National theater, local pain
I was a young boy when I learned my first lesson in city life—not in a classroom but in the public market of Tarlac. My mother would hand me a list: fish from that stall near the drainage, tomatoes from the woman with the denim apron, canned milk by the corner where the light was dim, walis tingting by the entrance. I learned to navigate narrow passageways, recognize faces, negotiate prices, tell freshness by smell and touch. It was crowded, noisy, wet, and alive.
The public market was the heart of the town. People came from kilometers away before dawn—farmers, fisherfolk, traders—bringing the countryside into one compressed block of urban life. Every peso circulated quickly. Every relationship mattered. If a vendor disappeared for a few days, someone noticed. If prices spiked, news traveled faster than any announcement. This was urban governance at ground level.
In the past 25 years, I have lived in Marikina, and I felt that same “provincial” familiarity the first time I walked into its public market. You have your suki in every major section—meat, fish, vegetables, coconuts, tools, tarpaulins, bolos, sandals, people who are predictably there day after day, year after year. What still amazes me is how organized, clean, and reasonably priced—often even cheap—the goods are, and how effortlessly you find everything you need.
And Marikina’s market has remained public. For a quarter of a century, those conditions have been sustained not by accident, not by glossy redevelopment, but because the city and the people have strained—deliberately—to make them so. Rules are enforced. Cleanliness is demanded. Order is maintained. Vendors comply because the system works, and because livelihoods are protected rather than treated as expendable. It is living proof that public markets can be clean, safe, affordable, and humane—if governance is taken seriously.
Yet across the country, many public markets no longer look or feel this way. Some have been “modernized,” others enclosed, some converted into multilevel retail complexes with escalators and glass facades. On paper, these projects promise efficiency and order. On the ground, they often unsettle livelihoods that took decades to build. A stall passed from parent to child. A vendor who survives on trust and volume, not margins. A life reduced to a line item in a feasibility study.
What hurts most is how invisible this pain is to the national conversation. Turn on the news, and you’ll see the grand theater: politicians posturing, unseating one another from leadership positions, trading speeches that sound like principles but feel like choreography. Committees convene. Impeachments are filed. Statements are issued. The camera lingers. Meanwhile, in the public market, a vendor wonders whether she will still have a stall next month, whether rent will double, whether customers will return.
This disconnect is not accidental. National politics thrives on spectacle; local life depends on continuity. The public market sits firmly in the second world. It is where daily life happens, quietly and repeatedly. When policy treats it as just another “asset” to be optimized, something essential is missed.
Modernization is not the problem. Markets need sanitation, drainage, fire safety, and decent working conditions. But there is a difference between transforming a system and unsettling it. The difference lies in whether the policy understands the market as a social institution or merely as real estate.
Small vendors do not have buffers. Their livelihoods are thin, fragile, and deeply place-based. Many have spent their entire adult lives in the same few square meters. When redevelopment plans stretch for years, when temporary relocation breaks foot traffic, when rents rise faster than daily sales, the damage is not theoretical. It is immediate and personal.
Ironically, “public interest” is often invoked to justify these changes—health, cleanliness, order. Yet health and safety are not guaranteed by gleaming floors alone. They depend on enforcement, on inspectors who can enter freely, on systems that do not push vendors into sidewalks and alleys where regulation is weaker. A market can look modern and still be unsafe; it can look humble and still be well-governed. Marikina proves this every day.
When policy ignores this everyday intelligence, it risks becoming cruel without intending to be. And perhaps that is the quietest pain of all: that while the national theater plays on, the heart of many a town is distressed in silence.
—————-
doyromero@gmail.com
