Mountain Crossroads : Agricultural Life in the Philippine Cordillera, 1971-73

During the early 1970s, when the photographs of agricultural activities 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 photographs in this book document the traditional farming of rice in irrigated terraces, a practice that has remained largely the same in the centuries since the first terraces in this region were constructed.

Most of these images are of activities 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 photos 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 with regard to livelihood, education, religion, dress and family life.  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.  And yet, agriculture and subsistence, which revolved around the durable, seemingly eternal, stone-walled terraces, remained little changed from the practices of previous generations.

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.