Dogeaters

Hagedorn's Manila is a city told in fragments: the air-conditioned movie palaces and department stores of the downtown Avenue, the perfumed nightclubs of Ermita, the vast slums of Tondo, and the guarded gates of Malacanang, all held together by radio soaps, imported films and the daily violence of the Marcos years. The map runs across the old heart of the city, from the river districts of Binondo and Santa Cruz south to Ermita and east to the presidential palace.

Rio Gonzaga

The movie houses of the Avenue

Part One

The novel opens with the young narrator and her cousin at the pictures, an American melodrama flickering in a cooled, gilded hall. Those palaces stood along Rizal Avenue, the downtown thoroughfare Manilenos called the Avenida, whose picture houses defined the city's imported dream life in the 1950s.

Part One

explicit Rizal Avenue, the Avenida, is named and real; its grand cinemas clustered in the Santa Cruz stretch. The exact theatre is not fixed here, so this marks a representative point along the avenue's old movie-palace row.

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Rio Gonzaga

Escolta

Part One

The narrator's Manila is also a city of shopping and display, the smart downtown where old money and new appetite meet. Escolta, the colonial commercial street in Binondo just north of the river, was the city's premier address for department stores and cafes, the setting for that world of imported goods and status.

Part One

explicit Escolta is a named, real street in Binondo; coordinates mark the historic commercial stretch by the Pasig.

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Rio Gonzaga

The nightclubs of Ermita

Part One

Night in the novel belongs to hostesses, hustlers and foreign visitors moving through smoky clubs and hotel bars. Ermita, along Mabini Street south of the old walled city, was Manila's nightlife district in these years, the natural ground for those neon-lit scenes.

Part One

inferred The novel's bars and clubs are not tied to one named address; Ermita and its Mabini Street strip were Manila's nightlife quarter in the Marcos era, so this marks that district as a representative point.

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