Philippine E-Journals

History and the Phenomenon of Migration: Migrant Muslims in the Cordillera

Maria Nela B. Florendo

Discipline: History

 

Abstract:

This paper deals with people who move. In Sociology the phenomenon has been popularly called migration. In more recent  years, we were introduced to concepts like travelling cultures and diasporic cultures. In history, the study of the phenomenon of migration has been classified within the rubric of historical demography.

 

This preliminary study on the Muslims in the Cordillera provides a profile of the movers, and the conditions of their places of origin and destination. It presents how the migrant Muslims have been able to· sustain their Islamic traditions in an alien land, the links that they maintain with their roots, and the collective memory they have about their past.

 

Where does history come in? In undertaking a study on migration, particularly the movement of marginalized peoples, the historian studies social processes that mark continuities and discontinuities. The historian mediates in the formation of an oral collective memory that is otherwise undocumented. As narratives are brought to corroborate documentary evidence, the historian brings oral history into a dialogue with written sources.