13/09/2026
A Letter to My Birthplace
(Happy Founding Anniversary, Hingyon!)
Dear Hingyon,
I suppose I should begin by telling you that you and my birth certificate do not agree. My mother says I was born at home, in their old native house at Ambabag, Mompolia. So, growing up, whenever a form asked for my birthplace, I would proudly write, with certainty: Hingyon, Ifugao. After all, Mompolia is part of you.
Then one day, a form required me to attach my birth certificate. The person checking it gently pointed out that I had written the wrong birthplace. “It should be Lagawe, Ifugao.”
It was not that my birth certificate was wrong. When I was born, Mompolia was still part of Lagawe. You had not yet become the municipality I would eventually call home. So, after that, on official documents, I learned to write Lagawe, Ifugao.
But, dear Hingyon, documents record administrative facts. The heart keeps its own records. And in my heart, i-Hingyon is inscribed.
I have often been asked by people who are not from Ifugao: “Where is Hingyon?” Perhaps that is something you have had to endure too.
There are places in Ifugao whose names are more readily recognized—Banaue, Kiangan, Mayoyao, Lagawe, and, more recently, Hungduan because of the Punnuk. But I love how your people continue to labor to place Hingyon into the tourism map. Perhaps someday, Hingyon will no longer be merely a gateway to tourism, but a destination in its own right.
In a way, you were born from the edges of other places. Before you became a municipality, portions of you belonged to Lagawe and Banaue. Some areas were referred to as huddokna which may be understood as the fringes or the outer portions of a place. Or does huddokna really mean the North?
Geographically, you are indeed north of Lagawe, the capital town of Ifugao. And there is something fitting about that. Because North is not merely a direction. It is a point of reference. In this time when direction instruments are available, it is where the compass points when we need to know where we are going.
In 1982, Batas Pambansa Blg. 239 gave you a name and a political identity of your own. Several barangays were separated from Lagawe and Banaue to constitute the Municipality of Hingyon, with Barangay Hingyon as the seat of government.
You were no longer simply part of somewhere else. You had become a place in your own right. You became the smallest municipality in the province in terms of land area.
Yet smallness, as your story would later show, does not necessarily mean insignificance. Hingyon has produced leaders who would eventually occupy significant positions in the political life of Ifugao including being governor and vice governor. And up to this day, there are i-Hingyons among those who help shape the political affairs of the province.
The people affirmed this new identity in a plebiscite in the first month of 1983.
I remember, as a child, that the seat of government was then housed in an old Gabaldon school building in Barangay Hingyon, which had gradually come to be called the Poblacion. It was a modest beginning for a municipality finding its own place on the map.
About a decade later, a new munisipyo rose in Culob, in Barangay Bitu—another sign that the young municipality was growing into its own identity.
One of my earliest memories of that new municipal center is the town fiesta in 1993, celebrated as Gotad, a name drawn from the grand household feasts of old Ifugao. I cannot say whether it was the first celebration to carry that name, but I remember being there among those early celebrations at what is now the seat of government in Culob.
The mayor at the time must have had both ambition and a good sense of occasion. He managed to bring in two senators in succession for two of those celebrations during his term. This is quite a feat for a young and, by land area, small municipality.
For a child, of course, the significance of such things was not yet fully understood. I simply remember the gathering, the place, the people, and the sense that something important was happening in our small corner of Ifugao.
Looking back now, I realize that those celebrations were more than fiestas. They were also expressions of a young municipality beginning to tell its own story.
You have changed since then, as places inevitably do. You have grown. You have built roads, schools and public spaces. You have welcomed new generations and watched many of your children leave in search of education, work and opportunity.
I am one of them. Life took me along other roads and brought me to another place. Thankfully, it was not too far from you. But I have come to understand that leaving one's birthplace does not necessarily mean leaving it behind.
Hometowns stay with us. Perhaps this is even more true for those who have gone farther away.
They remain in our accents, our memories, our food, our stories, and even in the way we understand who we are. Perhaps this is also why I have always been intrigued by your name.
Hingyon is said to be a shortened form of hingngiyon, from hingngi, associated with taking a detour, diverting, or branching from a pathway. Hinggiyon - a name for a place—and a possibility of lives. One path becomes two, and suddenly there are choices.
You yourself are a kind of branching. Not just geographically but metaphorically. You emerged from other municipalities and eventually became your own destination.
And life is like that, too. We begin somewhere. We follow a road laid out for us. Then, somewhere along the way, we take a turn.
Sometimes the turn is deliberate. Sometimes it is simply what life gives us. And some of the most meaningful destinations are reached by roads we never intended to take.
Dear Hingyon, many of your people have taken many such roads. Yet somehow, they have continued to lead their way back to you. Not always physically. Sometimes through a memory. In my case, the house where my mother remembers giving birth. The dikes and rice pond fields I walked through. The names of grandparents. The distinctive names of people in Hingyon. The language I first heard in childhood. The people gathered during occasions such as Gotad and other fiestas. The stories that became familiar even before I fully understood them. These are the things, among many others, that remind me that a birthplace is not necessarily the place written on a birth certificate.
So yes, my birth certificate says Lagawe. But if someone asks me where I am from, I always proudly say Hingyon.
Happy 44th Birthday, Hingyon. May your people celebrate you well—not only for the municipality you have become, but for the memories, identity and sense of home you continue to give to those who call you theirs. And may you continue to be, in whatever sense we choose to understand it, the North that points us home.
(Cultural Notes: Northern Philippine Tines, September 13, 2026)
