ABSTRACT
Acupan-Balatoc was a minesite camp that evolved with the Acupan mine which Benguet Corporation (BC) operated since 1927. Acupan-Balatoc was a melting pot of almost 5,000 people including mine workers and their families. Ethnolinguistic affiliation was initially a defining criterion for social interactions. Decades of living together in a bounded spatial area gradually blurred ethnolinguistic divisions towards self-ascribing shared appellations such as Taga-Acupan (‘of/from Acupan’) and Taga-Balatoc (‘of/from Balatoc’). With the decline of metal prices in the 1980s, the Acupan mine had the first of a series of manpower reductions followed by more rounds of retrenchment until operations ceased in 1992. This resulted to the departure of more than half of the population leaving the municipal government the burden of economic and social dislocation. After almost a decade, BC reopened the Acupan mine, but with a much smaller scale of operation, and thus began the re-population and resumption of work and life in the locality. The changes and continuity in Acupan-Balatoc demonstrate that even with the economic and political leverage of BC to steer the course of events according to its corporate objectives, the people in Acupan are not bereft of options.
