This Walking Tour Lets You Rediscover Tondo Through the Words of Its Writers

(SPOT.ph) When one hears of a visit to Tondo, some people still do a little pearl-clutching-literally and figuratively. After all, the district has a reputation for being rough around the edges. It’s how Pinoy movies painted Tondo to be. Slums everywhere. Liquids of unknown origin seeping onto barely-there sidewalks. The pungent aroma of esteros making its way up your nose. The din of jeepneys roaring through the street.

This is the Tondo most people carry with them: crowded, chaotic, and anchored largely in the riot of Divisoria. But as the title of Andrés Cristóbal Cruz’s novel famously goes, Ang Tundo Man May Langit Din. If you’ve ever wondered whether a paradisiacal Tondo ever existed, one removed from the poverty and neglect that continue to define it today, take the Tondo Writers Workshop’s word for it: you need only look inside a book.

“How is Tondo represented in text?” This was the question Rajee Florido found himself reflecting on as he and fellow volunteer Aldrich Cansino set out to design the first-ever Tondo Literary Tour.

Florido and Cansino are part of the Tondo Writers Workshop, a support group for local writers that hopes to inspire and empower a new generation of wordsmiths from the area. The barely year-old collective was looking for an activity that could reframe Tondo for a wider public and invite people to see the district through a different lens. The tour would be the culminating event of their week-long writing program for Tondo youth and would also help generate funds for it.

The idea was inspired by a literary tour Florido attended in Dumaguete—a UNESCO-recognized Creative City of Literature, no less. Born and raised in Tondo and a self-professed bookworm, Florido wondered whether he could bring that same experience to his hometown: a chance to explore a familiar place through the stories, poems, and books written about it. He enlisted his friend Cansino, who shared his passion for literature and heritage, and together they brought the idea to the Workshop, where they set out to bring the tour to life.

The duo spent two months poring over texts: stories, novels, and poems by Tondo-born-and-raised writers, as well as by writers who referenced or discussed the area. They found pieces like Liwayway Arceo’s Canal dela Reina, which talked about and was titled after a historic man-made waterway of the same name that runs perpendicular to Recto Avenue; or even obscure references in larger texts like an excerpt from chapter one of Juan L. Arsciwals’ Isa Pang Bayani, which mentions factories and workers along streets like Azcarraga or today’s Recto corner Ilaya. 

Once they found enough material—about 35 pieces—they began mapping them onto the neighborhood, plotting a route, and eventually a narrative that could flow through the familiar streets of present-day Tondo. The idea was to give context to the mundane: walk down an ordinary street, pass by a building or pocket park, and see it through the eyes of the writers who had lived there, written about it, or witnessed its transformation.

But the work went beyond simply finding literary references and putting pins on a map. They also sought to contextualize the lives and works of Tondo-based writers—to understand, for instance, why someone like Amado V. Hernandez was moved to write about the plight of laborers and farmers, or why Isabelo delos Reyes, better known as the Father of Philippine Folklore, was also deeply involved in the labor movement.

To do this, they brought in another element to the tour: history. The duo worked with The Heritage Collective’s Stephen Pamorada to further shape the tour by adding cultural context to the pieces. Pamorada, of course, is not new to this. He has long been behind many unique tours, such as the Maria Clara and Ibarra Tour of Manila, the Halloween-favorite Cemetery Tours, and many more experiences that seek to bring Manila’s heritage closer to a new generation. Together, Pamorada, Florido, and Cansino shaped the Tondo Literary Tour as more than a literary scavenger hunt. It became a way to understand how the place shaped its writers and how those writers, in turn, captured the character of Tondo.

The result is a four-hour walking tour through the winding streets of Tondo, starting at the Bonifacio Monument near Tutuban Mall, passing through portions of Divisoria, and stopping at landmarks like the Macario Sakay Monument in Plaza Morga and Plaza Moriones.

At each stop, history and literature come together. Pamorada provides the historical context, expertly navigating the streets and pointing out the plaques, busts, and monuments that might otherwise go unnoticed, while Florido and Casino bring the literature to life, reading excerpts written about or inspired by the places around them.

