What does Sportex and Monte Vista CC represent?

Sportex, a department store chain owned by a Philippine entrepreneur, and Monte Vista Country Club represent motifs in Jessica Hagedorn's satirical and exuberant novel, Dogeaters. In a 1991 interview in BOMB cultural magazine, Hagedorn describes the genesis of Sportex: "Sportex is based on a couple of big stores in the Philippines." One of them, she goes on to say, is Shoe Mart, a kind of institutional development of the Pinoy open market. Catering to the middle class, it sells a wide variety of consumer goods at reasonable prices - from shoes to native foods. It, she concludes, is egalitarian and omnipresent. The other store, occupying the high end of the consumer spectrum, is Roostan's, selling expensive items quite out of the reach of the vast majority of Philippine culture. Hagedorn "combined both Shoe Mart and Roostan's, high class and low class, into Sportex." The transformed store represents the novel's melange of Pinoy society, from company founder and owner, the fabulously wealthy and powerful Severo Alacran, to company employee, Trinidad Gamboa, a sales associate who, like many of the other characters, aspires to affluence and prestige.