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By Geoff Go wen
“You have to go back to the Philippines.”
It was my daughter, Laura, calling from her home in Washington state. “And we’re all coming with you!” she added. I gasped, but I shouldn’t have been surprised. The youngest of Laura’s four children, Louisa, was then-in 5th grade and a few months before, in late winter 2006, Laura and I had entertained her class with a presentation about the Philippines, where I grew up before and during World War II.
The class had seen pictures, taken by Louisa’s great granddad, of the Cordillera Central of northern Luzon, the mountainous backbone of the Philippines largest and most populated island. These mountains, seven and eight thousand feet high, support terraces built with stones and crafted to withstand typhoons that can drop 24 inches of rain in as many hours. The terraces ascend steeply from the bottom of ravines thousands of feet deep and produce rice for the mountain people, the Igorots, who tend them and whose ancestors built them millennia ago. Highly practical, they are also a touristic wonder.
Most of the children in Louisa’s class i and perhaps a few of their parents) had no idea that the U.S. had had an empire acquired from Spain in the late 1890s almost 110 years ago. They learned that the peoples of the Philippines, the centerpiece of this empire, are of Malaysian origin from waves of immigration several thousand years earlier, who had widely adopted Roman Catholic Christianity after nearly 400 years under Spanish rule. The elite families, many educated in Madrid or Paris, were deeply cultured and had produced famous artists and writers.
The Igorots, however, with
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