Abstract

This study examines colonial metaphors that transformed Baguio City in the northern Philippines during the twentieth century. Applying Lakoff & Johnson’s Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT), primary source textual evidence demonstrates that metaphor functions not merely as a rhetorical flourish but as a cognitive device that enabled and legitimized colonial power. Colonial reimaginings of Baguio as “McKinley,” “A Switzerland in the Tropics,” and “Little America” displaced Ili, Kapaway, and Kafagway, names that situated humans within a landscape in which mountains housed ancestral spirits and land represented kinship. These conceptual structures supplanted Ibaloy spatial cosmology with colonial civilizing binaries, materializing new social and geographic orders in institutions, infrastructure, and architecture, while legitimizing Indigenous dispossession. Through Lakoff and Johnson’s conceptual mechanisms, metaphorical conquest enabled physical conquest. These colonial cognitive frameworks persist in tourism materials, development plans, and everyday discourse, illustrating metaphor’s enduring power as an instrument of colonial imagination and urban transformation.

Keywords: Baguio, colonialism, conceptual, embodied, geographical, history, interdisciplinary, linguistic, metaphors, mountain resort, ontological, orientational, structural, urban transformation

DOI: https://doi.org/10.64743/PEMG5027