If Binondo disappoints you, make the sign of the cross and cross the high-way toward Quiapo [...] Flanked by Muslim-staffed bazaars, Quiapo is usually riddled with puddles and infested with flies and pickpockets, but you’re willing to take the risk in the name of fashion. Besides, what you wear might make the U.S. ambassador’s head turn. (Linmark 164)
In R. Zamora Linmark’s most recent novel Leche, Quiapo is one of the “foreign” spaces visited by the protagonist Vince de Los Reyes. Like Vince, Linmark resides in Honolulu, and at times in Manila. He has received grants and fellowships from the National Endowment of the Arts, the U.S.-Japan Friendship Commission, and twice from the Fulbright Foundation. His oeuvre includes Prime Time Apparitions and Rolling the R’s (“SMALL PRESS”).
Speaking for myself, it seems that the way Quiapo is described in Leche matches the chaotic, multiracial, and multivalent Quiapo the Filipino publics’ memplex: populated with non-Tagalog vendors, Quiapo is a shopping center for all kinds of things. It comes, however, with a risk: pickpockets and even disease. In Quiapo, Vince also finds stores such as National Bookworms and Mercury Drugstore, farcical puns on real-life stores such as National Bookstore and Mercury Drugs.
In Leche, the carnivalesque craziness of Quiapo, Manila matches the celebratory queerness of the bakla: “the city can do all this because it in fact provides the literal and conceptual space within which the homo/sexualization of the local effeminate identity of the bakla takes place—most efficaciously—in the Philippines” (Garcia 162). Puns that mock real-life names of stores belong to gay lingo. Head-turning fashion, which interpolated Quiapo into the narrative in the first place, is a relevant gay agendum. Quiapo becomes a site where Vince could let loose and be bakla.
The rest of the novel refracts this queerness by varying in form. Instead of a linear narrative discourse, Leche is punctuated by postcards, some of which, like below, features Quiapo.
By and large, the novel is a pleasurable and hilarious tour of Manila. At times, the depth of Vince’s consciousness is compromised by the book’s unconventional structure and the third-person point of view. However, we can find relevance in Vince’s principal role as a witness to the messiness of what it means to be American, balikbayan, Filipino queer in the early '90s, “a time when the Philippines was a hotbed of political, cultural, and environmental turmoil. Much as it still is today” (Boggs “Leche”). As mentioned in a tourist tip list in the novel, “Your Manila [along with Quiapo] is only one of the hundreds of millions of versions.” Linmark and Vince’s is one well worth visiting.
Black Jesus. One of the many postcards Vince sends to his siblings who stayed in Hawaii. This one depicts the Nazareno (Linmark 204).
WORKS CITED
Boggs, Nicholas. “‘Leche’ by R. Zamora Linmark.” Lambda Literary, 24 Aug. 2017,
www.lambdaliterary.org/reviews/07/04/leche-by-r-zamora-linmark/. Accessed 16 Dec 2017.
Garcia, J. Neil. “The City in Philippine Gay Literature.” Likhaan, vol. 8, no. 1, 2014, pp. 161-184. Accessed 16 Dec 2017.
`r. Zamora Linmark. Leche. Goodreads, www.goodreads.com/book/show/9590632-leche. Accessed 16 Dec 2017.
“SMALL PRESS SPOTLIGHT: R. ZAMORA LINMARK.” Critical Mass, National Book Critics Circle, 18 July 2008,
bookcritics.org/blog/archive/SMALL_PRESS_SPOTLIGHT_R._ZAMORA_LINMARK. Accessed 16 Dec 2017.
Vergara, Benito. “On R. Zamora Linmark’s ‘Leche.’” The Wily Filipino,
www.thewilyfilipino.com/blog/2011/05/16/on-r-zamora-linmarks-leche/. Accessed 16 Dec 2017.
LECHE BOOK COVER.
Baklaan sa Quiapo:
The Queer Quiapo in R. Zamora Linmark’s Leche
Jose Monfred Sy | November 8, 2017
In the ambitious, sprawling Leche, Vince, a young gay Filipino-born American, returns to the Philippines only to be told at Immigration that he is no longer a Filipino, as he owns a U.S. passport. With this, he must stand in the long queue under the heading “balikbayans,” émigrés who arrive at the airport on return visits from the States lugging rope-tied balikbayan boxes stuffed with perfumes, branded clothes, and second-hand appliances (Boggs “Leche”). This may be an “authentic” Filipino stance from which to write, as there may be anywhere from 8.2 to 11 million Filipinos overseas--about 10% of the Filipino population (Vergara “On R. Zamora Linmark”).
Vince’s ambivalent and fractured sense of national identity is the highest stake in the novel, not his sexuality, which he easily exercises given his cismale performance. The madness and the melancholy of returning to a home he barely knows are situated in modern-day Manila, where he encounters a larger-than-life cast of characters such as Dante, a bisexual cab driver, an activist nun smacking of Sister Stella L., an acclaimed (gay) movie director, and President Corazon Aquino’s actress daughter, here called the “Massacre Queen of the Philippine Cinema” (Boggs “Leche”). Before going to the province where most of his Filipino family has lived, Vince goes through a roller-coaster-ride by taxi all over Metro Manila, from Pasay City, to Malate and its Santacruzan, to Quiapo.
Quiapo enters Vince’s itinerary when he began considering places where he could grab fashionable clothing