On the HALSEMA ( My grandfather’s Mountain Trail)
After typhoon Pepeng killed around 2oo people in October,2009, I went up to Baguio and took snapshots of Halsema. It is still a mountain trail really. Halsema Highway was originally built by an American engineer from Ohio who was assigned to the Philippines in the 1900s. His name was Eusebius Julius Halsema. He also became mayor of Baguio for 17 years ( 1920-1937). Large sections of Halsema just fell down the mountain. Cemented roads looked like paper pieces sticking out of the brown soil. I remember Halsema because as a little girl, my father would drive us to Atok where my ancestors were from and we would attend weddings, canaos (feasts), or simply hang out drinking local rice wine (tapey) or good brewed coffee with some of my grandmothers–sisters of my grandfather Lupo, Sr. His sisters who we saw then were Lola Cecilia, Lola Nining, Lola Codney. They lived in various places in the interior of Benguet.
I have always loved the Halsema or Mountain Trail as the old folks referred to it. The views were always spectacular. I should go and shoot in an 8×10 really. The 35mm format is quite small but its all I have right now. A really nice landscape camera would be grand. 
Landscapes I Remember
I think we all remember some places more than others. I remember a meadow that we used to go to when we were kids in Baguio where I grew up. Today, it has concrete houses and all the commercial places one needs to survive the modern age–laundry shops, groceries, a gas station, etc. In Baguio, I went to the CICM/ICM schools. I don’t thinks its the best for your kids to go to these schools but it was one of the better schools at that time and my parents thought it was good. If I had gone to City High, it might have been good as well, I dunno. In school I loved words and art. And that opened my eyes to reading books which became a passion. So that’s not so bad, in a way .Then I remember the first time I saw Quiapo with my father and my sister. Why was it so dirty? It smelled bad too. Later when I moved to study and later work in Manila, I would spend so much time in its streets shooting a collection of images of Avenida, Taft, Divisoria, Tondo, Recto, Lawton, etc.
Last year, I saw the Himalayas in Nepal. It blows your mind. Landscapes like these– they have a place in your heart. Benguet is a beautiful province-gentle, quaint, shy, with a charm all its own in the vast Cordillera.
There are landscapes that make you so damn glad you are alive.
The color photos above are on a poster layout I designed for a backpacking trip into the Mountain province.
We saw the Ambuklao Dam in Bokod,Benguet when we decided to climb Mt. Pulag in Kabayan one summer in the late 90s. We did not have the expensive tent which I have now, nor did we have any other special equipment with us except our enthusiasm, some food and our thick jackets.
We used a white canvas tarp for a tent. It was quite cozy while the fire we built that night was warm enough. We decided to leave our canvas tent behind when we went up to the summit. We came back to find the tarp gone.
We then trekked all the way down to the highway to wait for a Norton bus. On our way down, we met a Kalanguya woman and her daughter. They spoke a certain kind of language that had Ibaloy words mixed in it. We told Papa about them. He said it would be good to also know about them. I have never been to that side of Pulag where the Kalanguya live. I wish I could go there and photograph their life too.
Growing up Ibaloy in Baguio
I grew up in Baguio, a city in Northern Luzon. My parents were both Ibaloys. My father Lupo Jr. grew up partly in Irisan, a few minutes from the center of town and partly in Atok, two hours from Baguio. His family had escaped from the Japanese during WW2 by going back home to Atok, Benguet where my ancestors are from. My father’s father , Lupo Sr. was a second lieutenant in the guerilla army, part of the USAFFE. His family was well-off in those days and owned vast tracks of land and cattle in that part of Benguet. He was also a gold prospector who roamed Mindanao when he finished with the army. But I only heard about all his adventures when he was in his 70s and was already sick and dying. Lolo Lupo would usually share his stories while we drank coffee when I was around 12 or 13 years old. My father’s mother, Miriam, had died of ovarian cancer when she was just in her 40s. She was an English teacher at Easter School in Guisad . She was taught by the first American teachers who came to Northern Luzon. I heard that my Lola Miriam spoke English very well and even quizzed my grandfather on his grammar from time to time. My father had a sister who became a teacher, and a brother who joined the US Navy.
My mother was adopted by her relatives in Itogon, a mining town. Her own mother had died early while her father worked as a miner in a nearby mining company. I remembered going to Itogon for vacation during the summers. I stayed with my cousins there who would eventually be my hosts during the two times I was in California after attending photography workshops in the US. The river in Itogon was grey and full of silt. I always loved playing by there and thought of it as my playground even if the grey water was not at all inviting. Later, I would find out that the mines had killed that river.
