Pacific Features Mountain Crossroads: Portraits from the Philippine Cordillera, 1971-73

During the early 1970s, when the photographic portraits in this book were taken, the people of the Cordillera mountains of Northern Luzon had arrived at a crossroads in their history. In this remote and rugged region of agricultural villages, the traditional way of life and the path to modernity were converging. The road forward was uncertain. The portraits in this book reflect this period of rapid change, and the different choices people were making about livelihood, education, religion, dress and family life. Most of these images are of people living in and around the municipality of Sadanga, in Mountain Province, where the author was a guest for eighteen months from 1971-73. A few of the portraits were taken in nearby villages and in other highland provinces in the Cordillera. At the time, Sadanga and its neighboring barrios were some of the most traditional villages in the entire region, but even here, the forces of change were already at work. Many of Sadanga’s elders still wore traditional dress, slept in thatch-roofed houses, and lived much as their own parents had. But their children and their grandchildren were already choosing very different lives, and some were finding paths leading to work in other provinces, even other countries. Each chapter in this book features a different generation, from elders to the very young, showing just how quickly life in these mountain villages was changing.. The photographs in this book were originally taken on color transparency, color negative and black-and-white negative film. In 2018, they were scanned to create a digital archive. The majority of the portraits contained in this archive are reproduced here with little or no editing or modification. Captions for these images present a brief description, the time and place of the photograph and an archive index number. Most of the descriptions include the name of the individual being photographed.