[OPINION] Ode to Baguio

I first arrived in the city as a 16-year old incoming freshman of the University of the Philippines-Baguio. I was accompanied by a relative for the routine medical check-up before enrolment. It was my first time traveling north. When we reached the Victory Liner terminal, we rode a taxi and told our driver that we were headed to UP. He responded, “Baguio?” To which I replied, “Opo, UP Baguio.” Off we went and to my confusion he brought us to the University of Baguio (UB). That was when I learned the taxi script of UP Baguio students. UP and UB sound very similar, so this clarification is necessary: “Manong, UP Philippines.”

Baguio was established as a colonial hill station by the Americans in 1900. It was known as the Summer Capital because the bureaucracy of the colony was literally moved to this colonial hill in the months when the heat in Manila becomes unbearable for the American administrators. Daniel Burnham designed the city for roughly 30,000 inhabitants. At present, Baguio houses more than 10 times this population size. Year after year, people like me move to Baguio. Like me, a lot of them do not intend to stay. Like the clientele of numerous guest houses in every nook and cranny of this city, the manner of my stay in Baguio is the same — transient.

For those who were sent to Baguio in the precarity of youth, the city is a place pulsating with life that is pregnant with both possibilities and foreboding. 

For a young promdi, the city literally carved in a mountain is like a world of its own. The birds and ants are fatter (one of my first observations as a freshman); the streets are familiar but are reputed as dangerous (beware of pickpockets); the weather is mercurial (mornings are gray, middays are sunny, afternoons are foggy, and nights are cold). The air reeks of pollution, but the scent of dama de noche is nauseatingly sweet at night. The fresh scent of pine trees is tenacious against car exhaust and garbage.

On sunny days in our campus, I usually find myself sitting on those iron benches in the brick-floored plaza facing our auditorium. The coldness of the metal pierces through my clothes. The warmth of the midday sun is gratifying on my skin in the usual cool Baguio air. (READ: IN PHOTOS: A month of Sundays in Baguio City)

It is fascinating how fitting it was to study history in the city that, for most of my life after college, would reside only in my memory.

Indeed, I can always ride the bus in Cubao and take the long road trip to Baguio. The pine trees would still look like a splatter of air brushed green against the blue-sky canvass; the afternoon rain would still be mercilessly cold, and the rainwater would still flow down the hilly city roads soaking my shoes (squish, squish, squish); yet it will not be the same anymore. Have you heard the saying that no one ever really gets back home? Because the place that you left is never the same when you returned? Even you. The person who left is not the same as the one who returned. What remains is memory. 

Baguio’s history is a long narrative of contradictions. In the first place, it is a city superimposed on a terrain where a city ought not to be built. It was established as a refuge for colonizers in a hot tropical country where they were not supposed to be in. When you drive around the city, its streets and parks were named after celebrated imperialists — Governor Pack Road, Harrison Road, Wright Park, Kennon Road, Burnham Park. Yet when you walk down Session Road or around the Baguio Public Market, you  could not help but notice the unapologetic assertion of Cordilleran identity. As a lowlander, this has been especially striking. The red spits of momma (nga-nga for the Tagalogs) stain the walls of jeepney terminals (Americans tried replacing the momma with American-filtered cigarettes. They perceived spitting as unsanitary), parades feature indigenous music and performances, and the traditional pinikpikan chicken recipe remains a staple in many Baguio eateries. Indeed, in the eclecticism of Baguio, the indigenous assiduously reveals itself. It is as though the heartbeat of the city, despite the cacophony of hefty malls, theme parks, and parking lots, remain: I am, I am, I am. 

At times, this heartbeat is amplified and echoed by the thousands of hearts which have learned to beat for the city. I was a sophomore when I joined thousands of Baguio residents (permanent and transient) march in protest against the cutting of 182 trees to build SM City Baguio’s parking building (cue Joni Mitchell singing, “They paved paradise and put up a parking lot”). Every year, students would march down the road decrying tuition hikes, and LGBT groups would wave giant rainbow flags for the yearly Pride March. (READ: ‘Like a thief in the night,’ SM Baguio uproots pine trees)

Baguio, long taken over by relentless commercialization, remains as home to pockets of resistance: rallies, heated public fora, pubs playing country songs. If you know the places to go, then Baguio is not just Burnham and Mines View (apologies to the tourists who asked me the direction to Mines View. I pointed you somewhere but the truth is I have no idea). It is a city thriving only in the struggle. It is a city grimy with car exhaust and restaurant wastes; encrusted with the sweat of service sector and contractual workers; cracked by frequent earthquakes; salty with the tears of those who came only to leave.

I am, I am, I am.

They say that the greatest tragedy of mankind is not found on the cruelty that we have inflicted against one another — of the white man who decided that the Igorots needed some “civilizing;” of the mining companies who looked at the beautiful Cordillera mountains and decided that the gold underneath is of greater value; of the government soldier who determined that this student is a dangerous enemy of the state and that he should disappear; of that person who woke up one day and thought that someone’s heart should be broken by evening. The tragedy is not in the cruelty per se. Rather, the greatest tragedy lies in forgetting.

This is not because remembering is our only viable tool in scaling that precipitous wall of the future, but because it is through remembering that we shield ourselves from nonchalant suffering. It is when we forget that we submit to our oppression with utmost docility. Forgetting means letting go of the better days. It means reconciling with our oppressors. 

Nostalgia is fuel. 

Dreams may be onward looking, but they are also a looking back — to evenings in that café with tablecloths blemished with cigarette burns, to the times when failing was just for the semester, to the idealism that brought us to the streets. Isn’t it nostalgia that fuels us to resist colonialism and capitalism through the unremitting assertion of our identity?

I am, I am, I am.

Baguio, especially the one that I knew and loved for 4 years, will only exist in my memory for the rest of my life. But what matters is that it is going to be there. I will always dream of that warm sun and cold Baguio air as I sit on one of those iron benches in the brick-floored plaza of our campus that is no longer there. – Rappler.com 

Veronica Alporha teaches History at the University of the Philippines-Los Baños. She was a transient resident of Baguio from 2010 to 2014 where she finished BA Social Sciences (History-Political Science) in UP Baguio.