Growing Up in Baguio

Luisa A Igloria is a Filipina-American poet who ‘now makes her home in Virginia,’ according to her personal website. The same page also notes that she is ‘originally from Baguio City in the Philippines.’ ‘Hill Station,’ from her book of poems Juan Luna’s Revolver, is a loaded piece from Igloria, who grew up in a town that served as the summer residence of the American colonial government and now living in the country of the colonisers. The poem’s central image is Baguio City, currently the capital of Benguet, a landlocked province in northern Philippines.

For most people, Baguio City is a tourist destination known for its cool climate, rows of hotels and cabins for family vacations, long-time restaurants, new food haunts, ukay-ukay (thrift shops), and many outdoor parks that sometimes serve as tourist traps. In the past years, the tourist influx, especially during long weekends and Christmas holidays, earns the ire of its locals. Traffic is getting worse year after year, and even its residents can’t have some peace and quiet when celebrating their own family events.

And then there’s the other side of Baguio, with its layers of subtly violent history that built its roads, vacation houses, and recreational facilities. This is the city in Igloria’s ‘Hill Station,’ where she is referring to the Baguio City that was established as a hill station – the only one in Asia – by the United States in 1900; hence, the title. As an ecofeminist piece, it brings forth ‘cruxes of gender, class, race, economic capacity’ (Filipova 508).

It starts off with an epigraph – personal notes of then-Secretary of the Interior Dean C. Worcester from 1908: ‘We found conditions exactly as described in the Spanish report … It took us but a short time to decide that here was an ideal site for a future city … There were scores of places where, in order to have a beautiful house lot, one needed only to construct driveways and go to work with a lawnmower.’ This immediately points to a period in Philippine history and establishes the coloniser-colony relationship between the Americans and Filipinos, particularly in Baguio City, one that begins with the intention of transforming the place, from one that is forested, as written in the poem’s first line – ’These are the woods through which they came,’ to one that has house lots with driveways.

The rest of the poem is rife with images and clever enjambments to emphasise this colonisation and the systemic oppression and violence that come with it. There’s ‘Cutting through virgin // brush and green pine,’ which referred to how the Americans arrived while ‘riding ponies from base camp’; and ‘a beacon-flare pinning this city down’. This is in reference to the ‘bust of the Chicago architect’ Daniel Burnham, the city planner for Baguio and Manila. United States’ so-called urban renewal was part of the coloniser’s agenda towards the so-called gift of civilisation and national development. Modernising both Baguio and Manila not only allowed them to successfully manage the colony, but also do so in an environment familiar to them – especially since the tropical, archipelagic Philippines is a far cry from their climatically diverse country. In addition, both images of ‘cutting’ and ‘pinning’ are loaded with savagery, where Baguio is the victim. Both are also associated with violence against women, as the binary system of coloniser-colony, men-women, and white-brown, is always in favour of the former.

The issue of race is mentioned in the line cut of ‘embarrassed by the abundance of brown / breasts,’ contextualised by the line about American women giving the ‘native / girls their first white blouses.’

The foreigners disguised it as ‘a Christian gesture,’ manipulating the Filipinos’ religious belief – one that was passed on from Spanish colonisers – to their advantage. But it was, in fact, because of the American’s embarrassment in seeing the locals as naked savages, primitive and barbaric. American benevolence, as colonisers called it, is actually just disguised racism. With ‘native / girls’ being savages, they had a justification for subjugation: the white man saving the uncivilised, uneducated, and violent brown people.

At this point, however, Igloria turned the tables on Americans by portraying – even just for a few lines – Baguio girls and women in an elegant light.

they stressed—embarrassed by the abundance of brown
breasts, bosoms paganly adorned with layers of onyx
and carnelian, smoky agate, gold leaf, and traded shells,

polished to brittleness. [...]

This juxtaposition highlights how the American women saw them: naked, ashamed, and uncivilised. And yet, their accessories highlight ingenuity and even nobility.

Renato Constantino, in his landmark 1959 essay ‘The Mis-Education of the Filipino,’ explained how the American colonial government used education as a tool to instil a sense of inferiority among Filipinos and promote American cultural and political values. ‘Indigenous Filipino ideals were slowly eroded in order to remove the last vestiges of resistance.’ Folk wisdom was subjugated in favour of American education. The poem continues:

[...] You see such heirlooms now
only in antique shops, wrapped in oilcloth or resting
in the shallow lips of food baskets. Mothers bring them

to exchange for cash, thinking of daughters and sons
anxious to leave the mountains, thinking of new
things they might become: teachers, lawyers, even doctors

or nurses in that other land, America. [...]

These verses speak of the undying effect of American benevolence from more than a century ago, as more and more Filipinos still continue to leave their homeland. The mountains, consciously or unconsciously, are associated with being lesser-than, antiquated, and unsuccessful.

Internal migration continued even after World War II, as more Filipinos moved away from the regions and towards the capital. Most of the movements seen, especially before the ’60s, were from Luzon and Visayas and to Greater Manila (Lumibao). The latter is often called Imperial Manila, as it is the Philippines’ centre in terms of politics, economy, and culture. With power and wealth concentrated in the ‘centre,’ there is significant disparity in development and opportunities between the capital and the provinces.

The rest of ‘Hill Station’ versifies Igloria’s formative years in Baguio, where the city was already transformed into the hill station that it has become. The image of ‘neatly painted houses with their trim / gardens and hedges’ signals this transformation; more importantly, the names of the streets reverberate with the legacy of Americanisation …

The last two stanzas reveal a hard truth. The children who saw themselves as ‘more citified, more cleansed of / savage origins’ taunted the students of ‘Igorot stock.’ Filipinos who have been urbanised and influenced by the American occupation have a lower regard for fellow Filipinos who have remained in their indigenous lands. This is reinforced by the urban planning made into the hill station that is Baguio City, where the forests have been transformed into houses, schools, and markets, often promoted by urban planners as signs of progress. On the other hand, the areas surrounding Baguio City remain as agricultural lands, where its people do not have direct access to better infrastructure, quality education, and other resources.

Interestingly, Igloria herself is no stranger to such economic divide and migration, having spent more than half of her life in Baguio and then now living in the U.S. Such self-awareness is exuded in the mention of names of fictional fourth-grade classmates in the penultimate stanza: Monroe Gawigawen and Jefferson Palpallatoc, emphasising the Americanisation of their names, but not of their roots.

In a 2021 The Margins interview, Igloria talks about writing about her past and her home.

‘Living in Baguio soaks everyone who lives there, consciously or unconsciously, with a sense of its own colonial history. I like to think of how place names and places themselves are not only a sign of displacements and erasures, they’re also places of haunting and of the idea that the past is always still there,’ she told the editor (Orden).

It is perhaps through poems like ‘Hill Station’, despite Baguio’s haunted past and colonial history, that Igloria tries to come home again and again.