Learning to read Iloilo City as a writer

By Noel Galon de Leon

I have been writing for a local newspaper in Iloilo for two years and seven months. Two years and seven months may not be long enough for me to consider myself an authority on column writing or even on the city itself. Iloilo is far older, more complicated, and more layered than the relatively short period I have spent writing about it. Yet those years have been long enough for me to learn one important lesson about writing and about the place where I live. If a writer is willing to look closely, patiently, and critically, Iloilo City is almost never without something worth writing about. The challenge is not always the absence of stories. More often, the challenge is that we become so accustomed to our surroundings that we stop recognizing them as stories.

This is the most important thing I want to share with anyone who wants to write a column, an essay, or any form of nonfiction rooted in a particular place. I do not intend to teach people how to write in a purely technical sense. There are already countless books, workshops, courses, and lectures that can teach structure, style, grammar, argument, characterization, voice, and the other formal aspects of writing. What interests me more is the question that comes before the first sentence is written. Where do we find something worth saying? How do we recognize an experience, a place, an object, or an ordinary moment as material for writing? For me, the answer has increasingly become simple: I look at the city itself and try to see it again.

Iloilo City is a particularly interesting place for this kind of writing because it is a city in transition. It carries a strong historical consciousness while simultaneously presenting itself as modern, sustainable, competitive, livable, creative, and globally connected. Its identity is shaped by the continuing presence of old churches, ancestral houses, historic districts, markets, plazas, and neighborhoods, while new roads, commercial developments, condominiums, business districts, public infrastructure, and investment projects continue to transform its physical and social landscape. The tension between what the city remembers, what it wants to become, and what its residents actually experience in their everyday lives is where I find many of my stories. A city in transition is never a finished story. It is an argument that continues to unfold in public.

I have learned not to begin with the question, “What should I write about today?” That question can be paralyzing because it assumes that the writer must first discover something extraordinary before writing can begin. Instead, I ask myself a different question: What is happening around me that I have stopped noticing because I see it every day? That small change in perspective is important because familiarity can make even significant changes appear ordinary. A newspaper column does not always have to begin with a dramatic event, a major controversy, or an important announcement. Sometimes it begins with an ordinary street, a public market, a vacant building, a sidewalk, a jeepney terminal, a plaza, a heritage structure, a bookstore, a coffee shop, a street vendor, a construction project, a new condominium, a public sign, a tree that has disappeared, a road that has become more difficult to cross, a neighborhood that has suddenly become expensive, a word that people no longer use, or a language that is slowly being pushed aside. The ordinary becomes interesting when we begin asking questions about it.

The City Is a Text

One of the things I have gradually understood as a writer is that a city can be read in much the same way we read a book. Its streets are sentences because they direct us toward particular destinations and reveal connections between places. Its buildings are paragraphs because they contain histories, conflicts, memories, and transformations. Its markets are conversations because they bring together people from different classes, occupations, communities, and backgrounds. Its plazas are archives because public memory is constantly performed, preserved, forgotten, and contested within them. Its traffic is an argument about mobility, planning, access, and the unequal distribution of public space. Its advertisements are declarations of desire, telling us what kind of life we are encouraged to want. Its abandoned structures are fragments of memory, while its new developments are statements about the future.

The people of the city are constantly rewriting it through the ways they live, work, move, remember, consume, resist, adapt, and survive. This is why I have become increasingly interested in writing about Iloilo not simply as a beautiful city but as a contested space. The usual narrative about Iloilo is certainly attractive. We hear about heritage, the Iloilo River, the esplanades, festivals, food, architecture, tourism, business districts, universities, creative industries, and the city’s growing reputation as one of the country’s more livable urban centers. There is truth in these narratives, and the physical and economic transformation of Iloilo should not be denied. But a writer should not stop at the official narrative or repeat it without examination. The responsibility of the writer, at least as I understand it, is to ask what remains outside the frame.

If we say that a city is becoming more livable, I want to ask: livable for whom? If we say that a city is becoming more sustainable, I want to ask who actually experiences that sustainability in everyday life. If we celebrate development, I want to know what happens to the people and places that development displaces or transforms. If we celebrate heritage, I want to ask whose heritage we are preserving and what exactly we mean when we say preservation. If we describe Iloilo as a cultural city, I want to know where its writers, artists, cultural workers, vendors, craftspeople, and communities are located within that cultural economy. These questions do not mean that I am against development. On the contrary, development is necessary. But writing becomes more meaningful when it refuses to treat development as a word that automatically means progress. Every form of development produces consequences, and those consequences are rarely experienced equally by everyone.

