherwise erased, made invisible, and policed in the public sphere. 

The jeepney drivers themselves are cognizant of their politicized identities, mostly through their class status. A topic at the forefront of these jeepney drivers’ minds is oil prices. According to one of these drivers, a typical day as a jeepney driver will garner a wage of around forty-eight dollars, whilst the 2013 oil prices for a day will be twenty-four dollars, half their take-home pay (27:20-27:38). The movie shifts between scenes from within the jeepney (from the point of view of passengers) and those of protests on the streets. This particular imagery emphasizes one of the main points of the movie—that jeepneys are for and by the people. Oil prices don’t only affect the drivers whose livelihoods depend on this business, but also customers. Jeepneys are the Philippines’s cheapest modes of transportation, with starting prices as low as fifteen cents, with an extra two cents for each kilometer. The rise in oil prices increases the price of the jeepney, which limits people’s ability to access public transportation. There is solidarity between the drivers and the people, for the jeepney business is completely locally owned. Shots of colorful jeepneys blocking roads and people yelling at police barricades are evocative scenes that display the power of art and labor/worker solidarity as resistance.  

Jeepney also draws parallels between the lived experiences of these drivers to that of multi-billion dollar companies in the Philippines, often Western companies that outsource labor and resources to poorer areas: a more obvious neo-colonial aspect of globalization. There are key shots taken of jeepneys driving beside a large mining company, the bright colors contrasting the rubble, pollution, darkness, and overall discoloration of the excavation site. An environmental justice lens is then used to analyze the stark differences between the sustainable initiatives placed on these companies versus the workers. To understand the connections between the environment and jeepneys, more background is needed. Jeepneys are in no sense environmentally friendly, as they generate around 40 kg of carbon dioxide daily. Add in the congested environment and not only does this lead to exorbitant amounts of traffic pollution that impact the natural environment, but they also create a human health hazard by ruining the ground-level air quality. One driver interviewed by filmmaker Casey states that consequently, jeepney drivers must pay additional taxes on the pollution they create. While this does seem like a fair price to pay, when placed beside the mining company depicted previously, and many other oversea companies outsourcing materials in the Philippines, the film showcases the inequity at play. These Western companies actually receive tax breaks from the Philippine government, even though they are environmentally detrimental, as bad if not worse than the jeepney emissions. Thus the unfair and targeted nature of sustainable ventures is highlighted as not necessarily something that is for the good of the environment because the government gets to pick and choose who gets to be affected by sustainability incentives such as higher taxes. The lower class Filipinos, which consists of these drivers, are targeted while billion dollar American and European companies are exempt. Here,we see colonial narratives playing out once more in public and economic spaces, in which American control is so strong that they still have sway in a supposedly “independent” Philippines. 

The existence of jeepneys as colonial relics themselves, a reclamation of decades of cultural and physical loss through brutal colonization and the independence wars to follow, is a representation of the anti-colonial sentiment still present within the Philippines. The passivity of colonial subjects, and Filipinos in particular, is common—but jeepneys are living proof of the everyday advocacy and political work of working class, poor Filipinos. 

Here, I have demonstrated existent colonial legacies in the Philippines through a focus on urban planning and policing, and its erasure of marginalized peoples. Examining the jeepney as a form of political retaliation, I have sought to find channels through which Filipinos have resisted ongoing colonial efforts, police brutality, and economic stratification. In the last week of writing this paper, Marcos Jr.’s victory in the election had just been announced, securing a militaristic and dictatorial government for the future of the Philippines. It has been hard to write about this history, or to even discuss jeepneys as resistance when the  situation feels as hopeless as it does right now. However, I believe that with the current disinformation campaign so strong within the country, and the risk of history repeating itself, it’s essential to spread the ongoing activist efforts within everyday Philippine lives, and the history and present of violence within the country.

1. To expand on the overlap of globalization and gentrification, a definition and evaluation of each term is helpful. Globalization is best understood as the expansion of communication and cultural links between different countries or regions, though in this case, is used to refer to the Americanization of Philippine public spaces, and thus its one-way cultural integration. Gentrification is the process wherein a neighborhood changes with the arrival of more affluent residents and businesses. Thus, the relations between these two words is in their ongoing processes of colonization, in the homogenizing of space to reflect affluent and Americanized spaces.