Now/here no/where woman

Mid-morning, May 1, residents of Baguio launched a petition asking the tv network ABS-CBN to change the venue of a thanksgiving concert that was going to be held on the set of the popular teleserye, Forevermore. The thanksgiving concert was scheduled for May 10 in Sitio Pungayan, which is inside the Mt. Sto. Tomas Forest Reserve, a vital source of water for Baguio City and surrounding areas. People here were worried that the concert would cause further damage to an already suffering watershed. The details are in the petition . Within 24 hours of the petition's launch on change.org, over a thousand people had signed it. While the petition was circulating on social media, people were also making calls and connections, asking for help from anyone and everyone who might have a line to ABS-CBN decision-makers. People who signed the petition called or wrote messages to colleagues, former teachers, childhood friends, public figures, journalists, former tv stars, staunch environmentali...

Wanderlust strikes again. We made our way to Lias on April 27, 2015, a place in the Mountain Province we'd never been before, because I broke a glass in our bedroom in the first week of April. Muttering irately to myself, I grabbed a spread from an old newspaper and began picking up the larger shards of glass. As I placed the broken glass on the newspaper page, the word "Lena-u" caught my eye. It was the title of an article about a local delicacy in Lias, which would be prepared during the coming Changyasan Festival on April 28. Intrigued but also in a hurry to clean up, I used my phone to snap a picture of the paragraph containing the phone numbers of the author and festival coordinator, Sixto Talastas. Then I swept the floor, bundled up the broken glass in the said page from the Mountain Province Exponent and dropped it in the bin, article and all. But lena-u had worked its spell on me. I had to get to Lias, no matter what. There is no rhyme or reason to wande...

Some of you may recall that sometime last year we had a visiting scholar, Camote, Ph.D . He has been in the field since August 2014, but sent us this short essay reacting to the culling of approximately 60 trees by SM , in Baguio City. Stock photo of Camote, PhD. Taken July 2014, towards the end of his fellowship in our kitchen. THE TRAGEDY OF THE PRIVATES*  News travels quickly through the underground networks of plants. Leaving aside the anguish that coursed through our roots as the trees on Luneta Hill fell Saturday night, I offer up this food for thought for the human communities of this city. Image credit: Sherwin Cabunilas and Bringing 182 to the Supreme Court. In 1968 Garrett Hardin wrote a seminal essay in Science Magazine entitled, The Tragedy of the Commons . His ideas will be familiar to many. Hardin used the metaphor of medieval European herders to argue that in a commons, a shared resource with open access, all rational individuals will seek to maxi...

Sometimes I feel small, like this. Sometimes I know this is not a bad thing.

The Little Boss and I went to see the Birds of Baguio and Benguet Photo Exhibit at the Maryknoll Ecological Sanctuary . I carried her so she could see them up close and she pointed to each and every photo demanding, "What's that? What about that? What about this one?" I dutifully read out the name of every single bird featured in the exhibit: Scale-feathered Malkoha, Luzon Sunbird, Citrine Canary Flycatcher, and so on.We discussed the colors of their feathers and the shapes of their beaks. Some of the birds were already familiar to her. The crow and the shrike are frequent visitors in our garden. Shrike in the hands of the Artist-in-Residence, with the Little Boss' first hesitant touch. Taken October 2013. Once a young shrike in flight crashed into our picture window and lay on the ground, stunned. The Little Boss and the Artist-in-Residence held it lovingly in their hands and as soon as it pushed against their palms they gently released it. That was The Littl...

As part of the recently concluded Markets of Resistance , I gave a short talk in Katipunan RestoArt, near the old Dangwa station, on a few facets of the market that are meaningful to me as a Baguio girl. Sharing my stories again here. (Some of this stuff I've said before, here .) There are markets and there is the market, economies of places and places of economy. I want to share stories about the market place – the Baguio public market – as cosmopolitan, exotic or exoticized, historical, human, home, hostile, changing. The market as a mirror. The market as cosmopolitan, is also the market exoticized: Let me begin with a quote from the book, “From Land of the Headhunters: Being an account of a summer holiday in Baguio, 1924.” This was a manuscript found by Bencab in a small antique shop in London in 1977, which he published as a small book in 1991. The author, who left no trace of his identity in the manuscript, quotes a “local guide book”: “The up-to-date Filip...