Culture and Literature — The Mountain Collegian's annual 'Pintig at Pantig' literary competition gathers the Cordillera's best young literary voices and recognizes them for their work.

MANILA, Philippines — For the people behind Benguet State University’s The Mountain Collegian, the mother tongue knows best.

The 46-year-old organization was recently counted among the 20 finalists that competed over the honor of becoming 2011’s Ten Accomplished Youth Organizations (TAYO), owing to the strength of its “Pintig at Pantig” literary competition.

Established three years ago, “Pintig at Pantig” has quickly grown to become a leading champion of the vernacular language of the Cordilleras, recognizing young voices who are unafraid to use the language of their mothers and fathers to tell their own tales.

“This is about our generation making a memory of our own and putting it into print. There is a lot of literature written in the vernacular, but their focus is mainly on the old stories. We are making stories while continuing the legacies of our forefathers. It will complete the picture of Cordillera literature and Philippine literature,” declares Romulo Bagasina, who represented the student publication at TAYO’s final stretch.

These high aspirations certainly weren’t around at the competition’s genesis, admits Bagasina. Ironically, the competition was borne out of a conversation that wasn’t even in the vernacular. Two of Bagasina’s org mates were conversing in Tagalog when the words “pintig” and “pantig” came up.

“That was where the idea to create a literary competition started. Our purpose really wasn’t that grand when we started. We weren’t even that serious in the beginning. During our first competition, we didn’t even have a theme!” he says.

However, successfully mounting that first competition would convince the publication that “Pintig at Pantig” could be used as a platform to discuss topics such as the environment, culture, and integrity. The Mountain Collegian started incorporating themes during the competition’s second year, and by the third year, a vernacular language category was introduced, alongside the already existing Filipino and English categories.

THE LANGUAGE OF THEIR FATHERS

Bagasina says that decision was undertaken because of the lack of interest among young Cordillerans to take up the language of their mothers and fathers.

“We wanted to acknowledge that problem so we focused on the vernacular category of our competition. There are literary competitions all over the Philippines, but we took advantage of its power to promote culture because we believe that language is a carrier of culture from one generation to another,” says Bagasina.

The Mountain Collegian doesn’t just ask for entries from students all across the Cordilleras. A week before the competition’s awarding ceremonies, participants are made to take part in a literary seminar with speakers from the Baguio Writers Group. Three months after winners are picked, their pieces are published in the Kalaleng, the university’s official literary folio.

It is with the Kalaleng that “Pintig and Pantig” moves from encouraging young people to writing in the vernacular to reading works written in it. The Mountain Collegian distributes hundreds of copies of the Kalaleng to different schools and libraries all over Benguet.

The group also brings copies of the Kalaleng with them whenever they are invited to speak in different schools in the region. And as far as Bagasina is concerned, this has been extremely helpful in interest in the use of the region’s vernacular language.

“Only three people joined the vernacular category when we first introduced it. But for the second time around, there were 25 of them who wrote in vernacular. We’re translating increased participation in the contest to an increase in interest,” he says.

THE STRUGGLE CONTINUES

Bagasina vows to continue their stand for their region’s vernacular languages.

“There’s not a lot of literary competitions that focus on the vernacular. There are so many universities located in areas like Mindanao where a majority of our indigenous peoples live, and they’re not taking advantage of that to promote their own vernacular language,” remarks Bagasina.

“The Cordilleran people and the indigenous peoples of the Philippines have long been marginalized, have long struggled for them to be able to keep their cultural identity as a people. That is still a pressing problem in the Philippines.”

More than the prize money or the trophy, Bagasina says that the bigger prize would be seeing their project replicated in other regions of the country where indigenous cultures and vernacular languages are under attack.

“We would like universities and high school publications to do the same thing. Seeing this replicated would be more important than the P50,000 or the trophy.

With the permanence of print, if we give one copy of the Kalelang to a student of the Benguet State University, it’s not just going to be read by him, but by his parents, even his neighbors. That small grain of awareness is what we hope for, that everything we did for this project isn’t in vain,” he ends.