By Atty. Antonio P. Pekas
Last week I wrote about a ka-GMC who untimely passed on. In far away UP Los Banos in Laguna, GMC was the Green Mountain Circle. It used to be an organization of Igorot students. We were a small group, that somehow made its members feel at home in a relatively far away place. In the early 70s of telegrams (not text messages) and bank to bank transactions were through telegraphic transfers (not ATMs) Laguna was like a foreign land, in today’s terms.
So it was comforting to be with that group. You were with others like you. Same culture, not so different economic situations.
After about a decade, however, the organization evolved. It was not just for casual socialization among Igorots. It became a breeding or recruiting ground for leftists if not NPAs. The sad effect of that was so many who got hoodwinked into becoming NPAs were not able to finish their studies. Only for them to find out much later that what they got into failed to give them the basic economic deliverance everybody has to have to raise a decent family. Many ended up being jobless, unable to support their families.
Many years later, I met one of them, a young single mother (recruited from the GMC) who got pregnant on the run. She was being hunted by the military and when I seriously told her of the need for an independent source of income for the future of her baby, tears started rolling down her cheeks. That remorse for the kind of life she unwisely chose in a moment of blind or uninformed idealism might have become stronger after seeing China and Russia virtually becoming capitalistic. Were those the societies she practically gave up her life for? I doubt.
Am sure the ideal society she must have wrongly thought to be at hand is still very far into the future, if ever.
Then there was another guy who was with the GMC also who was in the same situation. He did not finish college. Without basic qualifications for a decent employment after he came down from the mountains, he had to learn how to do business for his family’s future. He was very successful at it and soon the plebeian or Spartan life he once preached and lived swung to the other end of the spectrum. His life became a bit luxurious.
But I digress. So back to the organization. It was I guess in the late 70s when the group started accepting as members non-Igorots who were from Baguio City or elsewhere in the Cordillera.
A comparison might be in order. There was a nationalistic movement in an Indian state that was inspired by ethnic considerations for the group to gain political control of the state. But due to practical reasons they had to shed off the tribalism and considered as one of them whoever was living in the state and earning and spending his money there. That was nationalistic enough but not tribalistic or based on tribe.
Sure, nationalism or tribalism or regionalism have to be invoked to fight off exploitation by outsiders but such concepts must expand to include others. As French President Macron recently said, nationalism is the antithesis of patriotism. While the comment was a snide against US President Trump, it was the right comment in a modern and supposedly humanistic world where narrow “isms” should be done away with or expanded towards universalism.
And so the GMC has expanded its source of members and rightly so.
Though I belong to a time when being with fellow Igorots was all that mattered. Call it tribalistic, if you will, but that was how I felt. I thought that welcoming others of different ethnicity would spoil the purity of the group.
But then after a number of years, I felt the need to expand my wings. To achieve this, I had to leave the place. And so I did.
So the key word as far as the GMC membership is considered should be any Cordilleran. And a Cordilleran should be whoever who lives in the region or anybody who calls it home.**
