The One Where I Finally Found the Weaver, Not Just the Bags

The One Where I Finally Found the Weaver, Not Just the Bags

The first three times I went to Baguio looking for a real Igorot bag, I came back with something that wasn’t it. Not fake, exactly. Just… distant. Like a photocopy of a photocopy. You know the stalls on Session Road, the ones near the cathedral, where every bag has the same three patterns and the vendor tells you “direct from the weaver” while handing you something that still has the factory tag tucked inside the lining? I bought one of those once. Paid 450 pesos for it. The strap broke on the jeepney ride back to the bus terminal.

That was 2019. I still have the bag. I keep it as a reminder.

Eventually, I started asking around in a different way. Not tourists, not the tricycle drivers who offer to take you to the “best souvenir place” (which is always the one that pays them commission). I asked the old women selling strawberries near the public market. I asked the security guard at the Baguio Museum, who looked at me like I was the first person in six months to ask something that wasn’t directions to Mines View. One of the strawberry vendors, a woman named Ate Liza who’s been at the same spot near the market’s eastern entrance since before I was born, finally said it: “You want the real ones? Go to the weaver. Don’t go to the shop. Go to where the shop gets them.”

She drew a map on a napkin. It looked like a child’s drawing of a confused spider.

Getting Lost on Purpose

The address she gave me was in a barangay called Pinsao Proper. I’d never heard of it. Google Maps kept trying to redirect me to a different Pinsao—Pinsao Pilot Project—which I later learned is a different place entirely. The jeepney driver I flagged down near the market shook his head when I showed him the napkin. “Baba,” he said. “Baba lang.” Just go down. He didn’t elaborate.

I got off at a corner where the road turned from concrete to gravel and the air smelled like woodsmoke and wet earth in a way that downtown Baguio never does, no matter how many pine trees they plant. There was a sari-sari store at the corner, the kind with a single plastic chair out front and a Coca-Cola sign that’s been sun-bleached to a pale pink. The woman inside was shelling peas into a metal bowl. I showed her the napkin. She pointed uphill, then made a gesture that could have meant “third house” or “keep going until you see the blue gate” or “you’re wasting your time.” I still don’t know.

I walked for maybe fifteen minutes. The road narrowed. Dogs barked from behind fences. A group of children were playing with a deflated basketball in a yard, and one of them, a girl maybe seven years old, ran up to me and asked, in English, “Are you lost?” I said yes. She laughed and pointed to a house with a blue gate. “Lola’s house,” she said. “She makes the bags.”

The Workshop Behind the Gate

The blue gate was unlocked. I pushed it open and walked into what I thought was someone’s backyard but was actually a covered workspace—a concrete floor, a corrugated iron roof, wooden beams overhead hung with strips of dyed abaca and bamboo. An old woman was sitting on a low stool, working a backstrap loom that was attached to the house’s wall on one end and wrapped around her waist on the other. She didn’t look up when I came in. She just kept weaving, her hands moving in a rhythm that looked like it hadn’t stopped in forty years.

Her name was Nanay Belen. She was 74. She’d been weaving since she was 12, taught by her mother, who was taught by hers. She didn’t speak much English, and my Ilocano is still at the “counting to ten and ordering coffee” level, but her daughter—a woman named Marilou who came out from the house when she heard voices—translated. Nanay Belen makes about four bags a week, each one taking two to three days depending on the pattern. She sells them for between 600 and 1,200 pesos, depending on size and complexity. The ones on Session Road, the ones with the factory tags, go for 350 to 500.

I asked her if she ever sells to the Session Road vendors. She laughed. Marilou translated: “Sometimes they come here and buy five or six, then sell them for double. But they tell people the bags are from a different place. They don’t say her name.”

