Manila Nights: Ermita, the Boy with the Cigarettes, and What the City Shows You

Ermita is where Manila concentrates a large portion of its nightlife, which means it also concentrates the things that attach themselves to nightlife in cities where significant economic desperation and significant tourist money occupy the same geography. The district was developed as a tourist zone from the 1970s onward, during the Marcos years, when the government invested in Manila’s infrastructure for reasons that mixed genuine development ambition with the specific desire to project an image of modernity to the international community and the international lenders whose approval Marcos required. The money for the infrastructure came from those same lenders. The debt remained after the government that borrowed it was removed in 1986.

The sex tourism economy of Ermita and the adjacent Malate district has been running in some form for decades, its specific character shaped by the American military presence that lasted from 1898 until the closure of the bases at Subic Bay and Clark in 1991. The bases created an entertainment economy around them that outlasted the military presence and became self-sustaining, supported by the broader tourist trade. The bar district we moved through that night was explicit about what it offered, the menus that men pressed into your hands as you walked between bars not food menus, the women in the doorways of some establishments there on terms that varied in ways I did not fully understand and did not try to. Children worked the street between the bars.

The Philippines has a large and historically visible transgender community, concentrated partly in Manila and partly in cities across the archipelago, in a context that is specific to a country that is simultaneously one of the most Catholic in Asia and one of the most relaxed about certain categories of social convention. The bakla, a Tagalog term for people who were assigned male at birth and present as feminine, occupy a specific cultural space in Philippine society that has no direct equivalent in Western frameworks, neither straightforwardly identical to Western transgender identity nor fully captured by older anthropological descriptions. The Spanish missionaries who arrived in the sixteenth century and spent three centuries attempting to reshape Philippine society according to Catholic doctrine were unable to eradicate the bakla, which predates their arrival. The relationship between the Church’s teachings and the community’s existence has been managed, over centuries, through a kind of mutual accommodation that the Church’s official position does not entirely reflect.

Patrick, a Frenchman from our hostel group with considerable confidence in his own situational awareness, identified a table of women across the bar and suggested we introduce ourselves. I looked at the table and told him they were men. He disagreed. He went over. He came back. He reported that two were definitely men and the others were definitely women. I looked again and revised my assessment to four men and two ambiguous cases, one of whom had a striking physical resemblance to Michelle Obama, which I cannot dispute. Patrick went back. He returned with the information that all of them were men, confirmed by the waiter when I asked. He had been so committed to his initial reading that he returned three times in hope that the answer had changed. It had not.

None of this is remarkable in Manila. What was remarkable, and what stayed with me longer than anything else in Ermita that night, was the boy with the cigarettes. The street he worked, between the bars, between the women in the doorways and the men checking their menus, was not a street that anyone had designed for a seven-year-old to be standing on at one in the morning. The city had produced the conditions for it by other means, through the specific combination of poverty and inequality and the particular economy of Ermita, and nobody had decided that this specific child should be there. It had just happened, the way these things happen, through an accumulation of circumstances that nobody designed and that the city had been producing for decades.

I went back to the hostel. The rest of the group stayed out for another few hours and reported a good time. I have no doubt it was.