Three
Frontiers, 1836-1920

The air was heavy with the never-to-be-forgotten fragrance of sugar cooking from the vats of the hacienda mills.
John White, Bullets and Bolos (1928)

The years from 1836 to 1920 constitute a distinct era in the history of the Philippine sugar industry, one characterized by enormous expansion in export and cultivation. During this period sugar society became firmly linked to the world market economy and responsive to its fluctuations. As never before, sugar developed into a separate, wealthy sector of the native economy, unique in the high degree of foreign participation. Sugar regions served as very models of a cash-crop society in the Philippines, and their leaders became among the most influential persons in the colonial order of the Spanish and American regimes. Sugar growers led the way to a transformation of the Philippine countryside as they converted deep jungle into extensive sugar haciendas, and major portions of western Negros and northern Pampanga felt this impact. Yet while the physical alterations looked the same in both regions, their socioeconomic structures developed along dissimilar lines, reflecting their unlike manners of settlement and their diverse backgrounds. Pampanga and western Negros grew up very differently.

Expansion of the Sugar Trade

The rise of the sugar industry in the Philippines during this crucial eighty-four-year period is inextricably entwined with foreign markets and foreigners. The world economy supplied an ever-increasing demand for sugar, and outsiders played a vital part in supplying the industry with credit and technology. As in the earlier era, native Filipinos made their greatest contribution to the sugar business in the cultivation sector, although in Negros they became responsible for the processing as well. Until near the end of the period Capampangan continued to depend on foreigners for the last step of their manufacturing, and the division of

Figure 1.
Philippine Sugar Exports, 1836-1920. Sources: Ramon González
Fernández and Federico Moreno y Jeréz, Manual del viajero en Filipinas (Manila:
Est. tip. de Santo Tomás, 1875), p. 185; M. J. Lannoy, Iles Philippines (Brussels:
Delevingne et Callewaert, 1849), endchart, no. 5; Robert MacMicking, Recollections
of Manilia and the Philippines: During 1848, 1849, and 1850 (London:
Richard Bentley, 1851), pp. 270-72; Angel Martinez Cuesta, O.A.R., History of
Negros , trans. Alfonso Felix, Jr. (Manila: Historical Conservation Society, 1980),
p. 365; Cárlos Recur, Filipinas: Estudios Administrativos y Commerciales
(Madrid: Imp. de Ramon Moreno y Ricardo Rojas, 1879), p. 95; Russell, Sturgis
and Company, "Principal Articles of Export in 1854 and 1855," Market Reports ,
January 7, 1856 (Baker Library, Harvard University); Alexander R. Webb, "The
Sugar Industry in the Philippines," U.S. Consular Reports 31 (1889): 371; Edward
W. Harden, Report on the Financial and Industrial Conditions of the Philippine
Islands (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1898), p. 20; Sugar News
7 (1926): 186, 698; Philippine Islands, Bureau of Customs, Annual Report of the
Insular Collector of Customs to the Honorable Secretary of Finance for the Fiscal
Year Ended December 31, 1922 (Manila: Bureau of Printing, 1923), p. 69. The raw
data for this chart can be found in appendix A.

labor throughout the industry between those who did the overseas marketing and those who produced sugar persisted during this time of expanding frontiers.

Figure 1 portrays annual sugar exports from the Philippines during the era and illustrates the extent of transformation of the industry. Between 1836 and 1916 exports rose some 2,135 percent, from 15,097 metric tons

in the former year to 337,490 in the latter. By 1836 sugar had achieved first place on the list of exports; it continued to vie with abaca for that position throughout the rest of the nineteenth century (see table 3).

Foremost as an impetus to this dramatic transformation was an enormous heightening in demand for sugar that started even before the mid-nineteenth century, especially among industrial nations. Sugar consumption in Great Britain rose from an annual average of 16.4 pounds per capita in the years 1840 to 1844 to 90.8 in the five years from 1910 to 1914; meanwhile, the annual rise per capita in the United States went from 14.1 pounds in 1835 to 86 in 1920.^[1] Only during periods of major war did the rate dip in either country. Furthermore, all the while per capita consumption was increasing, population, too, was multiplying, in the United States from 17 million in 1840 to 125 million in 1920 and in Great Britain from 19 million in 1841 to 42 naillion in 1921. Hence, although the Philippines remained only one of many suppliers, exploding world demand almost guaranteed the islands a bigger export market each year.

The destination of Philippine sugar exports varied considerably over the period, reflecting changing realities in world market conditions. Data in appendix B convey some sense of the shifting terminals. The United States purchased on the most consistent basis, but Great Britain bought more in the nineteenth century. Even so, these numbers may be slightly misleading, for some sugar originally consigned to Great Britain ended up in American East Coast refineries.^[2] Australia, which served as a significant outlet at the advent of the era, faded after the 1870s as it began to acquire more sugar from other sources and to develop its own cane industry. In the 1880s and continuing through the rest of the period, China and, to a lesser extent, Japan became big buyers, taking up the slack as European purchases waned. Spain remained only a limited customer for its most far-flung colony, buying relatively small amounts of the very best grades of sugar available. More aggressive buying practices by British and American merchants in the Philippines partially account for this Spanish weakness, but Spain had other suppliers closer to home, in the Caribbean and in Europe. California, which early promised to be a large market, eventually came to depend on Hawaii's rising export as its chief source.

The complexity of shifting world markets created a need for good, current commercial intelligence, and British and American trading firms, including such giants as Ker and Company; Smith, Bell and Company; Warner, Barnes and Company; Russell, Sturgis and Company; and Peele, Hubbell and Company possessed the expertise, contacts, finances, and facilities to make the sugar trade a success. Throughout the nineteenth century these and other foreign houses controlled the export trade, al-

Table continued on next page

though the Spaniards tried through tariff legislation to end that stranglehold in the 1880s and 1890s. Spain's efforts came too late, however, and the only change in leadership in the trade arose from the vastly increased role of Philippine Chinese exporters during the last decade of the nineteenth century. British, American, and Chinese firms maintained their dominance of that trade into the twentieth century as well.^[3]

Constantly expanding world consumption explains the overall rise in sugar exports, but more specific events and factors account for short-term

fluctuations. In the 1840s the decline of West Indian production resulting from the prohibition of slavery stimulated British demand for Philippine sugar. Sharp rises in the 1850s and the early 1860s followed upon temporary curtailment of alternate sources and greater military need associated first with the Crimean War and then with the American Civil War. Limitations of American cane production, especially in Louisiana, in the period following the Civil War favored increased use of Philippine sugar by American East Coast refiners.^[4]

This upward course persisted until the mid-1880s when the expansion of the beet sugar industry, initially in Europe and later in the United States, offered new competition for cane. Germany, Russia, Austria-Hungary, and France put down extensive plantings of beets between 1850 and 1900, as did such American states as California, Michigan, and Ohio. To stimulate these fledgling industries, countries on the Continent legislated bounty systems rewarding local production of export sugar so that from the 1880s to the time of the Brussels Convention of 1903, they flooded the English and American markets with cheap, high-grade sugar. The McKinley Tariff Bill, passed in Washington in 1890, included a two cents per pound rebate on home-grown U.S. sugar, and although Congress repealed this bounty three years later, the Dingley Tariff of 1897 raised duties on imported sugar at a time when world prices remained low.^[5]

In the 1840s world sugar prices dropped because of diminished processing costs; however, in the succeeding decades growing demand held the rate more or less steady. In the 1880s, however, prices fell by almost half; except for a brief surge in 1889, they remained depressed until the boom years of World War I. The bounty system represented one early factor accounting for low rates, but at the heart of the matter lay oversupply: too much cane and beet sugar combined. Manila prices did not fluctuate so drastically (see table 4), but the amount of sugar exported leveled off as the English trade permanently declined from its 1881 high. Only the increasingly active role of Chinese traders and the China and Japan markets for muscovado maintained Philippine exports at their previous levels (in 1893 they actually reached their nineteenth-century peak). But the Asian trade, especially that of China, demanded mostly the lower grades of muscovado at cheaper prices and did not compensate entirely for the lost Western markets in the better grades.^[6]

The Philippine Revolution caused a further diminution of sugar exports, as disruptions at the port of Manila and combat in central Luzon curtailed deliveries from that northern island. Port facilities in Manila closed on and off in 1898 and 1899 while contending armies jockeyed for control of the city, and the archipelago's only refinery at Malabon shut down because of

the disruptions and because this concern lost its chief customer for refined sugar, Spain. In the south, hostilities proved far less costly, especially in Negros, although the agricultural experiment station at La Carlota was burned. Shipments through Iloilo and Cebu dropped only modestly throughout the period of struggle against Spain. By and large, sugar farmers and merchants continued their straitened business as best they could.^[7]

Declining exports in the early years of the American occupation had several causes including a disastrous outbreak of the cattle disease rinderpest that killed some 80 percent of the carabao, the main beasts of burden of the sugar industry. The disease had apparently arrived from French Indo-China in the 1880s but reached a high intensity for the first time only in 189Z Nearly one-third of the carabao in Pampanga and one-quarter of those in Tarlac died in 1902. An outbreak of human cholera in 1902 plus severe droughts and locust infestations added also to the miseries facing the population and the industry.^[8]

Disease and war did not represent the only sources of hardship in that harsh time between 1899 and 1909, for the shortage of good outlets remained as well. The archipelago's production had to compete with that of Java for the China market, and Japan began to obtain more sugar from its new colony, Formosa, acquired as a spoil of the Sino-Japanese War. Except for a brief period during World War I, the English market never returned. The Dingley Tariff inhibited U.S. sales in spite of the fact that the Philippines received a 25 percent reduction in duty after 1903. Lessening of the Cuban duty by 20 percent coupled with the cheaper cost of transportation from Cuba plus free entry of Hawaiian and Puerto Rican sugar kept the Philippines at a competitive disadvantage on the American market.^[9] Even as low world prices persisted, Philippine export stayed below half of what it had been ten years before.

