Baguio city and the politics of space: Creativity and innovation in a globalizing world

This article attempts to (re)write the local history of Baguio, a chartered city constructed by the Americans in the early 1900s. Informed by the concepts of spatiality or the organization of space as a social product (Foucault 2003: 19) and Henri Lefebvre’s triad of spatial practice, representations of space and representational spaces, I have conducted an intertextual interrogation of selected epistolary entries of colonial tourists, ‘official’ or otherwise, like Dean C. Worcester and Maud Huntley Jenks, vintage brochures, maps and other forms of ‘tourist art’ (Best 2001: 65), as well as little known fiction of Filipino writers in English Sinai C. Hamada and Lina Espina-Moore. This intertextual approach has allowed me to negotiate alternative routes to the reformulation of the assertion that history and space are never neutral but are steeped in power relations.