Take, for example, the stop at the Tutuban Railway Station. Here, Pamorada introduces Tondo as a “Melting Pot of Regional Cultures,” explaining how the station once connected the district to provinces stretching from Pampanga in the north to Cavite in the south. He describes the terminal as the place where provincianos first arrived in the capital, and where families and loved ones gathered to welcome or bid each other farewell.

It is fitting, then, that this is also where Florido and Casino read Manuel Principe Bautista’s Tren, a poem about waiting for a loved one at the Tutuban station. There’s also a reading of this excerpt from Amado V. Hernandez’s Ibong Mandaragit describing how the station was the gateway to the “Manila Dream,”

"Sa mga riles at estasyon ng tren na nag-uugnay sa Maynila at sa mga lalawigan ng Gitnang Luzon, hindi lamang mga kargamento at sasakyan ang bumabaybay, kundi pati ang mga pangarap at daing ng mga magsasaka at manggagawa. Ang Maynila ang sentro ng kapangyarihan at ng pahayagang Kampilan, ngunit sa mga lalawigan nagmumula ang hukbo ng mga nangangailangan ng katarungan."

Suddenly, the old railway terminal’s story isn’t just another historical fact; it becomes an almost intimate look into someone else’s memory, captured in words and given new meaning, never the same again thereafter. 

But perhaps the most fascinating thing about the tour is that it isn’t simply a walk through Tondo’s history—it is a walk through its many incarnations. With every reading, the present-day streets become layered with the Tondos that came before. The texts act almost like time capsules, giving us glimpses of the places as they were seen, experienced, and remembered by the people who lived in them.

Can you imagine describing the water in the canals of Tondo as “cool and green” where children would learn to swim? Have you ever heard of the beaches of Tondo? In The Quarrel, Andres Cristobal Cruz describes the Tondo of his youth as exactly that. But he also writes about the neighborhood in the aftermath of the war, capturing a Tondo already in transition. Read today, his words become more than a recollection of childhood; they offer a glimpse of a place in flux.

It’s interesting to see how the texts about Tondo have also changed over the years. Pieces written before the Second World War describe Tondo as an enviable center of trade and a bustling hub of cosmopolitan life, as in John Bowring’s A Visit to the Philippine Islands. “Their best houses are of European construction, occupied by Spaniards or mestizos,” he writes.

Compare that with Rosario de Guzman Lingat’s account of post-War Tondo in What Now, Ricky?, which says, “Makeshift hovels and houses made of stone dotted the landscape of Tondo. His house was not made of cardboard and corrugated iron, nor was it made of stone.” Put those two accounts side by side, and you can almost watch the book on Tondo flip a page.

This is perhaps the tour’s best plot device: it allows you to stand in one Tondo while reading about another. The physical landscape may have changed, but the literature freezes certain moments in place, preserving not only what Tondo looked like at a particular time, but how it felt to live there. It adds color to the history, providing you with characters to root for, experiences to relate to, and examples to live by.

Tondo isn’t simply one thing. It is many things at once, and has been for centuries: an ancient settlement, a center of trade, a gateway for migrants, a working-class neighborhood, a place battered by war and neglect. No version invalidates another; they are each equally a layer to a place that has never stayed still for long.

And perhaps the more interesting question is not which version of Tondo is the “real” one, but which version we are leaving behind.

“When we were looking for texts about Tondo, it was hard to find modern texts. Parang after the ‘80s halos wala na,” says Florido. 

“Hopefully, through the Tondo Writers Workshop and tours like this, we can inspire a new generation of writers to start writing about Tondo again,” says Beverly Wico Siy, one of the founding members of the Tondo Writing Workshop.

By the end of the tour, Tondo is still Tondo. The jeepneys are still roaring, vendors are still calling, and the streets are still as overwhelming as ever. But now, you know there are other Tondos beneath the one in front of you: the Tondo of railway stations and swimming canals, of workers and writers, of childhood memories and postwar upheaval.

And perhaps that is the real point of the tour—not to show you a different Tondo, but to teach you to look more closely at the one that is already there. And maybe, in doing so, to wonder what stories the Tondo of today will leave behind. Somewhere in the middle of all those old pages, the next Tondo is waiting to be written.

Photos by Paul Sugano.

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