Weak markets prevented recovery, especially in central Luzon; more-over, several old sources of credit to the industry had dried up by this time. The two American firms that had supplied so much cash and machinery in former years had gone bankrupt, Russell, Sturgis in 1876 and Peele, Hubbell in 1887, while a large British lender, Smith, Bell, faced deep financial trouble because of its inability to sell its overstock of sugar in New York. It took Smith, Bell from 1905 to 1909 to remove itself from debt and to begin rebuilding its cash reserves. Absence of credit led farmers to advocate the creation of the Agricultural Bank, launched in 1908; however, this institution made few loans to farmers, because they generally lacked the good, clear land titles acceptable as collateral. Furthermore, Pampangan farmers complained that too many government loans at the time went to

Negros. In 1916 the bank was absorbed by the far more successful Philippine National Bank (PNB).^[10]

Philippine sugar producers began to focus on the need to garner tariff concessions on the American market, and here the government proved more helpful. Such efforts took time to succeed, however, for American beet and other offshore cane producers lobbied the U.S. Congress to limit preferences for Philippine sugar. It required the influence of William H. Taft, the first head of the Philippine Commission and later president of the United States, plus the efforts of other lobbyists for the Philippines to gain those import privileges. Under the Payne-Aldrich Bill of 1909, the Philippines received a 300,000-ton duty-free share of the U.S. sugar market, and in 1913 under the Underwood-Simmons Bill, even that weight limitation was dropped. Despite these concessions, however, the Philippines still competed with such heavy suppliers as Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Hawaii, and in most years of the 1910s it had to sell substantial portions of its product on the less lucrative Asian market.^[11]

The underlying problem for Philippine export was the quality gap: processors turned out the same low-grade sugar they had for the past eighty years, but on a world market that now demanded a higher degree of purity. In 1813 an Englishman, Charles Howard, invented the steam-heated vacuum pan that, under reduced pressure, boiled sugar syrup more efficiently and quickly at a lower temperature. Invention of the centrifugal separator, a steam-driven cylinder that removed molasses from crystal sugar cleanly and rapidly, followed in the 1840s. By the late nineteenth century Java, Hawaii, and Cuba were already using these innovations; however, the cost of erecting a modern steam-run central ran very high, reaching the hundreds of thousands of dollars.^[12]

The Philippines remained the last major world producer of cane sugar without centrals. The less expensive machinery introduced into the Philippines in the nineteenth century to replace the crude equipment of earlier times included steam-driven metal grinders; hornos economicos that, instead of wood, burned ground cane refuse (bagasse ) as fuel; and batteries of open kettles (see figure 2). The first two used in tandem produced more efficient extraction rates of juice from cane; the latter improved the polarization of mat sugar. By the latter part of the century, Negros turned out a good sugar with an 85º average polarization (degree of sucrose content) that compared favorably with the finished pilon sugar of Pampanga; neither kind, however, matched the 96º of centrifugal sugar. For the introduction of even this cheaper equipment, credit belongs mainly to foreign risk takers: Nicholas Loney and Yves Germain Gaston on Negros

Figure 2.
Advanced Muscovado Mill System. G. E. Nesom and Herbert Walker
Handbook on the Sugar Industry of the Philippine Islands (Manila: Bureau of
Printing, 1912), pt. 2, p. 100.

Island and Paul de la Gironiere, Adolphe Delaunay, and M. M. Vidie on Luzon. The big trading houses supplied the machinery and financed its purchase when native planters followed the lead of those innovators. No one, however, attempted the erection of a complete central. The refinery at Malabon that functioned from 1887 until the outbreak of the Revolution had an array of modern equipment; even so, this plant's operation was limited in size by the circumscribed market for fully refined sugar.^[13]

For the most part, Philippine growers did not even care to invest in better farming techniques to improve their profits, and the Philippines possessed the lowest yield per hectare of all the major sugar-producing regions of the world. A 1920 report indicated that Hawaii and Java had 6.66 times the per hectare yield of the Philippines; for Cuba and Puerto Rico it was 2.6 times, for Queensland, Australia, almost 3 times, and for Jamaica 2. Even beet-

producing areas of Europe and America had higher productivity. Not until well into the twentieth century did planters begin regularly to fertilize their fields, rotate and irrigate their crops, and select the best cane for planting.^[14]

In the mid-nineteenth century Philippine muscovado drew praise for its quality, but by the late 1870s criticism started to appear, and the new realities of the international sugar trade began to hurt the Philippines by the mid-1880s. Because of ad valorem duties on high polarization sugar brought into America and England (until 1874), it remained economical for these two countries to import 85º muscovado. But with the rising availability of high-quality beet sugar, first from the Continent and then from domestic growers, both countries began to insist on 96º centrifugal. As the century ended, muscovado was losing the competition for valuable European and North American markets.^[15] The next decade proved an unmitigated disaster for Philippine sugar. Table 3 reveals that, even as overall Philippine trade continued to grow despite war and natural calamity, sugar's share of that trade declined from a high of 47 percent in 1893 to just 10 percent in 1903 and only 16 percent as late as 1909.

The major casualty of the sugar depression of the early twentieth century was the pilon industry of central Luzon and Pampanga's in particular. Before 1850, pilon sugar that was reclayed in Manila represented the top of the export trade and found its way readily to Western markets; however, an improved Visayan mat earned a significant share of those markets over the second half of the century. Pampangan farmers damaged themselves as well by lacing their sugar with molasses, a practice that drew criticism in the 1870s. Instead of improving their polarization, then, they became more dependent on the Manila fardarias to raise the quality of their product. By the 1890s annual exports from Manila, chiefly superior pilon, to North America and England began to drop drastically, while Iloilo shipments of Visayan mat to those destinations continued to rise. The Revolution savaged the industry in central Luzon; it never recovered. Sugar exports from Manila dropped from 127,000 tons during the 1887-88 milling season to nothing in 1909.^[16]

In the next ten years Pampanga began to move away from pilon when some planters switched to making mat sugar by hiring sugar maestrillos expert in the Visayan boiling technique. In a more desperate move, other farmers after 1914 commenced sending their cane to the newly erected central at Canlubang, Laguna, despite the serious loss of sucrose content caused by the delay between harvesting and grinding.

Pilon no longer sold well, and only the best mat could compete for markets with the poorest grades of centrifugal. During World War I, the Continental beet sugar industry was incapacitated, and cane producers

everywhere profited from the shortage as world prices touched extraordinary heights. In the Philippines, Asian and Western buyers vied with one another for Philippine sugar to such an extent that, for the first and only time, the United States bought small quantities of Philippine refined: Even so, muscovado sold for from five to more than ten pesos lower than did centrifugal; moreover, not every Western refinery could handle muscovado-quality sugar any longer.^[17]

Despite the imperatives, potential investors in Philippine centrals faced formidable obstacles. First of all, there existed a problem of cane supply. To remain profitable, large, modern mills required that ample stocks of sugar cane be delivered throughout the milling season, and most centrals in other countries possessed guaranteed stocks through ironclad lease arrangements or through ownership of the surrounding fields. In the Philippines, however, acquisition of large tracts of public land was illegal, and there were insufficient private estates for purchase or lease.

Second, the matter of cost loomed large. Participants in the Philippine sugar industry generally lacked the resources and incentives to purchase expensive factories. The Spanish colonial government, more inclined to worry about paying its burgeoning bureaucracy, took little interest in aiding industrial development. Long-term depreciation of its silver-based currency over the last quarter of the nineteenth century as well as a large outflow of its precious metal reserves left the Philippines with a cash shortage.^[18] Equipment that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars before the onset of World War I cost millions once it began. Local lending institutions at the time could not supply such amounts, and private families feared making big investments on their own, knowing little of the financing and construction of such enterprises. Lack of expertise constituted part of a bigger problem: confidence—or lack thereof in the future of sugar. A decade of weak prices and fierce world competition made all but the most intrepid investors chary of perilous commitments. Again, it took foreigners to lead the way to change.

As to the first matter, the guaranteed sources of cane, several solutions emerged. The initial one involved a stratagem to avoid provisions of the Public Land Act of 1902 that prohibited the granting of public lands greater than 16 hectares to individuals and 1,024 hectares to corporations. This law, partially passed at the behest of American beet sugar interests, effectively prevented development of centrals along traditional lines by denying the centralists ownership of sufficient cane fields. But a careful reading of the law governing the disposal of the friar estates, newly acquired from the Catholic Church, allowed corporations to bypass the law on public domain and to buy extensive tracts of the land formerly owned by the religious

orders. With the aid of Philippine Commissioner Dean Worcester, an American syndicate representing mainly Horace Havemayer of the American Sugar Refining Company purchased some 18,000 hectares of unused friar land in San Jose, Mindoro, in 1909, and subsequently erected a central there. The project ultimately failed because of the malaria that plagued the area, the peaty soil, and the unavailability of an adequate work force; nevertheless, a precedent had been set, and a central capable of milling some 1,500 tons of cane daily had been built in the islands.^[19]

Before the Philippine legislature closed the loophole in the Public Land Law in 1914, California interests under the leadership of Alfred Ehrman and the Pacific Commercial Company acquired 8,000 hectares of the Calamba and Biñan estates in Laguna and used this property as the basis for erecting a large central at Canlubang. The enterprise flourished so well that in 1919 its owners put up another central in Del Carmen, a barrio of Floridabianca, Pampanga. Only at San Jose and Canlubang, however, did the owners acquire extensive plantations, and other investors in centrals had to look elsewhere for solutions to their cane problem.