I went to an all-girls Catholic high school where Ibaloys didn’t get together as a group but tended to mention how they each knew of each other’s families.Ibaloys in Baguio knew each other through stories handed down by their parents. Our school was run by strict Belgian nuns. I enjoyed high school but I sometimes went against the rules of the nuns. I disliked sitting in religion classes that made me guilty about things that I didn’t think I should be guilty of.
My homelife was simple and we practiced and learned about our Ibaloy roots through my father’s efforts. He was the first one to give me a small Japanese camera so I started shooting the images that I have now. They all simply documented the feasts, the wakes, the weddings, the gatherings of my clan. I then came to realize that documenting the disappearing life of the Ibaloy was a gift that I was fortunate to have.
It is still an ongoing project.
The photo accompanying this post is of my Uncle Artemio ( Mang Tems, we called him), his wife, Auntie Placida and my uncle’s sister Alsimi in Bentew, Atok, Benguet. And the house behind them is the house which I miss because a few years ago, my uncle’s children decided to modernize it and so the original Ibaloy structure is now gone. I spent some summers here and roamed the hills looking for “ajosep” or black berries. I have nice memories of Bentew. That was a real Ibaloy place.
Juana and Mary
The people in the picture are my mother’s cousins Mary (right) and Juana (left). They are from Tublay,Benguet. I took this photo with a trusted Nikon FM2 and TRI-X film. And that Scout in the background is my father’s. This photo was taken in Brookside in Baguio where we lived for 20 years until 2001.
Juana and Mary would always come to visit mama and this would also be a chance for them to watch TV. Their favorite thing was to watch wrestling! Yeah, these old women were a bit vicious! In Ibaloy, they would say-”Shengpel mo!” or say some other encouraging
words. I would often see them watch TV in the sala and I wish I had taken their pictures then. Their animation over wrestling was fun to witness.
In 2005, this photo was part of my series as a participant to a group show at the CCP Main Gallery of grantees of the Asian Cultural Council (ACC). One camera guy from a Japanese TV crew–who , it turns out was Ibaloy–approached me and said that he knew these two women. I was so surprised but glad to meet a fellow Ibaloy at the CCP. He said that he was born and raised in La Trinidad, Benguet and had seen Juana and Mary in various canaos, festivities in La Trinidad. Isn’t that a funny coincidence? So that’s my short story on Juana and Mary-two Ibaloy women from Tublay, Benguet. The full photo is in the beginning of my blog series.
Welcome to my blog.
it amazes me that there are things we don’t know about two minutes before, or maybe a week or a year ago and then, when it’s there, you respond to it and it changes you. nothing related to why i started this blog. but well, i started this blog in 2006 but never got to fill it. here i am doing it over. i hope it gets batter.
16 july 2008. this blog is about Being Ibaloy and how it affects my work, how I relate to people, what i believe in, what defines me. for a long time, it was just something that i thought about as just there but never fully embraced. it’s probably because we lived in the city , isolated sometimes from our Ibaloy relatives although we would occasionally visit Atok ( where my ancestors are from ). also we felt Ibaloy when we would have relatives who would visit-they would let us know that so and so died, got married, went away, is living in the US, went to Saudi,etc. The stories would be carried to us by such people as Uncle Tems, the various grandmothers who would come and man- adivay in my home, or maybe the various cousins who would bring corn, maybe camote, and other farm produce that they themselves had grown. then one by one, the older people died and so there were fewer people visiting us. and then my parents died. then we didn’t meet our relatives anymore except when there were family reunions. so i hope these reunions don’t stop. i hope they will continue for the next generations to know about their rich ibaloy heritage.
i call this blog MANGSAS because when we were kids, i remember being fascinated by stories of Ibaloys who could see ghosts and the supernatural. in Atok, my father said there once was an old man called Gua-jas who could see the creatures who preyed on the living. he was a mangsas. there was a story where Gua-jas along with some members of the community attended a canao ( a feast ) in a nearby barrio. it was already dark by the time it was time to go home. everyone walked home in a single file as is the usual case in the highland but they were surprised when Gua-jas run past everybody because he had seen that there were ’strange creatures” trying to tag along with the group. he had seen what Ibaloys call the “a-ngel” ( ghosts ).
widow apolonia, tublay, benguet 2007