What You Actually Get for 800 Pesos

I bought a bag from her that day. A shoulder bag, about the size of a book, with a pattern of diamonds and zigzags in deep red and black on a natural abaca background. She had it nearly finished on the loom when I arrived; I waited about an hour while she finished the last few rows and cut it free. Marilou showed me how to check the quality. The weave should be tight enough that you can’t see light through it, she said. The edges should be finished with a braided trim, not just folded over and stitched. The strap should be attached to the bag itself, not to a metal ring that’ll rust or break. She turned my old Session Road bag over in her hands and pointed to the metal D-ring holding the strap. “This will break in three months,” she said. “The bag is fine, but the ring is cheap. You can fix it, but most people won’t bother.”

I paid 800 pesos for the new one. Cash, because Nanay Belen doesn’t have a card reader, and doesn’t take GCash because her phone is a Nokia from 2012 that she only uses for calls. She wrapped the bag in old newspaper—the Baguio Midland Courier, specifically, the classifieds section—and tied it with a strip of plastic twine. I bought two more: a smaller crossbody for 600 and a large market bag for 1,000. Total: 2,400 pesos. For context, a single “authentic handwoven Igorot bag” at the Session Road stalls that claim to be direct-from-weaver runs 800 to 1,500. You do the math.

On my way out, the little girl from the street was back, now holding a plastic bag of mangoes. She asked if I was going to tell other people about her lola’s house. I said maybe. She said, “Good. She needs more customers. The rent went up.”

The Practical Parts Nobody Tells You

Getting to Pinsao Proper from downtown Baguio takes about 30 minutes by jeepney if you catch the right one, or an hour if you don’t. The jeepneys are the ones with “Pinsao” written on a signboard in the windshield, not “Pinsao Pilot Project.” You can also take a taxi, which costs around 150 to 200 pesos from the city center, but the drivers won’t know the house by name—you’ll have to direct them to the blue gate, which means you need to have been there before or have a very patient driver. I took a taxi on my second visit and the driver, a man in his 50s named Mang Tonyo, told me he’d lived in Baguio his whole life and never knew there was a weaver in Pinsao. “Usually they’re all in the villages near Bontoc,” he said. “Or up in the Cordillera, the actual mountain towns. But here? I didn’t know.”

Nanay Belen doesn’t keep regular hours. She weaves when she feels like it, which is most mornings and some afternoons, but she also tends a small vegetable garden and watches her grandchildren after school. If you show up at noon on a Tuesday, she might be there, or she might be at the market. The best time is late morning, around 10 or 10:30, after the morning chores are done and before lunch. I’ve been three times now—once in February, once in June, once just last November—and she’s been at the loom every time between 9:30 and 11:30.

She doesn’t have a website. She doesn’t have a Facebook page or an Instagram account. Marilou said people have offered to set one up for her, but she doesn’t see the point. “She says the bags sell themselves,” Marilou told me. “And she’s right.”

The Clutch I Couldn’t Buy

On my third visit, last November, I saw a bag that Nanay Belen was working on that she said she couldn’t sell me. It was a small clutch, maybe 20 centimeters across, with a pattern I’d never seen before—something like interlocking triangles that formed a sort of spiral at the center. She said it was an old pattern, one her grandmother used, and that she only makes it for special orders. Someone from the National Museum had commissioned it for a display. She wouldn’t tell me how much they paid. She smiled when I asked, the way old people smile when they know something you don’t, and went back to weaving.

I took a tricycle back to the market that afternoon. The driver charged me 50 pesos, which is fair for the distance, but he also tried to take me to a “friend’s shop” on the way. I said no. He shrugged and dropped me at the market’s edge. I bought a bag of ube jam from a stall I trusted, a bag of green mangoes from Ate Liza (who waved when she saw me, like we were old friends now), and a cup of taho from a vendor who was packing up for the day. The taho was warm, the ginger syrup was sharp, and I stood there eating it out of a plastic cup, watching the afternoon fog roll in over the city, holding a bag made by a 74-year-old woman in a backyard that most people in Baguio don’t even know exists.