city was quickly rebuilt after 1945, becoming once again the country’s summer capital. Burnham’s handiwork survives in the design of the city center, which includes a City Hall that looks much like Manila’s, a willow-fringed park (named after Burnham) with its boating lagoon, and a complex of roads leading to the city’s several districts and to points further north and east. In 1990, the city was devastated again, this time by the same earthquake that crumpled Dalton Pass. Several hotels collapsed, along with scores of residences, many of which were flimsily built squatters’ homes. The city’s funeral parlors were unable to handle the sudden increase in business, and so bodies were strewn around the parks, and the air was filled for weeks with the stench of death. The lowland press speculated on the city’s demise, but in little more than a year, Baguio had recovered, had started to attract visitors once again. How could it be otherwise? In these mountains, death by earthquake was a given, was a part of living.
I love this city, balm in childhood and adulthood, a much-needed refuge from Manila’s murderous premonsoon heat. Horseback rides at Wright Park, boating on Burnham’s artificial lake, walks on Session Road and up and down a city that sloped every which way—these were the sum and content of my childhood trips. As a boy coming to Baguio for family vacations, I would eagerly await the smell of pine to waft through the car windows, a smell that heralded a world different from the humdrum one of Manila. Today that scent has all but vanished, replaced by diesel fumes. Militarization in far-flung areas and the corresponding influx of the poor and the dispossessed, together with the lax enforcement of zoning and environmental laws, have resulted in trees being cut for fuel and building material.
On the wall of her apartment in Arlington, Virginia, my mother has a photograph of me—I must have been five years old then— together with my brothers and sisters, astride ponies in Wright Park. Riders and animals look docile, bemused. The ponies’ handlers— tough but gentle men, Igorots whose land this once was—are nowhere to be seen, shunted off camera. They were largely invisible to us, forming part of an exotic backdrop to our vacations. As a child I knew nothing of them, only that they were different from us, Other. I had no idea then that they had had a long history of resistance to foreign incursions. In Manila, my only encounters with them had been in the hunched forms of elderly Igorot women who went begging from door to door. For them to be on the coast, in the indifferent embrace and oppressive heat of Manila meant the abasement of a proud people, a culture exploited by and under siege from consumerism.
In the 1970s, however, spurred by the excesses of the Marcos regime and by militarization, the Cordilleras became once again a center of resistance to lowland oppression. Quiescent warrior traditions were revived, and the communist New People’s Army found a secure refuge in the mountains. The government in Manila realized that its hold up in the highland was shaky—had in fact always been shaky. Highland resistance to the Marcos regime reached its peak in the vigorous opposition to the proposed building of the Chico River dam, which would have inundated the ancient burial grounds of the Kalinga tribe. The Kalinga and the NPA formed a tactical alliance, but it was the military’s subsequent 1980 assassination of Macli-ing Dulag, a charismatic Kalinga chief, that provoked widespread outrage, ultimately forcing the cancellation of the plan to build the dam.
With the collapse of the Marcos regime in 1986, a lot of windows had been thrown open, to get rid of the musty air. And in Baguio, several well-known artists—who either had been born there or had chosen to live there and all of whom had lived in the West a while— began to meet informally, began to talk of what their art meant to them, began to think of themselves as a collective, as part of a nation perenially plagued by self-doubt, by uncertainty in the way it dealt with cultural issues. The result of these meetings was the formation of the Baguio Artists Guild.
One of its prime movers and founders is Ben Cabrera, also known as Bencab. A tall, balding, bespectacled man, Bencab is a well-known painter and printmaker who had lived in London for fifteen years before deciding to return to the Philippines. He has settled here, away from the big-city sophistication and pace of both London and Manila. I had last seen Bencab in New York in the early 1990s, where he had had a one-man show that explored the quake that leveled Baguio. I visit him one afternoon, and as we sit in his studio sipping coffee and gazing out at the city, he tells me about his artistic odyssey.
Bencab is illustrative of the Filipino artist who had once looked to and lived in the bosom of the West, secure in the belief that he was where he should be, only to find that the journey West was really a journey East. That journey began in the 1960s when he was offered a job as an artist and illustrator with the Manila office of the United States Information Service. The job paid P250 a month, nothing today but a decent salary then. His tasks were pleasant enough, but the colonial-mindedness of the staff bothered Bencab. “Hindi ko masakyan [I couldn’t stand it],” he explains. “I remember this one writer—he had been with the service for a while—who was telling me how he felt about two officers. One was a white American, the other was a short, dark Filipino. This writer said, look at us, we’re so ugly. He could hardly wait to immigrate to the United States: If you worked for the service for fifteen years, the come-on was you could go to America.”
For the educated Christian Filipino like Bencab or myself, this racial self-hatred was very much a part of growing up. The unremitting emphasis in school was on ignoring inconvenient details like race, cultural geography, and a history of warfare, abuse, and suppression. At the Ateneo de Manila High School, speaking Tagalog—or the “dialect,” as it was referred to—was forbidden, as though the native tongue were a repository of dark, unmentionable secrets, an omnipotent mantra, that could slough off our Western conditioning like unwanted skin. The history we had been taught was one informed thoroughly by the West. Our own stories were deemed relevant only in relation to the Spanish and American colonial periods, and even then it was a history written from the point of view of the victors, presenting a benign view of colonialism. (I don’t recall a single instance at school when the term was even used.) In the process, our tongue, our own sense of it, had temporarily disappeared. The impact of such an education was all too evident, for example, in our sense of aesthetics. Whether expressed in the clothing we wore—Levis, Arrow shirts, Florsheim, Nike—or in the music we preferred—rock, disco, Latin, jazz—our (hi-fi and stereophonic) fidelity to and feel for Western pop culture had few equals. The end result? I was drenched in nostalgia for places in the West I had never been to.
In terms of earthly beauty, it was no different—let my face be done on earth as it is in heaven. The Catholic icons revered by most of the country—the weepy but beautiful Madonna; her pink-cheeked, plump Santo Niño, or Holy Child; Christ as a handsome, bearded, incandescent ascetic—bore little resemblance to the masses who prayed, wept, and often crawled at their feet. No doubt a large number of the devotees wanted to be lighter-skinned, to have aquiline noses, be a little taller. The fairer, the better; Spanish or Caucasian American mestizas were prized. And so the silver screen echoed the national preference. The language used in local films may have been Tagalog, but the matinee idols had noses and eyes of a distinctly European origin. So it puzzled me as a teenager when I saw hulking American servicemen on leave, strolling on Roxas Boulevard accompanied by petite dark women I considered unattractive, women I presumed worked in bars.
It wasn’t so much what these women did that bothered me and my friends, it was that they looked “native.” Mukhang chimay, we would say, or “servant-faced,” our ultimate put-down for those women who failed to meet the standards we took for granted. Dark skin meant servility, undesirability, the wrong class. By reminding me of the traditions I had been separated from, these women threatened to disrupt a seemingly well-ordered but actually fragile and narrow world. Only later did I acknowledge the stirrings of attraction for these non-Caucasian-looking women of the night
Bencab’s work at the USIS made him begin to see the absurdity of all this. He quit and joined a now-defunct daily The Manila Times. Beatriz Romualdez—a niece of Imelda Marcos who would later marry Henry, my oldest brother—was also with the paper as a writer. She had just opened a café on Mabini Street in the Malate district of Manila, called Café