Look for the Contradiction

One of the best sources of material for a columnist is contradiction. Iloilo can be both old and new. It can be proud of its heritage while undergoing rapid redevelopment. It can promote tourism while struggling with the social and cultural consequences of tourism. It can celebrate public spaces while those spaces remain unequal in accessibility. It can talk about sustainability while residents continue to experience flooding, heat, traffic, waste, and other environmental pressures. It can promote modernization while many people continue to depend on informal and precarious forms of livelihood. It can become increasingly attractive to investors while housing affordability remains an important concern. It can celebrate cultural identity while the languages through which that identity is expressed receive less institutional attention than English or standardized national narratives.

These contradictions should not automatically be understood as weaknesses of the city. They are stories. In fact, contradiction is often where a story becomes intellectually interesting because it prevents the writer from accepting easy conclusions. It is easy to write that Iloilo has beautiful heritage buildings. That is already widely known. The more difficult question is: What happens to heritage when the city becomes more valuable? Once we ask that question, several other questions immediately emerge. Who owns these buildings? Who uses them? Who profits from their preservation? Who pays for their maintenance? What happens when commercial interests enter historically significant spaces? Can a heritage building remain alive without becoming merely a decorative backdrop for consumption? Suddenly, one old building can become an entire column because the building itself reveals larger systems involving ownership, economics, memory, tourism, conservation, and urban development.

This is precisely the kind of tension that interests me as a writer. I do not want to describe a place only as it appears on the surface. I want to understand the systems and relationships beneath it. A heritage structure is not merely an old structure. A new commercial building is not merely evidence of growth. A public plaza is not simply an open space. Every place is connected to decisions about money, power, access, memory, regulation, and identity. The task of the writer is to recognize those connections and make them visible to readers. This does not require pretending to have all the answers. Sometimes the most valuable contribution of a column is not a solution but a question that people have not seriously considered before.

Do Not Underestimate the Sidewalk

I have also learned that important stories frequently happen outside formal institutions. We tend to look for stories in City Hall, universities, conferences, ceremonies, press releases, official announcements, and organized events. These are useful sources of information, and many important public issues begin within institutions. But institutions are not the whole city. Sometimes the better story is on the sidewalk. Watch the person selling food outside a school. Watch how commuters behave when a jeepney is full. Observe where pedestrians are forced to walk and where sidewalks suddenly disappear. Look at what happens to vendors when a public space is redesigned. Ask why people continue to use a particular street even when another route has been developed. Notice which establishments replace older businesses and which neighborhoods receive sustained investment while others remain neglected.

Look at the people who clean public spaces after an event has ended. Ask who works in the places that tourists photograph. Observe the difference between experiencing the city as a visitor and experiencing it as a worker. The city becomes much more complicated when we move from the perspective of the tourist to the perspective of the person whose labor makes that tourist experience possible. This is one reason I am interested in markets and public spaces. A market is not merely a place where goods are bought and sold. It is a social document. It can tell us something about inequality, migration, livelihood, food systems, gender, class, urban regulation, and survival. It contains countless stories because it brings together producers, sellers, workers, consumers, transport providers, and regulators within the same physical space.

When we see a street vendor, it is easy to reduce that person to a single category and simply call the individual “a vendor.” But what happens when we ask more difficult questions? Where does this person live? How much does it cost to operate a small livelihood? Where do the goods come from? What happens when the city clears the sidewalk? What alternatives are actually available? Who is allowed to occupy public space, and who is excluded from it? Who has access to permanent commercial space, and who remains dependent on temporary or informal arrangements? These questions move writing away from simple observation and toward analysis. That movement is important because the writer begins to see the individual not merely as an isolated subject but as someone whose life is connected to larger economic and political systems.

I Write About Places Because Places Reveal Systems

Some of my most interesting observations about Iloilo have emerged from places that initially seemed too ordinary to deserve a column. Jaro Plaza, for example, is not merely a plaza. It can become a way of discussing heritage, public art, religion, urban aesthetics, tourism, memory, and the politics of public space. A market is not merely a market. It can become a discussion about livelihood, regulation, poverty, dignity, and inequality. A heritage building is not merely an old building. It can become a discussion about ownership, memory, real estate, conservation, and the changing value of land. A bookstore is not merely a bookstore. It can become a discussion about literacy, access to literature, local publishing, language, and the survival of reading culture.

A festival is not merely a festival. It can become a discussion about who gets represented, who benefits economically, what aspects of culture become commercialized, and how traditions are transformed into spectacles for consumption. This is why I believe writers should develop the habit of looking beneath the surface. The story is rarely only the thing we immediately see. There is usually another story underneath it, and sometimes several stories exist at the same time. The challenge is to identify the question that connects the visible object or event to a larger social reality. A writer does not need to invent significance. Significance is often already present in the relationships surrounding the subject. The task is to investigate, observe, listen, compare, and think carefully enough to recognize it.

