Mountains, faucets, and other modern faults
“Taga-sari pa man baya kita?”
Where else would we be, I answered my sister, appalled. Apparently, drinking tap water constitutes barbarity—“Taga-bukid,” she noted when I downed a glassful—and I, a current Quezon City resident with my heart left at Perpetual Help, am no more civilized than the next resident of that small barangay in Iriga City. Considering the blue gallon of fresh mineral water at the corner of the kitchen, I still drink tap. I have steeled my guts to immunity, I figured, or just hated the responsibility of that gallon, both back in Iriga and Cubao. The refill stations are quite a walk, the lifting a pain, and the dread of redoing the process twice or thrice a week exasperating. Most of all, they’re never free.
Civilization is P35 a gallon.
I’ve been asked this before by a friend at a coffee shop in the city proper—sentro, as we call it—for his thesis project: What do you think about people making fun of people from the mountains? I replied with the most congenial, “I think people should just let others be, especially the marginalized communities,” and then lifted the matcha frappe cup to my lips, wondering if it was data enough for my friend to work with.
‘Taga-bukid’ is not an inherent quality, as it is a constructed difference—in economics, lifestyle, and apparently, choice of drinking water.
And then the barrage of follow-ups. I am from the mountain barangay of Perpetual Help, after all, first from sentro, last from the outskirts of the city. Although my skin was not half as dark as some of the residents of the communities whose houses were built and rebuilt before the trees were mown for concrete streets, my grandmother’s mother, my grandmother, my mother, and I are still considered dark. And while I merely watched the friendlier boys in the neighborhood shoot hoops on the potholed basketball pavement or jog around the barangay and survey the scenes as a tourist would, it was my home, the “where you would go to” that Joni Mitchell sings about like I was that Michael from mountains.
Looking back, I wonder what that same friend was thinking, asking me to react to the phrase “Nagrus-og na naman su mga agta” for his thesis, as the Agtas do during the February holidays of Tinagba Festival. The Agtas “slid” down the mountain again, the mocking says.
Just because I share the same barangay, does that make me an expert on their being the end of the ridicule? For one, I am neither agta nor will ever be in any way their representative; and two, I have grown accustomed to the taga-sentro ways in high school, with my university in the heart of the city proper, my taga-sentro friends, my years of not touching grass, the ones carpeting the borders of the basketball pavement, and my guts steeled to immunity when my friends joke, “Nagrus-og na si Kent,” all while they drown the humidity with overpriced bottled water and I, in my mountainous fashion, run to the tap for free, healthy, and mildly sea-salt rust-tangy water that I love.
Years later, until my sister clutched her pearls in revulsion when I drank tap water—“Malaka taga-bukid!” Napakataga-bukid! How mountainly!—I realized it was about the tap water being cheap. It was the unsightliness of the gesture while renting an apartment in Cubao, peak sentro, and it was the desire to detach as far away as possible from the mountain where we grew up. I have learned that, unlike the gallons of water bottomlessly refilled, it is not the rich, clean-enough tap that gets the recognition of a civil-enough society. The faucet was not “bought” enough. A well and a poso, both of which are plentiful still in Iriga, are even more non-bought. The flowing currents of Waras River communism.
Recently, I came across a Mary Louise Pratt screencap on Facebook that mentions indigeneity as a state of relations rather than being—no one is indigenous until someone else shows up. Learning “contact zones” through Pratt’s work back in college, it wasn’t much of a surprise than it was a reminder. “Taga-bukid” is not an inherent quality, as it is a constructed difference—in economics, lifestyle, and apparently, choice of drinking water—with the taga-sentro whose centeredness subsumes through establishments and subverts the established, homogenizes and hegemonizes.
And while I’ve grown immune to the chlorinated microbiome running through pipes and the occasional scornful glances from my taga-sentro sister, I’d like to be reminded that the heart of my Iriga is the mountain, Asog, where the Agtas settled long before the colonizers came. Strange where we are now.