Filipinos born on the Gran Cordillera Central are generally known as Igorots, though they might more accurately be referred to by the names of six different ethno-linguistic groups into which they can be divided -- Isneg (Apayao), Kalinga, Bontoc, Ifugao, Kankanay, and Ibaloy. But historically they all have one thing in common, whatever they are called -- their ancestors resisted assimilation into the Spanish Empire for three centuries.

If the Spaniards had drawn a map of their new colony in the 16th century, all this Cordillera territory would have appeared as part of the provinces of Cagayan, Pangasinan and Ilocos (with the Ilocos-Pangasinan border between Bauang and Balaoan), and an unconquered area called Ituy in the upper Magat valley around the present municipality of Aritao. Mountaineers trading gold in Pangasinan and Ituy were called Ygolotes -- later to be re-spelled Igorrotes -- but mountaineers further north in the Ilocos coast were called by the ordinary term applied to mountain dwellers all over the archipelago -- tingues or tinguianes, from the Malay word for "high, elevated," tinggi, except in Pampanga where they were called Zambales. In the Cagayan Valley the need for such a term did not arise because the more gentle eastern slope of the Cordillera presented no sudden mountain wall, so the Spaniards simply called the Kalingas and teh Apayaos infieles (pagans) as they called the Ibanags and Gaddangs of the Cagayan Valley itself. But when they went up the Apayao River, the called the mountaineers there by another native name, Mandayas -- literally, "those up above." Then when they made expeditions in to the Baguio gold mines in 1620 and Kayan in 1668, they called the people there Igorots too and when they built a fort at Bagabag in 1752 against Ifugao attack from the west, they also called them Igorots or, occasionally, Tinguians.

Ordinarily the Spaniards called the indigenous populations of their empire both in the Americas and the Philippines indios, a term which originally had no derogatory connotations but was the simple result of Columbus's mistaken notion that he head reached the Orient when he found the New World. As these subject peoples modified their native customs under foreign domination, the Spaniards quickly formed their own image of the indio -- a dark-skinned person wearing pants who attended mass, paid taxes, obeyed Spanish laws, and only went to war when the gopvernment told him to. The mountain people of northern Luzon onviously did not conform to this pattern whether called Igorots, Tinguians, or Zambals, so they were collectively referred to as tribus independientes rather than indios.

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[During the 1887 Philippine Exposition in Madrid, where Cordillera tribespeople were put on display for the curiosity of the Spanish peninsulares, a scholarly Spaniard named Don Manuel Anton explained the inaccuracy of calling all non-Christian tribes Igorots, as cited in the same book by Scott.]

"The word Igorot, which has acquired such currency in Madrid as a result of the Philippine Exposition, and even the whole country, is understood and used in two different senses out there in the Islands -- one of them popular and the other scientific and anthropological.  People call unsubjugated Filipinos Igorots who live in independent tribes, governed by their own laws, or who don't pay tribute to the Spanish authorities, or, as some authors express it in classic Spanish, all montane and savage indios; but it is also used as the proper name of certain peoples living in teh provinces of Bontoc, Lepanto and Benguet."

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