Iloilo’s Development Gives Us an Enormous Archive

The present moment in Iloilo provides writers with an extraordinary amount of material because the city is experiencing significant changes in housing, transportation, environmental policy, infrastructure, digital governance, tourism, real estate, and public space. Housing, for example, can be approached as a straightforward policy story. But another writer might ask: What does a home mean in a rapidly changing city? Where do low-income families live when land becomes increasingly valuable? Can housing programs create communities, or do they simply produce houses? What does climate resilience look like from the perspective of the family expected to live within a climate-resilient community? The same subject can produce many different columns depending on the question the writer chooses to pursue.

Transportation offers another enormous field for writing. It is possible to write about transport routes, modernization programs, traffic, and public policy. But it is also possible to write about the commuter. What does modernization feel like when you are standing under the afternoon heat waiting for transportation? What does efficiency mean to a student carrying a heavy bag? What does mobility mean to an elderly passenger? How does a person with a disability experience a transport system that may have been designed without sufficient attention to accessibility? What happens to drivers whose livelihoods are affected by changes in routes and regulations? When we begin asking these questions, transportation stops being merely an infrastructure story and becomes a human story. That is where I think column writing becomes particularly powerful because it can connect policy with the daily experience of the people affected by it.

Learn to Recognize the Invisible

One of the most important skills I have developed during these years is learning to notice what has become invisible. I do not mean literally invisible. I mean the people, places, practices, and experiences that have become so familiar that the public no longer seriously questions them. The informal worker becomes invisible. The elderly pedestrian becomes invisible. The person with a disability navigating a difficult sidewalk becomes invisible. The small bookstore becomes invisible. The local writer becomes invisible. The language spoken in the neighborhood becomes invisible. The demolished house becomes invisible after the construction fence goes up. The historical memory of a place becomes invisible when a new commercial identity replaces it. The poor become invisible when a city is described only through investment, tourism, growth, and development.

This is where writing can become an ethical act. To write is sometimes to say: I saw this. And sometimes that is already important. I saw the person who was being ignored. I saw the building that was disappearing. I saw the contradiction that was hidden beneath a positive narrative. I saw what the official explanation did not fully account for. I saw the people behind the statistics. I saw the city changing. And I decided not to let that observation disappear without a record. Writing cannot solve every problem, but it can challenge the processes through which certain experiences become forgotten, ignored, or excluded from public discussion. A column can make readers pause long enough to reconsider something they encounter every day.

A Columnist Must Learn to Be Uncomfortable

I have also learned that writing critically about one’s own city can be uncomfortable. It is easier to criticize somewhere else. It is easier to write about problems in Manila, Cebu, or another city because emotional distance can protect the writer from the discomfort of personal attachment. But writing about Iloilo means writing about a place we love, and love can make criticism difficult. I love Iloilo. That is precisely why I do not think loving the city means praising everything about it. Love should allow us to ask difficult questions. A critical column does not have to be an attack. Criticism, at its best, is a form of care because it takes the subject seriously enough to demand more from it.

When I question a development project, I am not necessarily questioning development itself. When I question a heritage policy, I am not necessarily against heritage preservation. When I question a cultural event, I am not necessarily against culture. When I question urban beautification, I am not necessarily against beauty. What I am questioning is the assumption that these things are automatically good simply because we use positive words to describe them. Words such as progress, development, modernization, beautification, sustainability, heritage, livability, and resilience deserve scrutiny. A writer should ask what these words actually mean when they reach the street. How are they experienced by ordinary residents? Who benefits from them? Who bears their costs? What realities remain hidden behind their attractive language?

The City Is Changing Faster Than Our Language for Describing It

This may be one of the most interesting challenges facing writers in Iloilo today. The city is changing rapidly, but our vocabulary for describing the city sometimes remains trapped within familiar narratives. We continue to repeat established descriptions such as the city of heritage, the city of festivals, the city of food, the city of good governance, and other identities that have helped shape Iloilo’s public image. These identities have value, and they should not simply be discarded. But a city cannot remain permanently trapped inside the language of its past. A contemporary Iloilo is also confronting climate change, digital governance, real estate expansion, transportation modernization, creative industries, changing demographics, new forms of tourism, housing demands, environmental pressures, and increasingly complex questions about identity.

These transformations require writers to develop new ways of seeing and describing the city. We need to write not only about what Iloilo has been but also about what Iloilo is becoming. More importantly, we need to ask who gets to participate in deciding what it becomes. Development is not simply something that happens naturally. It is shaped by policies, investments, institutions, corporations, governments, communities, and individuals. Every decision about a road, a building, a public space, a transportation system, or a heritage district contributes to a particular vision of the future. Writers have an important role in examining these visions and asking whether the future being imagined is genuinely inclusive.