The real answer to access to cane came with the establishment of the highly successful San Carlos Milling Company in 1912 and is indicated in the opening statement of the company's prospectus:

Briefly stated, this Company has secured from the principal planters of North San Carlos District, Island of Negros, Philip-pine Islands, contracts to grind all of the sugar cane grown by them for the term of thirty years, and in return for this the Company is to receive forty per cent of the sugar manufactured.^[20]

The long-term milling contract became the model arrangement' used by other centrals erected in the Philippines and gave the archipelago a unique identity among the world's sugar-growing regions. San Carlos's success encouraged uncommitted planters to sign up with newly rising mills, and many farmers settled for less advantageous contracts containing a fifty-fifty split, especially during the boom years of World War I, when soaring prices promised great returns to those in the market.^[21]

The difficulty of financing centrals was solved in several ways. The first involved large infusions of foreign capital mainly American, as some of the biggest mainland U.S. and Hawaiian sugar concerns sought opportunities in the islands. At Canlubang, California interests came to the fore, and with Pasumil, the Spreckels West Coast refining interests joined Ehrman in supplying capital. Hawaiian money constructed the centrals at San Carlos and Silay, Negros Occidental (1920). Various firms representing

long-time Spanish residents of the islands also became involved in central building: the Elizalde-Ynchausti interests financed a major factory at La Carlota that commenced milling in 1920, and Tabacalera, a Spanish company built out of the remnants of the government's old nineteenth-century tobacco monopoly, funded a large central at Bais, Negros Oriental, in 1919. Two other groups of Spanish investors put up small centrals at Ilog and Kabankalan in 1916 and 1917 respectively.^[22]

Because of the shortage of domestic capital and available credit sources, native Filipino investors faced a more difficult challenge entering the central construction field. The Roxas family and Esteban de la Rama managed to erect small centrals on their own property at Calatagan, Batangas (1914), and at Talisay (1912) and Bago (1913) respectively, and Lizarraga Hermanos put up another little mill at Kabankalan (1914). Only Miguel J. Ossorio, however, could organize the private support to construct two big centrals, at Manapla (1917) and Victorias (1921). It took government intervention to assure that Philippine interests could afford to build centrals. The PNB, founded in 1916, loaned substantial amounts of cash for the erection of six large Filipino-owned mills: at Isabela (1919), Ma-ao (1920), Bacolod (1920), Talisay (1920), and Binalbagan (1921), all in Negros Occidental, and at San Fernando, Pampanga (1921). In the case of the five on Negros, these projects originated with prominent families, including the Yulos, Lizareses, and Montillas, who applied to the PNB for funds that included most of the capitalization.^[23]

Reluctance to invest ceased during the second decade of the century, not just because of desperation over dwindling markets for muscovado, but because the American tariff situation promised better market opportunities than had existed for some time. In addition, the opening of the Panama Canal in 1914 reduced transportation time and costs to the East Coast refineries where Philippine sugar sold best. Indeed, inauguration of the Panama Canal meant much more to Philippine economic development than had the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869. The government, by founding the PNB and expanding railroad facilities, demonstrated its willingness to assist the industry, while prices during the war added to the sense of optimism and to improvement of the investment climate.

Out of the private sector and government service came technicians experienced in the financing and engineering aspects of central construction and operation. Almost all of the early specialists were Americans who advised investors on how to obtain and finance central machinery. A major journal, Sugar News , designed to promote the industry and to disseminate technical information, began publication in 1919. As a result of the availability of so much specialized information, investing in centrals became less

of a mystery. By the end of the decade the first group of Filipino technicians trained in the intricacies of producing better sugar entered the industry. The era of the centrals might have started a little earlier except that the war created a shortage of shipping and machinery, so that rapid construction had to await the armistice. Not until 1921 did the export of centrifugal surpass that of muscovado.^[24]

Negros Occidental: The Formation of Plantation Society

The peopling and exploitation of the western Negros wilderness between 1836 and 1920 shared much in common with the global frontier phenomenon taking place at this time. The expansion of agriculture onto hitherto underutilized territory of the Americas, Eurasia, Africa, and Oceania happened in response to social, economic, and political pressures, as well as to an imperative to feed the machines of the Industrial Revolution. The cycle of initial pioneering, succeeded by intense cash-crop agriculture, the encumbering of land, the harnessing of labor, and the gradual imposition of a full range of civilization's amenities and restraints, was repeated on Negros as on other frontiers. As elsewhere, forest lands were reduced and the local aboriginal population displaced as a rising entrepreneurial elite rapidly accumulated wealth. This era was indeed the heyday of unfettered capitalism.^[25]

Figures in table 5 depict in gross terms the transformation of western Negros. Between 1845 and 1918 annual sugar production increased enormously, while population rose more than 1,021 percent, an annual rate of 3.35 percent. The extension of agricultural lands resulted from the creation of hundreds of new plantations out of areas heretofore primary and secondary jungle. Amidst these haciendas, permanent towns rose, built upon earlier settlements or upon missions recently established by Recollect priests.

In the mid-nineteenth century, new migrants to Negros included farmers who established homesteads, mainly subsistence, in coastal and interior Negros alongside the already settled Negrense smallholders. Here they grew chiefly rice, corn, or cash crops such as tobacco and abaca. The reasons for this early migration remain obscure, but they must have involved some degree of desperation, since much of this immigration did not have official sanction; moreover, local histories contain lore that some of these settlers came to avoid the law, the military draft, or various tax and labor obligations imposed by the government. Also, most arrived from overcrowded and depressed areas such as Bohol, Cebu, Antique, and the textile towns of Iloilo, suggesting that many of them sought simply to improve their material conditions, as homesteaders have done on other frontiers. Whatever the reasons, these early settlers had little effect upon the great changes

that occurred later. Many were subsequently absorbed into the hacienda labor force after having lost their land to the new breed of planters who took over the island.^[26]

As noted previously, the original haciendas on Negros appeared in the 1840s and 1850s with the advent of such settlers as Agustin Montilla, Yves Germain Gaston, and Eusebio de Luzuriaga and his fellow refugees. Despite these early pioneering efforts and improving market conditions, Negros did not begin to attract large numbers of new hacenderos until the late 1850s. At least three factors seem to have featured in the delay. First, the threat of Moro coastal raiders lingered on and was not finally eliminated until the time of Governor Emilio Saravia (1855-57) who defeated them in the waters off Silay in 1857. Shortly after this engagement, the government stationed two steam gunboats to patrol the Guimaras Strait, discouraging further pirate depredations.

Second, Negros possessed a reputation as lacking the social and physical amenities of communities on the neighboring islands. The advent of the Augustinian Recollect friars to exercise religious control of the province

served to alleviate somewhat this concern. Recollects assumed jurisdiction of Negros Island in 1848 and began establishing missions, then parishes, as well as taking up parishes vacated by the old native secular priests. Coincidental with the arrival of the Recollects was the governorship of Manuel Valdivieso Morquecho (1849-55) who, like his predecessor Vizmanos, sought to encourage economic development of the island. From his headquarters at the newly created capital of Bacolod, Morquecho began formally delineating a number of new town centers along the west coast and barrios that later became municipalities along the north coast.^[27]

Third, there existed no pressing need earlier to consider Negros as a field for investment. By the 1850s, however, British cottons began to penetrate the Philippine market, cutting into the sales of indigenous textiles, a business controlled until then by Chinese mestizos from Panay. In addition, an influx of entrepreneurial Chinese into the Visayan region drove many of these mestizo merchants out of what remained of the native cloth industry and prevented them from finding niches in other branches of the wholesale and retail trades. Many held out until their market began to dry up rapidly between 1865 and 1873 in the face of renewed competition from imported cloth following the American Civil War. These conditions sent the mestizos in search of new arenas of economic activity, and, aware of a growing market for Philippine sugar abroad, they increasingly looked across the Guimaras Strait to Negros as an investment alternative. At a slightly later period Cebuanos from Cebu and Bohol began to turn to the eastern and northern coasts of Negros as regions to expand their sugar plantations.^[28]

Other factors, too, began to exert a magnetic pull on potential investors. The immediate lift of the Crimean War, with its boosting of world prices, induced them seriously to consider risking the establishment of new plantations in the western Negros hinterland. To facilitate this movement came British Vice-Consul Nicholas Loney, who reached Iloilo in 1856. Loney, recognizing sugar's potential as an export industry, acted as a stimulus in several ways. On the positive side, he arranged for the flow of new British milling equipment, the provision of low-interest credit to pay for it, the construction of better port facilities, and the first foreign international shipments out of Iloilo, to Australia in 1859. On the negative side, by importing British cloth, he helped drive mestizos out of the textile business.

Loney established his own export-import company in 1860 and with his brother Robert acquired a hacienda on Negros a year later. In his early dealings, Loney took cash loans from the prominent American firm of Russell, Sturgis and Company, which put up its own branch at Iloilo in 1863. Subsequently, the other American merchant house in the Philip-

pines, Peele, Hubbell and Company, and such British firms as Smith, Bell and Company and Warner, Barnes and Company entered the sugar business, encouraging the growth of the industry on Negros. Together these houses dominated foreign export of sugar from Iloilo and became the chief suppliers of imported goods and machinery, as well as a source of credit to Negros planters. Iloilo opened to international commerce in 1855, making it possible for exporters to bypass Manila as a transshipment point and thus to reduce shipping costs. By the mid-1860s Iloilo became the chief port for Negros mat, a position it held throughout the remainder of the period.^[29]

The efforts of the first Recollect friars and Governor Morquecho, the opening of the Port of Iloilo, the activities of Loney and the other foreign investment houses, and, above all, constantly expanding world demand for cane sugar made the period from 1850 to 1886 the time of greatest intrusion upon the Negros frontier. Planters and small farmers sliced into the wilderness creating farming communities, and priests turned missions and parishes into new town centers. The chronology of town erections reveals the course of sugar estate expansion in western Negros (see table 6). Sugarlandia's major boundaries took shape during these prosperous market years of the nineteenth century.

The sugar frontier originated along the western seacoast, moved south from Bago as far as Ilog, and north from Silay, following along the coast to Cadiz. Growth also occurred along the eastern shore, out from Escalante toward Arguelles (Sagay) and Calatrava. San Carlos finally succumbed to sugar after the turn of the century. Settlement of the interior, up the rivers from the western coastal towns, took place slowly over the course of the entire period, and as late as 1920 virgin land still existed.^[30]

Sugar flourished on Negros because of a new generation of entrepreneurs who created large plantations, employing imported and local labor to do initial clearing and then to work the estates for them. The entrepreneurs fell into two categories: actual settlers and speculators who bought or acquired estates by other means, fair and foul, combining, then developing, properties already cleared. Few of the old Negrense elite seem to have become successful hacenderos.

With his story of the Valderramas, Negros historian Modesto Sa-onoy provides a good example of a typical pioneer planter family. Catalino and Fortunato Valderrama, sons of a Chinese immigrant convert and his Ilongo wife, left their home in Molo on Panay at a youthful age, when the cloth business that had sustained their parents no longer produced profits. In the 1890s Catalino oversaw the clearing of some 300 hectares of frontier in Cadiz then opening up to settlement. During the following decade his younger brother established Hacienda Nazareth on 400 hectares in newly

founded Manapla. While pioneering was a game chiefly for the young, some older settlers also participated. Revolutionary leader Juan Araneta, who lost his lands in Bago during Spanish times, at thirty-nine and with his second wife penetrated the interior to start plantations in Ma-ao.^[31]

Many of the arriving planter migrants utilized prior bonds to ease their entry into the Negros wilderness. Domingo Cuenca, a Spaniard, commenced farming in Minuluan (Talisay) when his brother Fernando, a Recollect, became parish priest in that town. Similarly, the presence of mestizo secular priests Eusebio and Ramon Locsin in Silay and Bacolod facilitated the movement: of their Molo friends and relatives to these parishes. On a broader scale, groups tended to migrate to areas where they had preexisting contacts. Peninsular-born Spaniards, for instance, clustered in the municipalities of La Carlota, Kabankalan, Manapla, San Carlos, and Bacolod, while Boholanos and Cebuanos did the same along the north and east coast. Mestizos from Jaro and Molo fed the west coast settlements

of Talisay and Silay, but migrants from the second-ranked Ilongo textile area of Guimbal-Miagao concentrated at Hinigaran and Isabela. Often, too, when planters imported labor, they recruited from their home town, so that small rural communities on Negros sometimes consisted of barrio mates from Panay or Cebu. As time went on, intermarriage and movement about Negros tended to break down this pattern, but some of the early associations between towns and groups still linger. The east coast towns, for example, remain Cebuano speaking until the present day, and the majority of Spaniards lived in the same five towns until at least the outbreak of World War II.^[32]

Spaniards had to settle for a share of the plantations, but not a dominant one, and in no place, save in La Carlota and Kabankalan, did they become a major economic force. Indeed, like their predecessors Agustin Montilla and Eusebio de Luzuriaga, they tended to intermarry with the mestizo population, and their descendants were absorbed into the group broadly defined as the Negrense planter elite. Not all Spaniards made it to the top of the social hierarchy, for they held no privileged economic position in sugarlandia simply because of their nationality. Some became owners of small estates, while others served as hacienda managers or foremen.

Westerners from other countries as well as a few Chinese also entered the plantation frontier. Included among this group were Hugo Koch, a Prussian; the Swiss Frederick Luchinger, Charles and Samuel Bischoff, Paul Wuthrich, and the Jeanjaquet brothers; the English Loneys, Thomas Evans, and Frederick Ashton; Chinese such as Domingo Lazarte Yu-Bangco, Yap Waco, Lucio Echauz Tan-Suia, and Yee On; and, after the turn of the century, Americans J. Clayton Nichols, David Mulliken, and John Merrick. Eventually such foreigners either sold out, became absorbed into the local population, or like Luchinger and Loney concentrated on the exporting end of the sugar business.^[33]

McCoy, in identifying the origin of the Negros planter elite, points to the continuity of names between the leading merchant families of Iloilo and the largest landowners subsequently on Negros, and certainly that correlation exists. At the same time it should be noted that settlers from other areas and groups sojourned to and succeeded on Negros and that the hacendero group became more than a mere extension of Iloilo society. The Ilongos Teodoro Benedicto, Isidro de la Rama, Teodoro Yulo, and Eugenio Lopez held thousands of hectares of land, but many of the other 485 hacenderos listed in the 1896 enumeration came from a non-Ilongo background. Moreover, intermarriage among the often large families of the era tended to blur some of the distinctions of origin. For example, descendants of the great Iloilo merchant Basilio Lopez (ca. 1810-ca. 1875), many of

whom became Negrense planters, within two generations had intermarried into numerous other Ilongo families, but also with Cebuanos, Spaniards, Spanish mestizos, and Americans. Among the original settlers the Spaniard Agustin Montilla married an Ilonga, while the mother of Yves Gaston's children immigrated with him from the Tagalog-speaking province of Batangas. Montilla's daughter married Hugo Koch. The same 1896 census lists 151 Spanish men and 24 women, but also 332 Spanish mestizos.^[34]

The image of the pioneer planter with spouse carving a hacienda out of the wilderness is slightly misleading. To be sure such individuals existed; however, planters coming in the 1850s and 1860s acquired land, usually along rivers and streams, mainly by buying the rice fields and unused property of local residents, often sitting or former officials. Heirs of these first arrivals would often clear and farm lands adjacent to the original settlements rather than move to the more dangerous interiors. In this way Negros grew out from the edges of prior settlement rather than from widely scattered nuclei in the middle of the jungle. Like many other pioneers, Juan Araneta did not live on his clearings, choosing rather to stay in his comfortable home in Bago. For a long time new haciendas and towns remained devoid of those amenities found in older settlements readily in contact by boat with the outside world. Furthermore, a high risk to health, especially from malaria, persisted for those dwelling in or on the edge of the jungle. Nicholas Loney probably died of that malady, contracted during a climb of Mount Canlaon in 1869. In 1902, Governor Locsin noted that malaria affected as much as 12 percent of the population and was particularly prevalent among workers dwelling in the interior portions of the province. With the threat of Moro raiders eliminated, the coastal town centers proved the more attractive places to live.^[35]

The matter of titling lands remained informal, given the absence of government surveys, good records, and land offices, as well as the apparent availability of unlimited land. Early purchase agreements might include a hand-drawn map roughly outlining the property (see figure 3) or a statement approximating the location of the land. Descriptions of property did not specify exact dimensions; rather, lot sizes were described in terms of the number of gantas or cavans of rice or corn seedlings or lacsas of sugar cane cuttings necessary to plant the land. Larger properties were simply referred to as haciendas. Over time the acts of buying and selling of property provided one form of recognition of land ownership and offered a basis for formalizing titles when the government introduced programs of land registration.^[36]

Figure 3.
Map Accompanying Deed of Land Sale, Hinigaran, Negros Occidental,
1850. Protocolos , 1975, Negros Occidental, Philippine National Archives, Manila.

Legitimation for the acquisition of large blocks of agricultural land on Negros began in the mid-.1870s when the Spanish government devised a program for distributing public lands (realengas ), territory considered unoccupied at the time and, hence, belonging to the crown. Petitioners could purchase such lands at giveaway prices or with proof of prior cultivation (denuncia ) could claim them gratis. Prices for realengas rose gradually over the two decades from one to two pesos per hectare to six to ten. The biggest purchasers on the list were Alejandro Montelibano and Teodoro Benedicto, each of whom obtained more than 1,200 hectares in this fashion. The majority of petitions involved properties of more than 100 hectares of frontier land. Martinez Cuesta's list of those granted free tide based on prior occupancy includes many heirs of the first pioneers claiming lands settled by their parents in older, established areas. Lands offered by the government at such low prices accrued considerably in value and created great fortunes for the recipients. A 1918 estimate placed the worth of land in Negros at P100 per hectare for unimproved plots and as high as P500 for the choicest fields.

The U.S. colonial regime did not prove so generous in making large grants of the public domain, seeking rather to follow America's own ideal of turning the frontier into the realm of the yeoman farmer. The Home-stead Act of 1902 granted a maximum of 16 hectares of public land per individual. Sixteen hectares still represented a substantial piece of land, and on the edges of the sugar frontier, in San Carlos for instance, numerous claimants came forth in the first two decades of the new century. The attempt, however, to preserve sugarlandia for small farmers failed.^[37]

Actual registering of land presented something of a problem in Negros, for there was no functioning land office until about 1890, and the process of surveying property and legally establishing clear title proved cumbersome. Few owners, save those given public lands, had clear titles before the twentieth century. In 1902 the Americans instituted the Torrens system, which provided government-guaranteed titles, but the complicated nature of registration and the reluctance of planters to let a tax-hungry government know the size of their holdings reduced the number of early applications. By 1910 some owners in Negros, as elsewhere in the Philippines, were beginning to apply, but not in sufficient numbers to satisfy the government. In 1913, therefore, it inaugurated a cadastral survey of the whole Philippines, which included pro forma lawsuits intended to force all landowners to obtain Torrens titles, a monumental project that dragged on throughout the rest of the pre-World War II period. Negros Occidental was one of the first areas surveyed, and judges acted efficiently in settling the

litigation, so that by 1922 legal titles for much of the best farming land in the province were available.^[38]

During the process of claiming, amassing, and titling estates, planters sometimes displaced small farmers of the original Negrense population and those poor migrants who came to take up subsistence plots. The actual extent of this eviction and land grabbing (usurpacion ) must always remain a mystery, for they were carried out in various ways by hacenderos and their minions who made and kept the records. Sometimes removal occurred legally when planters with proper claims removed squatters who had simply occupied their land. At other times eviction took place with the aid of falsified documents obtained through collusion between corrupt officials and hacenderos. The planter group and their friends, relatives, and employees held almost all municipal and provincial offices as well as all judicial positions, and they had little difficulty turning such a monopoly to their own use. Finally, in unnumbered cases beyond the sight of witnesses, employees of the hacenderos forced peasants from their land. From the occasional evidence that does appear, a sense emerges that the taming of the Negros frontier was fraught with unrecorded violence. McCoy cites a complaint of Spanish farmers from La Carlota against the great landowner Teodoro Benedicto for his strong-armed removal of a group of Antique migrants who had worked the same land for years before Benedicto claimed it.

Such usurpacion still occurred at the end of the period, as evidenced by the case of some La Carlota homesteaders that came to the attention of Senate President Manuel Luis Quezon. Small farmers found themselves threatened by three of the most influential hacenderos in that district (see appendix C). In another case going on at the same time, Governor Matias Hilado of Negros Occidental faced a charge of land grabbing brought by another government official. Confronted with such pressure throughout the era, peasant farmers could only retreat further into the wilderness or stay and work for hacendero claimants to their lands.^[39]

The plight of the aboriginal inhabitants of the island is more difficult to document but appears even more tragic, similar to the situation found on other contemporary frontiers around the world. As original owners of the interior they either farmed the land as swiddens or used the jungle for hunting and gathering. Since they possessed no formal titles, their land became officially crown property and could thus be granted to others. To resist the government directly or even indirectly meant to risk extermination. Governor Saravia supplied a frightening example of what could happen to an uncooperative population when in 1856 he caused the mass

murder of non-Christians in Barrio Carolan, Kabankalan, while trying to bring them under colonial control. Hill people learned early in this era that retreat represented the better part of valor. The interior mountains and foothills became final havens for all the displaced, where they could practice their ways and avoid becoming part of a work force for the sugar economy and servile members of the colonial pyramid. Land grabbing burdens the modern history of Negros, and even today tension mars the relationship between uplanders and sugar people.^[40]

A comparison of names of sugarland holders in 1896 with those who had made purchases at mid-nineteenth century reveals a considerable turnover of property ownership in the early years, demonstrating the high risk of venturing into sugar farming. Alongside early pioneers in the 1860s appeared speculators like Ricardo Mascuñana and Marcos Villaluz, who purchased agricultural land cheaply and sold it at a higher price to new-comers. In the 1870s wealthy merchants commenced putting together big estates for themselves and their relatives. In that decade alone Teodoro Benedicto purchased 5,590 hectares for P32,477, or about P5.813 per hectare. From this time on, some consolidation of ownership occurred, and by 1896 twelve families controlled almost one-third of the 53,211 hectares of sugarland in twenty of the twenty-six sugar-producing towns on Negros. About four hundred other planters having smaller haciendas possessed the remainder, so that the size of holding averaged about 109 hectares per owner. Investing in working plantations became a common way of entering the sugar business, and by 1887 the Iloilo newspaper El Eco de Panay carried advertisements for Negros haciendas complete with machinery, work animals, and crops in the field.^[41]

Constant traffic in land serves as a reminder that transforming the Negros frontier was first and foremost a capitalistic enterprise, that haciendas represented investments first and homesteads second. Other forms of associated business activity included supplying agricultural credit, trans-porting sugar to market, and sugar brokerage. Foreign and native entrepreneurs, if they had cash, turned to these other activities, which offered greater and more reliable opportunities for profit. Owning several haciendas and leaving their day-to-day management to employees or relatives allowed bigger operators to concentrate on other economic pursuits. Teodoro Yulo over the course of his lifetime acquired seventy-five haciendas, some from his debtors, and ran his diverse financial kingdom, which included banking, from his home in Iloilo. The ultimate success story was Isidro de la Rama, a petty Ilongo cloth dealer who migrated to work a plantation in Minuluan. After seven years of farming, de la Rama switched to buying sugar and loaning money to fellow planters. Eventually, he

moved into the shipping (interisland and international) and warehousing of sugar, and by the time his son Esteban took over his enterprises in the 1890s, the de la Rama fortune was one of the largest in the Philippines.^[42]

Supplying credit offered the best entree into sugar-related business activities, for a shortage of working capital always plagued farmers on Negros. At the outset, the island boasted cheap, readily available land, but little else, and it took infusions of foreign funds to nurture the budding industry. Such foreign firms as Loney and Company; Russell, Sturgis and Company; Smith, Bell and Company; and Lim Ponzo and Company loaned money to planters chiefly to acquire rights to their sugar, usually at slightly below market prices. To obtain guaranteed deliveries, brokers sent agents throughout the province who would offer loans on favorable terms, sometimes as low as 8 percent and well below rates for other mortgages, which could top 30 percent. Such anticipatory crop loans worked effectively because they reduced some of the heavy competition among brokers for the sugar of the hundreds of planters spread all over Negros. Brokerage firms operated most actively in years. of good market conditions when sugar was both expensive and scarce.

Foreign houses served as links in a chain of credit institutions with the large English banking concerns like Baring Brothers and Hongkong Bank at the top and planters at the bottom. Import-export firms borrowed from banks as well as from such private investors as the friar orders and Manila Spaniards. With this capital and their own earnings, the firms invested in crop brokerage, importation of Western goods, and local banking, providing a large share of the money for new plantations on Negros and elsewhere. A series of untoward circumstances led to the demise of Loney and Company in 1875, Russell, Sturgis in 1876, and Peele, Hubbell in 1887, putting a dent in the credit market just at a time when world sugar prices turned downward. In 1887 a group of Negrense farmers lamented the lack of cheap credit and petitioned the government to come to their rescue, and as late as 1918 farmers in northern Negros complained about usurious interest rates. Newer companies like Warner, Barnes and Company and the Chinese firms took up some of the slack, but they did not entirely replace the early pioneer lenders; nor did the alternate sources of credit provide capital at the same favorable rates. One of the most active brokers was Lim Ponzo, who lived in Iloilo but operated at least one store in Victorias and a warehouse in Silay. He loaned money to hacenderos in Silay, Saravia, Victorias, and Murcia in order to acquire their sugar for as much as 12 to 40 centavos below the prevailing market price—a considerable saving to himself. He charged interest for mortgages at rates from. 2 percent all the way to 15 percent, still low by prevailing standards. However, farmers

really in debt to him were required to buy hacienda supplies and rice for their workers at his Victorias store; also, they might have to pay an additional 12 percent interest on their loans, offer land as security, and pledge to deliver a given number of piculs of sugar to his bodega in Silay.

Aside from anticipatory crop loans offered by sugar brokers, hacenderos obtained mortgages and, to a lesser extent, pacto de retro contracts from private individuals and, infrequently, from sugar firms. Wealthy Ilongos like Teodoro Yulo, Isidro de la Rama, and Teodoro Benedicto made considerable money in mortgages, as did the occasional foreigner. When Yves Germain Gaston, founder and great pioneer of Negros sugar farming, died in 1863, the bulk of his P53,000 estate consisted of P40,000 worth of agricultural loans and a P9,000 investment in the Scottish firm of Ker and Company, the original Iloilo employer of Nicholas Loney. Rates for mortgage money commonly ran higher than for anticipatory crop loans and varied considerably in length, from as short as three months to more than a decade—as a rule, the longer the mortgage, the less favorable the terms. Lenders preferred land as collateral, but they occasionally took other forms of agricultural property; moreover, mortgages usually went on rather extensive properties valued in thousands of pesos. In 1915 the Spanish firm Ynchausti and Company picked up a hacienda as payment of an especially large debt of Pl12,500. That entries in the notarial records indicate few foreclosures in Negros reflects a high level of reliability on the part of the mortgagees; even so, lenders usually gave little money for agricultural land in terms of its true value.

Until creation of the Agricultural Bank of the Philippine Islands in 1908, and more especially its successor, the PNB, in 1916, even planters with good collateral did not have access to credit on really favorable terms. Government-sponsored lending institutions gave relatively larger loans on property, at 8 percent and 10 percent; even so, they only partially alleviated the credit problem, for they did not possess sufficient funds to meet the total need, and they demanded Torrens titles as security. Supplying agricultural credit persisted throughout the era as a lucrative business activity.^[43]

Differences in the size of holdings created a two-tiered structure of wealth in Negros with the most influential families having the most capital, frequently living in and conducting their business from Iloilo. Out on plantations and in the towns of Negros dwelt working hacenderos who lacked the economic cushion to carry them easily through hazardous times without borrowing. The wealthy group not only knew more security, they had money to lend and could profit from hard times and, in promising times, invest in progressive changes. When sugar tramways, centrals, and shipping lines were to be built, they had the financial resources to profit

and to increase their already extensive fortunes. Within the planter class of Negros considerable differentiations of wealth existed, and the gap grew wider as the era of the centrals approached.^[44]

At the heart of economic and social life on frontier Negros lay the hacienda, locality for the majority of the province's inhabitants. In the 1903 census, organizers took the barrio as the smallest unit of enumeration in all provinces save Negros Occidental, where they used haciendas as well as barrios; furthermore, in the big Negrense sugar towns, haciendas represented a very large proportion of reporting units. In the earlier 1896 enumeration of the province, haciendas were the main unit. Haciendas varied in size, from a few hectares to several hundred; the 489 listed in 1896 averaged 74 hectares, and most included a mill—steam, water, or animal driven.

Lack of easy transportation on Negros caused most haciendas to remain isolated, self-contained communities. In Spanish times the only reliable road ran between Silay and Bacolod. Elsewhere, a trail roughly paralleled the island's western shore; however, along most stretches it was only a crude path and even in the better places was rutted during the rainy season and dusty during the dry. Furthermore, because so few bridges existed, the many creeks and rivers emptying out into the surrounding seas needed fording, and travel off main roads moved along narrow tracks or up shallow waterways. Americans took a more aggressive approach to road and bridge building; nevertheless, as late as 1916 only 142 kilometers of first-class highway covered the province. The best highways provided access to town centers and allowed for some automobile traffic, but large numbers of haciendas were then, as they are today, difficult to reach. Planters often had large families and on more remote haciendas created their own community. An officer of the Spanish Guardia Civil seeking to establish a post in an outlying community found the center of a particular hacienda as busy and with as many buildings as a proper town plaza.^[45]

However, table 7 indicates that those Wealthy enough to own a substantial home (una casa de materiale fuerte ) chose most frequently to reside in town rather than in a barrio or on a hacienda. Towns, especially Bacolod, Silay, and San Carlos, possessed active social whirls, zarzuelas and other entertainments, large churches with regular religious services, business opportunities, and transportation facilities to other islands, as well as such twentieth-century niceties as electricity, ice houses, telegraph offices, and frequent mail service. In general, the focus of a family's business interests strongly influenced its residence pattern and social orientation.^[46]

While absentee ownership became a common feature on Negros, each hacienda had a planter in charge, either the owner of a small estate, a

leaseholder (arrendatario, acsa , or agsador ), or the owner's surrogate, an administrador or an encargado (overseer). No figures exist on how many owners actually operated their farms, but the sparse evidence suggests that the number diminished over the period. Hard times such as the decades of the 1880s and 1900s seem to have reduced the number of small planters, the kind most likely to run their own estates. A turn-of-the-century roster for the town of Eustaquio Lopez lists only four owner managers, all relatively small, out of forty planters. Owners of modest estates lived in houses little better than those of some of the paid supervisory personnel on larger haciendas.^[47]

Leaseholding arrangements came with a complex set of options on Negros and altered according to prevailing economic circumstances and the changing lifestyle of landowners. Straight cash rentals seem to have been the least favored choice, for they provided tenants with the least protection against fluctuating sugar' prices; moreover, owners did not prefer this option, because the lessees possessed little incentive to do long-term maintenance on hacienda machinery and land.

The acsa or agsador system of share rentals proved somewhat more popular, for it offered many protections not available under the cash tenant

system. Acsas as mere share tenants farming their own plots date back to the beginning of plantations on Negros when owners personally managed their haciendas; however, as absentee ownership became more common, the acsa system changed character and became one of lease management, used by both native and European entrepreneurs. By the late nineteenth century ambitious young Spaniards eager to enter the sugar business came out from the metropolitan country to work as acsas on haciendas of Spanish and native owners.

On some estates, larger ones especially, an acsa leased a particular portion, supervising laborers and delivering cane to the mill. On other, smaller properties he managed the whole hacienda and paid the owner a percentage of the total sugar produced. Size of shares varied considerably, from 10 percent to 75 percent for the lessee, depending on the owner's and acsa's contributions of working capital, farm implements, and animals and according to prevailing economic conditions. With muscovado sugar, for instance, the division could normally range from one-third to two-thirds; however, if a central processed the sugar, the mill's share reached 40-50 percent and the tenant's dropped to 8-10. Of course, in the latter instance, he did not have to do his own milling, and the sugar sold for a better price. Acsas rented haciendas as small as ten hectares and as large as several hundred. Landowners of one hacienda might sometimes lease others. In all cases, the acsa acted as planter, taking complete responsibility for the successful performance of the estate. A rare firsthand description by an acsa of his farming activities appeared in the Philippines Free Press in 1912.

I am working on the hacienda of my uncle where I cultivate my own sugar field. If the present price of sugar holds, I will make this year some P900 to P1,000 which is not a bad start.

I also have pigs and farm birds, and I am cultivating, besides, a little patch of Indian corn that within three months will give me sufficient maize for the feeding of my hens and hogs. With that I hope to obtain enough to cover the costs of the cultivating of my cane.

I go to the fields very early to begin the farmwork. As it is now cool, I can plow the ground by myself, at which activity I am engaged until nine in the morning. In the afternoon, when the sun no longer shines so intensely, I resume my work. And to these simple country folk it is amusing to observe, to pause before me and to express their astonishment, at seeing me work; it's not part of their comprehension that "amo [master] Ramon" holds a plow, being a student from Manila and a "gentleman."

I have also two carabao and I care for them with great solicitude. The idea that they can die frightens me, because if that

should come to pass, all my spirits, my hopes and my dreams will be buried with them. Lord, preserve them!^[48]

By far the most common system of sugar farming in Negros was owner or employee management of a hacienda of salaried workers. In 1911 Renacimiento Filipino published an article describing operations on a 2,700-hectare estate (one-third devoted to sugar) owned by the de la Rama interests in Bago. Under overall supervision of an administrator, the hacienda was broken up into eight units, each under the control of an encargado and each with its own complement of fields, mill, and workers. The administrator kept the books, oversaw the machine shop, supervised distribution of tools, and allocated use of the hacienda's three tractors. Encargados oversaw foremen, or cabos , responsible for the daily work activities of the hacienda's seven hundred permanent employees (duma'an, jornaleros ) who tilled fields, ran tram cars (bagones or bagonitas ), and operated mills. With variations in scale, machinery, and top administration, this plantation represents the typical sugar farm structure of Negros from the mid-nineteenth century to the advent of central milling.^[49]

A chasm divided the Negrense hacendero families socially and economically from their workers. Some physical distinctions may have surfaced to separate the planter class from its more "indio-looking" help, but such differentiation was more likely a matter of social perception than of empirical reality. No clear racial division such as that between the Caribbean white planter and the black field hand or the migrant Hawaiian kanaka and the Australian planter existed. The gulf in Negros remained social, economic, and, increasingly, cultural. True, some bonds of paternalism formed on Negros haciendas, yet such ties usually remained at their core pragmatic and contractual rather than socially intimate—discipline could not have been maintained otherwise. The distinction between those who did manual labor and those who did not was the cutting edge of a differentiation in wealth, education, mobility, and wider economic opportunity.^[50]

The permanent work force of the hacienda included persons with a variety of skills, responsibilities, and remuneration. The encargado, usually a relative or trusted employee of the owner, acted as hacendero in his absence and on bigger estates enjoyed a salary that allowed him and his family to live in a home of permanent materials. The following wry description, taken from Echaúz, illuminates the role of the estate supervisor (encargado or cabo-cabo):

Heart and soul of the little hacienda where he ordains and arranges is the factotum, he who must know everything, he who overlooks nothing. . . .

At dawn and dusk, he rings the bell, calls the roll with a thundering voice, distributes the work of the hacienda, and puts checks where he should not. . . .

Riding a nag of little worth, he uses a European saddle, he accompanies his bosses to town or to nearby haciendas, and looks after the fighting cocks bound for fiestas of greater importance.

During the cockfight he does not lose sight of the cocks held by the most trusted workers. . . . He collects the money if the cock wins and pays if things go badly.

Knowledgeable about the lands of the hacienda, he consults his boss in passing (as a courtesy) about the work of the following day; after a brief conversation, he handles all civil matters—and some more not civil—reads letters, writes, adjusts accounts, and officiates, once in a while, as a Cupid without bow and arrow.

Responsible for his actions, sometimes he is the intermediary between the worker who asks something for his sick mother, dead father or uncle, and the owner who pays. . . .

He distributes rice among the workers, which always results in a reduced quantity, something similar to the miracle of the Loaves and Fishes.

His handling of that cereal makes him friends and gives him influence, and when the owner complains about how quickly it is consumed, he always attributes the shrinkage to robbery, mice, or some other simple and innocent cause.^[51]

Cabos carried out encargado's orders, providing formal and informal leadership and liaison between hacienda management and the labor force. If the encargado might sometimes have been a European, the cabo was always a native Visayan. According to Echaúz, the cabo lived closer to hacienda worker families, in a nipa house only somewhat better than their own. Often literate, he held supervisory responsibility for day-to-day agricultural activities but did not do manual labor; he received two or three times more pay than the most senior duma'an. Other personnel on the plantation included the maestrillos who supervised the crystallization of muscovado sugar, the machinists, and clerks, all of whom received pay according to their skills. A tax survey of 1894 indicated that Chinese immigrants may have constituted a significant portion of the work force at sugar mills.^[52]

The bulk of the permanent labor force (duma'an) consisted of semiskilled workers, from as young as six to an advanced age, who prepared and maintained fields and looked after carabao and other stock. Duma'an cut

cane points from sugar stalks, weeded around young ratoons (plant stools), and saw to the repair of buildings and. carts. The number of workers depended on the size of the plantation, from as few as two or three up to hundreds of individuals; however, work varied little on all the estates. Living on or near the hacienda in nipa houses, duma'an were employed year-round, but they received little pay. Wages on sugar estates remain one of the more confusing and mysterious matters, because they varied so much. Foreman lists the duma'an salary at P4 per month in 1890; Landor places it at 25 cents per week, plus board, in 1902; and the Manila Times set it at P. 50 a day in 1919. None of these figures took into account use of land upon which a worker might build his house or the availability of rice and cash loans, which also figured in the salary equation. Often, the hacienda ran a store at which duma'an, isolated from the towns, could purchase necessities on credit; interest charges often produced debts that lasted for years. Salary thus became meaningless, for duma'an essentially ended up as subsistence workers on estates. So tied did workers become to individual haciendas that some sales of estates included all buildings, machinery, field crops, and the help.^[53]

November to April was the peak labor season: workers had to cut cane, make sugar, and put down a new crop simultaneously. Permanent workers could not handle all these burdens, and planters had to employ temporary help. To Panay, Cebu, Bohol, and other, smaller, offshore islands, hacenderos sent their agents with advance wages (antesipo or anticipo ) to enlist migrant labor (sacarias ) to come to Negros for from three to six months to cut and carry cane to the mills in exchange for a salary slightly higher than that of duma'an. Planters returned to the same poor Visayan communities annually to hire sacarias, or they engaged contractors (contratistas, capataz ) to make those arrangements. Contractors often recruited workers from their own home town, loaned them money, paid their salaries and their transportation to and from Negros, and supplied their food and necessities on the haciendas. Opportunities for contratistas to exploit sacadas abounded; however, economic necessity drew many migrant workers back to Negros regularly, as long as they could handle the field work.

Plantation work was (and still is) repetitious, dangerous, and physically rigorous, and only a closely supervised, industrious labor force could produce sugar profitably. Obtaining such a work force persisted as the ongoing challenge for planters throughout the period. Complicating the problem was their need to obtain such labor cheaply. For Negros sugar to contend successfully on the world market required that production costs be kept to a minimum, especially after the onset in the 1880s of the challenge from European beet sugar. Since Philippine yields per hectare

remained the lowest among the world's sugar-producing areas, maintaining a permanent poorly paid labor force on the haciendas and seasonally bringing in low-cost, migrant labor appeared to hacenderos the most reasonable solution to their dilemma.^[54]

Negros did not originally possess an available pool of hacienda labor, since the peasant population planted rice in the south and swiddens in the interior. Hence, workers had to be imported to begin sugar planting. To expand the agricultural frontier required that more labor come in, that the Negrense peasants move to the haciendas, and/or that the aboriginal population join the plantation work force. Labor migrated from other islands, and some independent farmers were absorbed into the hacienda system as their lands were usurped. Peasant farmers had a choice either of moving to new homesteads, working on plantations, or joining one of the bands of outlaws and cattle rustlers that preyed upon haciendas and towns. Recollect friars attempted for both religious and economic reasons to persuade the aboriginal population to become part of lowland society and the sugar work force, an effort at which the priests had little success. Curiously, Philippine Constabulary officers in the American period sought the same goal, in part as a matter of public order, in part to "civilize the natives." The constabulary, too, failed in this endeavor; thus, migrants and locally absorbed peasants fed the island's plantation labor force.^[55]

Once on plantations, workers usually found themselves bound there for life. Local judicial and executive authority, justices of the peace, and town officials were selected by and usually from among hacenderos and those who worked for them in the communities and on estates, so that legal controls supported the domination of the sugar elite. Runaway workers could be jailed for debt and returned to their amo, and laws still on the books in the American years supported these actions. The pattern of chronic indebtedness and lack of an alternative means of livelihood were the chief forces holding duma'an on plantations; however, in a frontier setting, with their farms remote from legal supervision and restraint, planters sometimes employed force as well. White noted that two legal codes existed on Negros: one for planters and one for the poor. Hacenderos possessed firearms and used them, along with other forms of physical abuse, to keep workers docile and acclimated to the discipline of hacienda work. Laborers might occasionally flee to a neighboring work place, but they seldom escaped from the system.^[56]

If planters easily controlled the permanent work force on their haciendas, they had less success coping with the sacadas who came annually to work the cane harvests. When the first migrant workers traveled to Negros remains uncertain; however, they probably did not arrive before

production made very rapid advances in the 1870s. Loney does not mention them in his extensive account of Negros in 1861, and one of the first references to their periodic journeys to the island appears in del Pan's description published in 1878. Ideally migrant laborers offered hacenderos a high degree of economic flexibility, for they worked only in response to seasonal demand. In practice, however, sacadas proved less malleable than duma'an, demanding more money for their part-time labors and working only when they chose to. Planters and their spokesmen often complained of the scarcity of labor, meaning that sacadas came in insufficient numbers to meet planter desires. Hacenderos became desperate enough to give advances to migrants and contratistas, although sometimes sacadas simply took the money and did not show up or left the fields early. Planters frequently spoke of a need for vagrancy laws as a way of coping with this flight, for, they presumed, culprits took the money and spent it on various vices in the towns.

Some disreputable workers and contractors may, indeed, have set out to defraud hacenderos, but others may simply have fled certain haciendas because conditions of employment and living became intolerable. A government report of 1911 stated (without intended irony):

In Occidental Negros local conditions seem to be the chief causes of the crimes against chastity, which are designated as being the most frequent in said province, in the same categorical line as crimes against property and person.

They are mostly committed at the time of the cutting of the sugarcane, and particularly, at the rice harvest time—from November to April—owing to the fact that during the sugar-grinding season a great number of laborers are gathered on the estates with their families, who live in crowded and narrow dwellings [quartels ]. . . .

In the said dwellings, which would hardly hold 3 or 4 persons, 3 or 4 families live and sleep closely and promiscuously, there being no separation of men from women, of the married from the unmarried, of old men from young men. As a resuit of the immorality growing out of this mode of living, the crimes of adultery, abduction, rape, and seduction are committed.^[57]

Hacenderos never completely solved the dilemma of controlling migrant labor, and another often-heard planter plea in the twentieth century was for importation of Chinese and Japanese workers, who had a reputation of industriousness and docility. Americans;, ever fearful of an inundation of "Asiatics," always dismissed such demands.^[58]

Despite incidental difficulties with labor supply, the Negros plantation system functioned well, to the advantage of hacenderos. Planters ruled absolutely, managing estate finances, fixing the schedule of agricultural activities, making technical choices, and setting work requisites. Few restrictions, save those of the marketplace, interfered with their control over property and workers. Colonial governments for the most part chose to support agricultural expansion by, among other things, not meddling with management of haciendas; meanwhile, the Church sided with hacenderos in almost all matters, for parish priests depended mainly on their largesse for survival. Negros plantations came to resemble, in many respects, those of the American antebellum South and the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century West Indies: worlds unto themselves, with the hacendero the unchallenged master. Flexibility built into the labor system allowed larger hacenderos to expand or contract their plantings according to market demand. Furthermore, in periods of economic downturn enterprising planters profited by absorbing the lands of the failing ones.^[59]

Wealth generated by sugar farming served as a springboard into other activities as well. The Valderramas, for example, went into lumber, for although large stands of Negros timber were cleared to make way for plantations, the northern region from Cadiz to Escalante became in the second decade of the twentieth century one of the first important Philippine lumber-producing areas. Lesser endeavors included one organized in 1919 by a group of Negrense planters to build a hotel near the health spa at Mambucal Springs in Murcia. Bigger entrepreneurs extended their empires beyond Negros, to Iloilo, Manila, the Visayan region, and the international arena. Children of the planter aristocracy not choosing to enter farming often used public and private primary and secondary schools in the province as a springboard to more advanced study in Panay, Manila, Spain, and the United States. A corps of Negrense professionals—doctors, lawyers, engineers, and technicians—serviced the island's communities and entered the ranks of government employees. Privileged families exploited sugar farming to create new economic activities and to reduce their dependency on agriculture as their. sole source of livelihood. Their wealth presented them with the opportunity to participate in the social and political life of the archipelago, increasingly focused on the capital city of Manila; and Negrenses like Jose Luzuriaga, Rafael Alunan, and Esperidion Guanco became leading politicians during the early American period.^[60]

Conversion of the Negros frontier into a plantation society represented a complicated process involving both foreigners and native Filipinos from all sectors of society: pioneer farmers, boatmen, rural workers, entrepreneurs, agricultural specialists, representatives of organized religion, and

government officials. From all these elements Negros society developed, similar in many ways to the rest of Filipino lowland society, yet different in others because of the nature of the frontier experience with its opportunities for the accumulation of enormous wealth. Despite rough surroundings, poor roads, and an atmosphere of violence, visitors wrote glowingly of the opulent planter lifestyle. A Negros planter might walk around his hacienda all day with a pistol on his hip, but at night he would shed it and dress in elegant clothes to dance with his family at a lively ball, one of the province's favorite entertainments.

Absence of societal and governmental restraints in a climate of unfettered capitalism permitted the lavish expenditure of resources, land grabbing, and exploitation and abuse of labor to go unquestioned. Surviving and thriving on the frontier entailed great risks, and many entrepreneurs did not succeed. Those who did felt that the risks taken justified their monopolization of wealth. Further, absenteeism and use of migrant labor on Negros reduced the sense of paternalism that marked other agricultural regions. Workers on Negros probably felt less sense of security than those in other, more settled agricultural regions. One son of Negros in this period simply and eloquently expressed their plight: "To the laboring class or the peasants belonged the miseries of life."^[61]

Pampanga: The Formation of a Tenant Society

In 1863, after a disastrous flood along the Paruao River, residents of Magalang, Pampanga, rebuilt their town. center several kilometers to the south, away from that tributary of the Rio Chico, on its present location dose to the foot of Mount Arayat. This transfer situated their settlement in the midst of an expanding region of sugar farming that included Mabalacat, Porac, Mexico, Arayat, and Angeles, as well as northern parts of San Fernando and Bacolor. In general, sugar cultivation moved onto higher, drier ground, forested and remote from the original riverine core area where rice farming still predominated. Wherever growing sugar proved feasible, Capampangan of the mid-nineteenth century took up that endeavor. The new Magalang, its poblacion laid out in a symmetrical grid pattern of streets with a central plaza, became a prosperous sugar community boasting a stone church and substantial government buildings.^[62]

Pampanga exhibited a far less dramatic response to the upturn in sugar business than did western Negros. A comparison of figures in table 8 with those in table 5 reveals that, whereas population in Negros rose more than ten times between 1845 and 1918, the population in Pampanga did not even double between 1852 and 1918. Furthermore, Negros had three times as many municipalities in the latter year as it did at mid-century, while the

number of Pampanga's towns did not change. Considering that the latter province began the era as a much more settled region, already well populated with many long-established villages, it could not sustain the same spectacular rate of growth as did Negros. Pampanga also encompassed a smaller area than did Negros and could not expand to the same degree. In areas of Pampanga where sugar came to play an important role, however, population shifts over the period were impressive (table 9). For the Capampangan of the time, parts of northern and western Pampanga and southern Tarlac represented a real frontier. Because of Pampanga's long commercial associations with Manila, other economic factors besides a concentration on sugar figured in the growth pattern of its towns. The Capampangan produced a variety of foodstuffs—fish, vegetables, and nipa wine and vinegar—as well as craft items—baskets, pottery, and ironware—for the archipelago's markets, and communities that specialized in such products continued to maintain a strong local economy throughout the period. Despite this economic diversity, however, towns with the most lands suitable for large-scale sugar cultivation tended to swell more rapidly than did older rice municipalities.^[63]

A major change occurred with the 1892 opening of the Pampanga portion of the Manila-Dagupan railroad. This line ran through the middle

of the province, passing between Apalit, San Fernando, Angeles, Mabalacat, and on through Tarlac, so that the latter four towns gained direct access to the port city for their sugar. Additional spurs to Magalang (1906), Arayat (1914), and Floridablanca (1918), plus completion of many kilometers of all-weather roads, largely eliminated dependence on water transport for sugar. These additions opened up new portions of interior Pampanga to sugar production while diminishing the prominence of Guagua as a sugar terminal. Angeles and San Fernando emerged as the two most thriving commercial centers of the province, and the latter replaced Bacolor as provincial capital in 1904. Expansion reached into neighboring Tarlac Province and probably slowed population growth in Pampanga, for numerous Capampangan migrated to towns in Tarlac, especially Capas, Bamban, Concepcion, and Tarlac, from the mid-1800s on. By 1918 these four towns had become adjuncts to sugar-growing northwestern Pampanga.^[64]

Settlement of Pampanga's sugar region resembled the pattern found in Negros in several ways. Large tracts of forested land gave way to extensive sugar plantations as entrepreneurs directed groups of workers to dear jungle and plant cane. Small towns and mission settlements became large, flourishing communities, and a feeling of wilderness disappeared as aboriginal Negritos retreated to neighboring mountainous regions. Yldefonso de Aragon found in 1818 the northern part of the province sparsely populated, heavily forested, and teeming with game. By 1880 Frenchman Alfred Marche visited a transformed northern Pampanga and southern Tarlac of sugar plantations interspersed with occasional cattle ranches. Because of rinderpest, the ranchers, mainly Spaniards in Porac, Floridablanca, and Lubao, gave up stock raising in the 1890s and switched to sugar.^[65] Sufficient public land for additional plantations continued to be available in Pampanga into the new century, although depression and war slowed growth from the mid-1890s to 1909; it picked up again only about 1915.

