Tigers being the endangered species they are worldwide, perhaps the best most of us can do for an encounter is with the figurative kind. When we do, as with the real item, it is likely to be challenging, especially if it is at the venture of riding one. Who was it who said trying to ride a tiger is always at the risk of being devoured by the beast?

These past weeks have made this writer starkly aware of a tiger, of the political stripe, in our midst. Talk about the thing has been rife for years and the signs that it was actually around were all over. But, like rumors of a truth, actually confirming reality is disconcerting and can even be unpleasant. And so it was when we came face to face with the much-talked about and vaunted Igorot vote.

All through the past forty years or so, there has been reference to the so-called Ilocano vote. In those years, there also sprung up the Pangasinese vote, the Batangueno vote, etc. But it was only in the past ten years or about that the Igorot vote has been listed as a political factor.

The Iglesia ni Cristo bloc has been around for some time, of course, but it has cut along church lines and not promoted any ethnic divide. That is what the more recent phenomenon has done.

Philippine politics has of course pandered to ethnic and tribal loyalties, especially the sort that chafes under some real or imagined injustice. The late strongman Ferdinand Marcos was the past master of this. The Ilocano vote and the solid north were his creations. How solid and how true those were will perhaps never be proven, but the fact is that both were always alluded to for every tear and victory he shed and basked in. All he had to do, especially in the early going, was to capitalize on the Ilocano's perception that he/she was a marginalized player in the national fabric.

Put me in Malacanang and all that will be fixed, was his message. If it worked that way, we may never know. It is enough that perception of the fulfilled promise was there.

So, what have we got in Baguio? Well, nothing less than our version of a similar creation. For years and years, the Igorot sulked over the feeling of being the stranger in his own land. The original Ibaloi settlers had been literally marginalized. Other Cordillera ethnic groups that had meanwhile immigrated into the city literally labored under "outsider" groups that had employed their more extensive schooling and bureaucratic skills. Up until only recently, the Cordillera peoples were smugly referred to as "natives," of what was never defined. It was as if the Igorots were not Filipinos, nor the rest of the Filipinos not native of any place.

But time has been kind to the native Cordilleran. He/she has breached all social, educational, economic and all other barriers. With that has come a justified pride at having arrived.

But, again, for a while there, Baguio remained something of an outside country. It took the ascension of the city's first elective mayor to end that. Finally, the corridors of power were no longer exclusive. The trick to that success, as the word that went out put it, was simply to pull the Cordilleran voters into a solid electorate that would swing local elections.

There has to be given some admiration to how that has acquired a degree of credibility. No better proof is there than how politicians now court the voter’s list is of such a determining element in the city's elections.

But there is a dark side to the phenomenon. First, but by no means most importantly, is that it has added one more division to a city needing to transcend ethnic clannishness. More than that is the possibility that the empowerment could transform itself into a self-indulging sense of power, a veritable tiger as it were.

Whose creation that tiger is cannot be ascribed to any one pol. What is certain is that the tiger is out there and a-prowl. And he, or she, who has ridden it will not likely get off, not without the risk of being devoured by the very means to power itself.

The next few years will show how the fairly new factor in local politics - and those who have dared to feed and ride it - will fare. Sadly, it is the original native of the city, the marginalized Ibaloi, who remains that. And in the now more complex arena, he might take little consolation in being the spectator.

It is not his ethnic tiger that is being ridden out there.