Writing the City Also Means Writing Its Languages

For me, writing about Iloilo cannot be separated from language. A city is not culturally alive merely because it has old buildings, museums, monuments, or festivals. Culture also survives in words, idioms, stories, jokes, songs, oral histories, names of places, and everyday conversations. That is why I am particularly interested in local literature and regional languages. When we lose a language from public life, we lose more than vocabulary. We lose particular ways of describing experience. Hiligaynon and Kinaray-a contain ways of expressing intimacy, humor, relationships, landscape, social hierarchy, memory, and emotion that cannot always be reproduced exactly in English. Language carries history, and every language offers a particular way of organizing and understanding the world.

For a writer working in Western Visayas, this means that language itself can become material. Listen carefully to how people speak. Write down the expressions you hear. Ask older people about words that younger generations no longer use. Pay attention to how advertisements translate, simplify, or avoid local language. Notice when a public institution uses English, Filipino, Hiligaynon, or another language. Ask why that language was chosen and what assumptions about authority, education, class, or identity may be involved in that choice. These seemingly small observations can lead to larger questions about cultural power. Language is never only a neutral instrument of communication. The languages that are visible in public life and the languages that are excluded from it can reveal how power operates within a community.

Do Not Wait for a Big Story

This is the most practical advice I can give to anyone who wants to write regularly. Do not wait for something dramatic to happen before you begin writing. The big story is often already there. You simply have not asked the right question. A road can become a story. A tree can become a story. A market can become a story. A word can become a story. A demolished house can become a story. A new building can become a story. A sign can become a story. A waiting passenger can become a story. A street vendor can become a story. A book can become a story. A public sculpture can become a story. A queue can become a story. Even a puddle can become a story if it reveals something about infrastructure, flooding, public safety, neglect, or the way people have learned to adapt to recurring conditions.

The challenge is not finding material. The challenge is developing the curiosity to understand what the material means. Writers should train themselves to ask questions when everyone else has stopped asking them. Why is this here? Who put it here? Who benefits from it? Who is affected by it? What existed before it? What might disappear because of it? Why do people accept this condition as normal? What would change if we looked at it from the perspective of someone else? Curiosity is not a minor quality in writing. It is one of the foundations of serious nonfiction because it prevents the writer from accepting appearances as complete explanations.

I Write Because I Do Not Want to Forget

Ultimately, I think this is why I continue writing. I write because I have become increasingly convinced that forgetting is not always an accident. Sometimes things disappear because nobody records them. Sometimes places disappear because nobody asks questions about them. Sometimes local stories disappear because they are considered too small to matter. Sometimes people’s experiences disappear because they are not considered important enough to enter the official record. History is often shaped by what institutions decide to preserve, but everyday life contains countless experiences that may never appear in official documents, reports, monuments, or celebrations. Writing offers one way of resisting that disappearance.

Writing cannot stop every form of forgetting, but it can create a record. A column can preserve an observation. An essay can preserve an argument. A profile can preserve a person’s voice. A photograph can preserve a place. A poem can preserve an emotion. A book can preserve a world. This is why I increasingly see writing about Iloilo as a form of civic and cultural participation. The writer is not merely producing content for a newspaper or filling a page with words. The writer is participating in the continuing argument about what the city means, what it remembers, what it values, and what kind of future it chooses to build. That argument matters because cities are not defined only by buildings, roads, and investment figures. They are also defined by the stories people tell about them.

Iloilo City presents itself through the language of progress, sustainability, resilience, heritage, investment, culture, and livability. These ideas are reflected in various initiatives involving urban development, environmental programs, housing, mobility, heritage preservation, and cultural activity. All of these developments give writers material. But our task should not be merely to repeat them. Our task is to examine them. To listen. To observe. To compare the promise with the experience. To ask who benefits. To ask who is left behind. To remember what existed before. To imagine what could exist afterward. And most importantly, to make visible the people and stories that might otherwise disappear from the public record.

After two years and seven months of writing for a local newspaper, I have come to understand that the city itself remains my most persistent source of material. I only have to walk outside. I only have to look again. I only have to resist the temptation to believe that what I see every day is too ordinary to matter. The real work of a writer is not to search endlessly for something spectacular to write about. It is to learn how to see the story that has been there all along. It is to recognize that every street contains a history, every public space contains an argument, every change produces consequences, and every ordinary life is connected to a larger story. In a city like Iloilo, stories are everywhere. The challenge is to look closely enough, think critically enough, and care deeply enough to recognize them.

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Noel Galon de Leon is a writer and educator at the University of the Philippines Visayas. He teaches in the Division of Professional Education and at UP High School in Iloilo. He currently serves as Faculty-in-Charge of the UP Visayas Language Program Office and as Secretary of the National Committee on Literary Arts of the National Commission for Culture and the Arts (NCCA). His poetry has been recognized by the Don Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature.