Love as a Contact Zone: Highland-Lowland Conflict and Negotiation in Three Philippine Cultural Texts

This paper analyzes three Philippine cultural texts that depict highland-lowland romantic relationships with the aim of discovering how romantic discourse is appropriatedto investigate the conflict and negotiation of culture. The texts examinedare the short story “The Girl from Bauko” (Ablang 1988), theTV series Forevermore aired in 2014-2015 by a local Philippine TV station, and the 2006 film Don’t Give Up on Us. All three texts depict the blossoming romance between an Igorot, who is a member from an indigenous minoritygroup, and a lowlander, whose collective ethnic identity is culturally dominant. To address these issues, this paper employs the concept of the “contact zone,” which is conceptualized here as a space where confrontation, exchange or kinship occurs or is developed. This paper argues thathighland-lowland romantic relationships as depicted in the three narratives implicate and engagea range of issues such as the metropolis/periphery dichotomy, the romanticization of the highlander, andthe prevalentsocio-economic and ethnic divides.