Marco Z. Garrido's "The Patchwork City"

Marco Z. Garrido is assistant professor of sociology at the University of Chicago.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Patchwork City: Class, Space, and Politics in Metro Manila, and reported the following:

Page 99 of The Patchwork City recounts how the residents of Phil-Am Homes, a gated community or “village” in Metro Manila, responded when a fire broke out in San Roque, the informal settlement across the street. Their first reaction was to secure their gates against looters. Upon seeing people fleeing the flames, many barefoot and with children in tow, some residents prevailed upon the homeowners association to help. The association allowed inside a number of “refugees”: 200 families in total, just enough to fit inside the village’s covered basketball court. The families were sheltered and fed for four days. Pains were taken, however, to keep the squatters “contained” within the court. They were watched by security guards around the clock. They weren’t allowed to roam around the village, or even to use the playground beside the court. If they wanted to leave, they had to be escorted out.

The book is about the relationship between the urban poor and middle class as located in slums and enclaves (and in Manila they have become increasingly so). The incident recounted on page 99 speaks to the complexity of this relationship. Enclave residents may view slum residents as vulgar and potential criminals, but they don’t only seek to exclude them. They also want to help them. This help, however, is perfectly consistent with a view of them as their social inferiors. The residents of Phil-Am helped out the residents of San Roque, but they did so in a way that underscored the social boundary between them. They imposed this boundary spatially by circumscribing their presence within the village. Benefaction and discrimination are not incompatible, in other words, and even while helping, the middle class may treat the poor as categorically unequal. Elsewhere in the book, I show that this treatment, writ large, is politically consequential. It makes the poor acutely sensitive to discrimination and may lead them to support populist leaders promising to overturn their stigma as poor people and squatters.

Learn more about The Patchwork City at the University of Chicago Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue