Joy Belmonte awaits her finest hour

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Joy Belmonte was in her element. In Pasong Tamo, on a late February afternoon, the Quezon City mayor was inaugurating the Tandang Sora Women’s Museum with Senator Risa Hontiveros.

Under a clear and open sky, a festivities of sorts outside the museum began. The curator spoke and several artists performed. There was dancing and singing. A young student read poetry.

Her father, the former House speaker and Quezon City mayor Feliciano “Sonny” Belmonte Jr., hovered around the edges and stood patiently against the railing as Joy toured the museum with Hontiveros.

Women, old and young, took the opportunity when the tour was over to take photos with the mayor. Some struck conversations. The mayor obliged, exchanging pleasantries. She seemed comfortable being physically close to whoever wanted to talk to her.

Later, when asked if she always received this kind of welcome, Belmonte said it was only because of the nature of the event that’s why people were so eager.

“It’s very ‘makibaka’ because the pillars of the women’s movement did the content,” Belmonte said when she invited us to the museum launch a few days before.

“Makibaka” in Filipino means “to struggle,” often used in progressive circles. It was also, coincidentally, the name of a militant women’s organization founded in 1970 by the late revolutionary Maria Lorena Barros.

Belmonte is far from being Maria Lorena Barros, Melchora Aquino, or Gabriela Silang — the likes who took part in revolutions, often bloody, and sought the emancipation of a nation, the poor, and the oppressed.

She is, rather, an administrator. The mayor of the largest and richest city in the country. The second woman to be elected local chief executive here following the late Adelina Rodriguez.

For her, the position she’s had for the past six years is a privilege.

“I recognize the struggles that the women before me had to try out against, just so I can have this privilege of serving you,” she said then at the launch.

A familiar name

Belmonte is a name cemented in national and Quezon City politics, and media business.

While her father was former House speaker, her mother, the late Betty Go-Belmonte, was among the founders of the Philippine Daily Inquirer, and later pioneered The Philippine Star. Betty’s father had been a publisher too, the founder of Filipino-Chinese publication, The Fookien Times.

“I allowed my daughter to do many things I was not allowed to do,” Betty was quoted as saying in a previous interview published in a UP Diliman journal.

“I felt I was sort of held back from doing a lot of things. I don’t take it against my parents because I know that they loved me. But I don’t want my daughter and sons to miss out on anything. Recently, I let my daughter Joy serve in Kadingilan, Bukidnon as a JVP (Jesuit Volunteer for the Philippines) where the only source of water was rain and there was no means to call her.”

Joy herself remembers her year in Bukidnon with fondness. After she graduated with a Social Sciences degree from Ateneo, she went to Kadingilan to teach high school students from 1992 to 1993.

“I had to live there for one whole year,” she said. “I taught everything, everything they want me to teach.”

In 1994, she took up museum studies at the University of Leicester. Then studied archaeology from 1995 to 1996 at the University College London. For her masters in philosophy, Belmonte researched Spanish archaeological sites in Manila and Cebu, focused on finding women in archaeological records.

Back in Quezon City, Belmonte led the Quezon City Ladies Association while her father was mayor. She taught archaeology and museum studies at UP Diliman for a while and joined excavations.

She said she remembered her father telling his children, “I did well. Does anybody want to follow?”

None of her brothers wanted to be politicians, she said. “They all wanted to be journalists like my mother.”

So she took the chance and started doing rounds in 2007, three years before the 2010 elections (“City is very big so it takes a while to get around.”) She was elected vice mayor under Herbert Bautista and completed all three terms. Afterwards, she ran and won as mayor in 2019.

Quezon City is its own kingdom

Quezon City was the capital of the Philippines from 1948 to 1976.

It is home to almost three million residents. Its 2025 budget is bigger than that of Manila, the country’s current capital. Academics, scholars thrive in top institutions along Katipunan Avenue. Government offices surround the historical Quezon Memorial Circle.

Progressive groups hold their offices in Teachers’ Village, Tomas Morato. Watering holes, homey restaurants, and trendy food joints pepper areas in the vicinity of young students and professionals. The rich have several enclaves to choose from: Corinthian Gardens, White Plains, La Vista, and Tierra Pura to name a few. Up north are the halls of the House of Representatives. And once a year, the President travels from his home along the Pasig River to the Batasang Pambansa to address the nation.

“Kyusi” is the colloquial name, the endearing diminutive of the immense city.

It was born in the midst of World War II. Founded in 1939, the city was envisioned to be the new capital as decay and congestion settled in Manila. The University of the Philippines and Ateneo de Manila University expanded and transferred, respectively, to Quezon City after their schools in Manila were destroyed during the war. Families from Manila relocated to the government housing projects in Quezon City (known as Project 1 to 8).

