To answer this, we need to turn to the material and symbolic conditions for making community especially in places where the drug war has been most intensely waged.
As Jensen and Hapal point out, in impoverished barangays, living spaces are organized into highly compact and crowded residences—slums that warehouse people into a surplus and highly disposable population.From the outside, slums are usually seen by the respectable middle and upper classes as sites of disorder, places that are magulo, or dangerous, and thus in need of policing. As products of the violence inherent in the history of displacement and the conditions of precarity, slums exist as kinds of penal colonies, constraining residents to forge bonds of protection and mutual aid. The spatial and economic realities of the barangay require the formation of what they have termed a “community of intimacy.” Given the flimsy housing materials and the tight pathways that serve as the only public spaces in Bagong Silang, residents are forced to live in close proximity, within the hearing and seeing of everything that happens to their neighbors. Privacy is at a premium, so everything is exposed to public knowledge. Additionally, gossip, or tsismis and rumor pass as information to fill in the gaps of knowledge about others and to keep everyone on guard about what others think of them. Under these conditions, as the authors point out, intimacy is both “compelled and compelling.” According to one of their informants, “We have no choice. We live here and they [our neighbors] live here as well. We just need to get along with them.”
The practice of “getting along” is commonly referred to in Tagalog as pakikisama, from the root word sama, “together.” As Jensen and Hapal explain, it is a form of “affective relationality” that entails generosity, friendliness, and hospitality, sustained by networks of reciprocal obligations. Pakiskisama is thus less a “value” than it is a highly contingent and shifting set of practices that allow people to seek companionship and protection while enjoining mutual aid under conditions of scarcity and the constant threat of displacement. For this reason, pakikisama as a cultural practice essential for settling remains unsettled and unsettling.