Kitchen rules

SLOW conversations go with slow food.

We had Igorot friends visit for the weekend. For our last dinner, they prepared pinakbet and adobo, the Ilocano way.

It took a time to look for boneless bagoong from Pangasinan. And then more time was needed to slice the vegetables. The size of the pork cuts warranted another discussion. And the order of sautéing the garnishing.

Always, there seemed to be a Cebuano way and an Ilocano way. In a matter of speaking, there were significant differences in going about things.

And a spontaneous concurrence of what is good food.

Trying to combine Ilocano and Cebuano ways, we ate dinner at past 1 a.m. Somehow, all of us woke at 7 a.m. to whip up an omelet and then resume eating the pinakbet and adobo of undefined ethnicity.

Looking at the frothy mounds made by the whipped eggs, M. remembered that the omelet his mother made for him and his seven siblings was as thin and smooth as the film that floats to coat the surface when oil is poured onto water.

His mother warned all the children watching, round-eyed, as that omelet was sliced and distributed around the table that there was no need to ask for more.

Mealtimes where “more” did not exist taught M. and his siblings that rice was not a staple but a strategy. He said he buried his viand in a mound of rice. After everyone else had eaten, he dug out and ate his hoard.

He felt full, whether from consuming his share or being consumed by his sibling’s envy, he could not say.

R. said having too many mouths was also a challenge for researchers in remote areas. He and his fellows once bought a chicken from a farmer.

The native fowl was lean and compact, virtues for a boxer but not for the meal prospects of ten hungry youths. D. volunteered to cook the chicken.

Sliced and spiced, the chicken adobo ended up as the dish for no one except D. When R. complained that the dish too spicy, D. explained that pepper is the secret in cooking. Why, he now had an entire chicken to finish!

Sharing a meal reminds us that we have more than appetites in common. M.’s drunk father insulted his neighbors. Walking home, M.’s father was set upon and nearly beaten dead by the neighbor and his sons.

Months later, these neighbors visited M.’s family to apologize. M. recalled that when it was their turn to visit, these neighbors would cook and eat breakfast even when M and the family were still in bed. Isn’t this tolerated because it’s all in the family?

M. asked his neighbors: When one’s father becomes an ugly drunk, do you look the other way or knock out all of his ugly teeth?

To this day, M. and his neighbors still visit each other’s home on the other side of the mountain.


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)


*First published in SunStar Cebu’s December 17, 2017 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Calling names

WHAT is the power in naming?

We call into being what we name. Those we have no name for do not exist for us.

In class, I first read about the Kalanguya and the Ikalahan of Northern Luzon from Babette P. Resurreccion’s “Imagining identities: Ethnicity, gender and discourse in contesting resources”.

In her 1998 study, the Ikalahan reside in Imugan and nearby villages in the town of Sta. Fe in Nueva Vizcaya. The group lives inside the reserve of the Kalahan Educational Foundation (KEF).

Outside the KEF reserve is the group that calls itself the Kalanguya. Fighting a land-grabbing attempt in 1970 to develop parts of Imugan into a mountain resort, the Kalanguya asserted the right of ancestral domain.

In 1974, the government granted instead the KEF a 25-year lease agreement that placed some 15,000 hectares of public forest land in Imugan under its stewardship.

In this competition for resources and other entitlements from the government, a “crisis of ethnic identity” arose among some of the Kalanguya and the Ikalahan: can a tribe have two names?

According to American colonial records, neither the Ikalahan nor the Kalanguya existed. Resurreccion traced that in their 1908 survey that became the basis for subdividing the Mountain Province and Nueva Vizcaya, the American authorities named only eight major groupings of uplanders.

By their non-inclusion in this colonial survey, the Ikalahan and the Kalanguya were not allocated territories.

The contemporary struggle of the Ikalahan and Kalanguya over ethnic identity goes back to this colonial act of omission, which turned them into a “people without history,” observed Resurreccion.

What is worse than being historically invisible? Being named by those who consider your existence a curse.

Ethnic names “were imposed” by the colonial authorities and later lowlanders, wrote historian William Henry Scott.

“Igorot,” the name given to ethnic groups, such as the Kalanguya, living in the uplands of Northern Luzon, has its roots in the Tagalog word “gulod,” meaning “mountain range,” according to Nestor T. Castro.

Yet, the “Y gorrote (people of the mountains)” was lumped with the other “tribus salvajes (savage tribes),” as the Spanish colonizers labelled the Igorot “pagans” who resisted Christianity.

Stereotyping the uplanders was also played up by the American colonizers, who practiced “divide and rule” among the uplanders and lowlanders of the Cordilleras, observed Scott and Castro.

The “Igorot” only acquired honor in World War II, when they drove the Japanese imperial forces to surrender in Northern Luzon, wrote Scott.

What is a name? A seed of narratives.


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)


* First published in SunStar Cebu’s November 26, 2017 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Seeking the Igorot

THE “TOURORISTS” are back.

A social media rant by a resident popped out in an online report about the gridlock that recently locked down Baguio City.

The portmanteau combines “tourists” and “terrorists” to aptly capture the exasperation of Baguio residents after a three-day holiday declared to decongest the streets in Metro Manila during the ASEAN Summit resulted in an exodus to the so-called summer capital.

I was guilty of adding to that congestion. The Baguio hallmarks were still in evidence: pine tree silhouettes, bracing upland air, and the fog, which, according to Carl Sandburg’s immortal line, “comes on little cat feet”.

But of traffic, too, there was more than anyone—resident or “tourorist”—desired. One queued to go inside the city’s only mall, to park a car, to use the toilet, to get a taxi, even to enter the “wagwagan (used clothes)” night market.

I waited for nearly an hour to take out siopao from this popular eatery, which has four floors and is open 24 hours. In the gridlock of that long weekend, snaking lines of people waiting to get in during dining “rush hour” meant rising at dawn to get the siopao that left my husband sleepless.

Is tourism a boon? According to city planners, Baguio’s woes are caused by the influx of visitors (and their vehicles) that bloats the population of more than 350,000 residents in a city designed to hold only 25,000.

I prefer to walk around to know a city better. During this visit to Baguio, though, walking seemed more of a duty, an attempt not to add to the toxicity hovering above irate motorists, jeepney commuters suffering behind long lines, and the frustrated waiting fruitlessly for an empty cab.

Yet, walking has its limitations. History is often found on the outskirts, rarely at the center. Baguio is the capital of the Cordillera region, the largest community of indigenous peoples in the country.

According to Nestor T. Castro’s brief but excellent “A Peek into Cordilleran History, Culture, and Society” (UP Press, 2015), the region derives its name from the Gran Cordillera Central, the mountain ranges serving as the “backbone” of the central part of northern Luzon.

This backbone is not just geographical. The Cordilleras is the bastion of ethnicity, “historically differentiated” from the rest of the country for successfully resisting the “inroads of colonization,” according to Republic Act No. 8371, also known as the Indigenous Peoples Rights Acts of 1997.

During this visit, the closest I got to Igorot culture was admiring the weaving patterns of a red-and-black loincloth called “binolda-an” in Sagada. To know why the “Igorot” is a contested being will have to be for another visit.


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 0917 3226131)

*First published in SunStar Cebu’s November 19, 2017 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”