Once frontier land, it has become an urban center sprawling from the north and cuts right to the heart of Metro Manila.

Carved out from, and relatively newer than, other metropolitan cities, Kyusi has had its fair share of critical moments in history. If Manila saw the decolonization of Filipinos from Spaniards and Americans, Quezon City saw the peaceful protest along EDSA that ousted a dictator.

Its sheer enormity gives anyone who wins city hall outsized power and influence.

“You’re not too afraid to act because you know that your size gives you some strength,” Belmonte told Rappler in an interview.

And with size comes a diversity in voices. “Your size gives you the right to speak out also because there are so many voices that you have to represent,” she added.

Under Belmonte, Quezon City institutionalized the right to care card for the LGBTQIA+ community. They won Galing Pook Awards for automated birth registration and their early warning system. East of Quezon City is the Marikina River Basin. Cutting through the city are 44 tributaries connected to five river systems, making many areas flood-prone.

Commuters and mobility found laudable the city’s Libreng Sakay bus service program, the installation of bike lanes, and the car-free first Sunday along Tomas Morato every month.

During the pandemic, the Quezon City government quietly passed the anti-teenage pregnancy ordinance. A similar law at the national level sparked an uproar in 2025, primarily triggered by the comprehensive sexuality education component that aims to address stigma against sex, human sexuality, and reproductive health.

“It really starts with political will,” Andrea Villaroman, head of the climate change department in city hall, told Rappler in a separate interview.

“If the decision or policy is not popular, sometimes the politician hesitates to get into it.”

Villaroman had been with the city government since 2004, and was even interviewed by the Belmonte patriarch himself. She said environmental issues and the city’s approach evolved, from Sonny’s solid waste management focus to Joy’s climate change lens.

She described Joy Belmonte as a “very hands on” mayor. They meet at least twice a week. Some nights, or even on weekends, Villaroman said Belmonte has a habit of sending related studies on climate and environment that she sees on the internet.

Joy’s evolution

Belmonte wasn’t always the popular Metro Manila mayor.

When Belmonte started as mayor in 2019, her administration was quickly overcome by the frustration, restlessness, and paranaoia that marked the COVID-19 pandemic.

Residents criticized the mayor for what they deemed to be slow pandemic response. Health kits that the city government distributed had her branding, “Joy Para Sa Bayan (Joy for the Community).“ Her voice, tinny and high-pitched, was a source of ridicule online.

At that time, then-Manila mayor Isko Moreno had been receiving praises for how he handled the pandemic response. He used his experience during the pandemic to prop himself for a 2022 presidential bid. In Marikina, then-mayor Marcy Teodoro advocated for mass testing and doubled down on contact tracing.

The pandemic was the litmus test for any local chief executive at that time.

In the early days of lockdown, Belmonte remembered asking one of her colleagues what she was doing wrong. She said she would like to believe then that she was just doing a bad job. A bad job means a chance of doing things better. She asked, “Why are people unhappy?”

“Every day of the pandemic, I was in city hall,” Belmonte said. “The whole team was in city hall and we were just working.”

Five years later, steeped in acclaim and probably the most popular Metro Manila mayor now, Belmonte led her slate at the Serbisyo sa Bayan Party proclamation rally. The audience at the Quezon Memorial Circle cheered and clapped for their candidates.

So far, Belmonte has welcomed two candidates from the administration slate, Makati Mayor Abby Binay and House Deputy Speaker Camille Villar — both from political clans like the mayor herself.

She raised the hand of Villar in a recent visit, a photo of which is making rounds online. And last March, Belmonte urged the public to make Binay number one in the polls, according to the Makati mayor’s press statement.

Belmonte is gunning for her third and final term. She sets her sights in the next three years: enroll all residents in PhilHealth, double the number of scholars, add hospital establishments, modernize health centers’ systems, and increase rental housing, among others.

“We are the model city,” she said Friday morning, March 28, on the first day of the local campaign period.

She said that she still thinks about what she could’ve done had it not been for the pandemic.

“At this point, I sometimes feel regret because we could have done a lot in the first three years if there wasn’t a pandemic, right? That’s three years of funds that were allocated for pandemic response.”

But, the mayor added, the pandemic was a “true test of leadership.”

“I know that from that experience, I will not go through anything that I will not overcome because that’s the hardest so far,” she said.

One wonders, given the breadth of experience in local politics, the advantage of a political machinery and name recall, if a national elective position is within Belmonte’s future plans.

None at the moment, she said. The answer was quick and automatic. It seemed like a question often asked her.

Belmonte, however, admitted to believing in divine intervention. Doors remain open. In the meantime, the next three years at city hall await. – Rappler.com

Quotes translated to English for brevity.

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