Perhaps the most notable difference between the frontier experiences of Pampanga and Negros was that in Pampanga expansion occurred mainly under the aegis of an indigenous elite rather than under that of outsiders. Capampangan planters had grown cane and produced sugar for a century on lands contiguous to the new territory; moreover, they controlled a local labor force and possessed the legal expertise to acquire unclaimed real estate. In the 1830s the landowning group consisted of a traditional indigenous elite increasingly infiltrated by Chinese mestizos, but ninety years later it was overwhelmingly Chinese mestizo with a sprinkling of Spanish mestizos, Spaniards, and Tagalogs. Despite this change, however, landlords still remained closely linked to one another through ties of

intermarriage, a commonly shared Pampangan identity, and decades of economic interaction and interdependence, for newcomers augmented the old elite rather than superseding it. After 1849 mestizos largely abandoned the commercial sector and limited their pursuits mainly to farming and to supplying credit for agriculture. Through the course of these transformations they assumed the culture of a hispanized upper class. A classic example of this metamorphosis was Ceferino Joven, related by marriage to the prominent de Leon, Liongson, and. Ventura families and a planter, owner of a pilon factory, and patron of local theater, who began his career in the retail trade in Binondo, the Chinese district of Manila.^[66]

Pampanga had far fewer Spaniards among its landowners than did Negros, for reasons not entirely clear. Perhaps general unavailability of large tracts, save in the western section, and a tight hold on property by indigenous landowners discouraged European investment in Pampanga; or maybe difficulty in obtaining labor prevented foreign entree to sugar fanning. Names of just a few Spanish families—Gil, Toledo, Puig, Valdes, Arrastia, and Herreros among the most prominent—appear on turn-of-the-century lists of those holding sugar properties, and those who remained after the advent of American rule seem to have rather quietly integrated into the local population or taken up residence elsewhere in the Philippines. Among those of Spanish descent owning land in the province (in Floridablanca and Magalang) who chose to reside in the capital was Trinidad H. Pardo de Tavera, an original member of the U.S. Philippine Commission. Aside from the Spaniards, few outsiders joined the provincial upper class. In the nineteenth century a small number of Tagalogs, including Don Pio Nepomuceno in Angeles and the prominent politician Felipe Buencamino in Apalit, married daughters of wealthy sugar farmers, but they remained the exceptions. Even fewer Americans became planters, and one discerns little of the cosmopolitan mixture that characterized Negrense hacenderos.^[67]

The Chinese who returned after midcentury did not join or interact socially and politically with the landholding elite, even though these new arrivals did come to perform an important economic function. They grew in number from 153 in 1848 to 1,100 by 1893, and they clustered in the three towns of Guagua, San Fernando, and Angeles, where they remained registered on their own gremios and chose their own gobernadorcillos. Though by law they could not farm, they did participate in the sugar industry in several ways. Some bought sugar in the province and transported it to their contacts at refineries in Manila; others operated distilleries that converted molasses into rum; and many of the poorer Chinese laborers ran the steam machinery on sugar farms. Finally, as the Chinese reclaimed

their role as itinerant peddlers, they drove their mestizo competitors into agriculture.

Sugar expansion, then, was undertaken mainly by the same group of planters and their descendants who farmed sugar and rice in southern portions of Pampanga. This phenomenon had several important consequences. First, the Pampangan elite, bound early by common ethnic ties and through intermarriage, utilized different sources of credit to facilitate their agricultural expansion. They depended much more on the pacto de retro for capital than they did on such outside credit sources as the foreign export companies that supplied loans to Negrenses. As noted earlier, the pacto de retro could be used under certain circumstances, particularly between rich and poor, as a means to acquire land, and historians have tended to regard it as an especially pernicious instrument. As a contract between approximate equals, friends, or relatives, however, it could serve to raise cash for additional agricultural and commercial endeavors. Such contracts proved a pervasive form of credit because with them both buyer and seller obtained many options. They could lease the land, work it, rent it to others, or use such contracts as a first step toward a final sale. Notarial registers for Pampanga contain many more entries for pacto de retro sales than do the ones for Negros. Up to 1920, even as other credit instruments became available, some Pampangan farmers still continued to employ this older form.^[68]

Retro sales involved parcels of land as large as several hundred hectares and as small as two or three. One contract in the records ran for thirty-eight years, but the usual arrangement lasted between two and ten. Wills of some wealthy Capampangan show that substantial portions of their estate consisted of land held with right of repurchase, land they nevertheless bequeathed to their heirs. Many farmers worked their own fields under pacto de retro for long periods; however, it would appear that few gave them up as a result of foreclosure.

Another example of the Capampangan ability to find more local sources for investment is their use of the rural credit associations, created by the insular government in 1914. These institutions were underfinanced and required iron-clad titles before granting loans; however, they were fairly widespread and effective among the Capampangan with their closer sense of community. In 1920 Pampanga possessed sixteen branches of these credit associations, compared to only two in western Negros; a decade later the ratio had grown to twenty to four.^[69]

A second consequence of the way frontier Pampanga became settled was that farmers tended to have scattered holdings rather than big haciendas. Large tracts of public land in western Lubao on the border of Bataan

Province as well as in interior Porac seem to have been granted outright or sold to Spaniards by the colonial government during the first half of the nineteenth century. One such parcel, Hacienda Mamada de Pio, consisted of 190 quinoñes (532 hectares) belonging to Don Felino Gil, the first of several generations of his family to settle in the area. Most of the other Spanish grantees sold their lands to native :farmers who broke them up into smaller lots. Still, Porac, western Lubao, and, later, Floridablanca (created out of portions of those two towns) harbored the province's biggest estates, one or two as large as one thousand hectares, often referred to as "haciendas." To this region to take up farming in 1854 came Gil's nephew, Roberto Toledo, from Valencia, Spain. By the end of the century his son, also named Roberto, had enhanced the family's holdings to more than three thousand hectares, some in very large pieces. The younger Toledo stayed on as one of the most progressive sugar planters in the province.

Apart from the Toledos and a few others, the overwhelming majority of landowners, even if they possessed extensive lands, cultivated smaller plots, often in more than one town. The biggest fields, which might run to 100 or 200 hectares, usually existed in later settled frontier areas of the province, in Mabalacat, Angeles, Magalang, and the towns of southern Tarlac, for example. A sample of data from wills and other documents for the years 1889 to 1896 reveals holdings ranging from 13 to 1,033 hectares, but such estates included mixed rice and sugar lands, lands held in fee simple and through pacto retro contracts, and land in and out of production. A 1910 survey showed 419 sugar planters farming 14,903 hectares, an average of 35.6 hectares per farmer, but this year represented only the first in an upturn following an extended period of depression, and probably more and larger plantations became reactivated subsequently. The tendency among landowners to sire large families and the prevalent system of equal inheritance among children tended to reduce the size of even the larger pieces.^[70]

Capampangan raised sugar through one other arrangement leaseholding—under which a lessee (inquilino , or mamuisan in Capampangan) rented land for a fixed price in cash or in pilones of sugar. Properties rented sometimes included machinery and warehouses, and in most cases the lessee acted as a landlord and engaged aparceros to farm smaller portions of his leasehold. Notarial registers contain entries for some rentals as small as several hectares and for others as great as several hundred, with the majority for parcels larger than twenty. Rent periods ran from four years to indefinite time spans. Straight leases appear to have involved two types of lessors: those either by age or infirmity no longer able to farm themselves or wealthy entrepreneurs interested in pursuing other economic

endeavors. Lessees included some of the more energetic farmers, those seeking to expand their planting beyond their own holdings. While the number of farm rentals remained small compared to that for absolute sales, it should be remembered that numerous farmers also leased land, in this case their own, through clauses of the pacto de retro contracts so frequently employed in the province.

A third consequence was that owners commonly possessed both rice and sugar lands and sometimes kept one foot in the north and one in the south. Although the northwest, being higher and drier, concentrated on sugar, and the delta on rice, all towns save two or three devoted at least some lands to both crops. Further, in times of poor sugar markets, owners and their tenants with experience in rice cultivation preserved a degree of flexibility in crop choice that could alleviate their distress.

A fourth consequence of the settlement pattern was that Capampangan transferred their traditional labor system to newly tamed lands. The samacan contract had originally evolved in the delta's rice-growing agriculture, and the elite subsequently adapted this arrangement to sugar production. Whereas with rice, landowners and casamac squared accounts in kind, with sugar they did so in coin. One of the earliest available descriptions of customary sugar contracts appears in Buzeta and Bravo's work of 1850, and turn-of-the-century portrayals by Sawyer and Forman reveal little change in their stipulations during the succeeding half century.

Under the terms of the contract, the landlord normally furnished cash loans, land, cane cuttings, processing equipment, and mill workers; the aparcero contributed his own tools, labor, and draft animals. Tenants planted, harvested, and transported the cane to the mill, where they assisted with the sugar processing. Sometimes, too, they had to supply half the cane cuttings. They paid and fed any additional hands required, but most often casamac relied on the sugu system of mutual help, thus reducing their expenses to the feeding of sugu during harvest time. After the completion of the sugar making the landowner sold the pilones to the Chinese merchant or his representative and then settled in cash with the aparcero. Proceeds were divided fifty-fifty, unless the landlord provided the carabao, in which case the tenant received only 25 percent.

Further variations within the contract depended on the quality of land and the degree of access to transportation networks. In practice, tenant farmers rarely profited from sugar farming, and almost all counted on credit from owners to survive through the agricultural season. Whatever the specifics of the contractual relationship, landowners monopolized profits because they owned the milling equipment, did the accounting, sold the sugar, added the molasses to their own share, set prices paid to tenants, and

supplied agricultural loans. A detailed survey conducted in Pampanga around 1915 confirms that few tenants gained the opportunity to better their socioeconomic position, and it proved easier for a landlord to become a casamac than for the reverse. Occasionally aparceros emerged as small proprietors, but troubles for sugar from the 1890s on, especially the onset of rinderpest, seriously reduced tenants' expectations in the twentieth century.^[71] Scarcity drove the price of animals out of the reach of many aparceros, and their income from sugar farming suffered accordingly.

At several points the 1915 report implies that sugar tenants fared better than rice tenants, but it is difficult to confirm this speculation because many casamac grew both crops either on alternate plots or at alternate times. Tenants often borrowed both cash and rice and repaid them both, although landlords usually charged more interest on rice. Since sugar tenants dealt more in a cash market, however, they seem to have held a slighly better chance to improve themselves than did the rice farmers, who lived more purely in a world of subsistence farming. In times of prosperity farming sugar offered more abundant opportunities for profit, while during depressions landlords provided some economic safety, and sugar tenants sometimes temporarily switched to rice.

Sugar planters in Pampanga made little use of migrant workers, at least before passage of the Payne-Aldrich Act. References to wage labor on sugar lands do not date back to the nineteenth century, and early twentiethcentury observations stress the prevalence of tenantry in cane production. With the upturn in the American market and the move away from pilon sugar, the bigger hacenderos began to import seasonal workers from northern Luzon and a few from the Visayas. The advent of centrals further raised the need for such help, which numbered in the tens of thousands by the time the new era commenced; nevertheless, in 1920 tenant farmers and their families still served as the major source of planting and harvesting labor.^[72]

A final implication of Pampanga's settlement pattern was that planters carried to new lands their old forms of sugar production, methods difficult to change because of extant socioeconomic relations. During the frontier era sugar output in Negros grew by 751 times, compared to only 5.8 times in Pampanga. The latter area already turned out substantial quantities of sugar at the outset and could not accelerate as rapidly as the former, which started almost from scratch; still, Negros consistently proved more responsive to new market demands. Greater influence from outsiders on its economic life meant it more quickly turned to new machinery and made more rapid adjustments in processing techniques than did Pampanga. The more independent Negrense planter continued freer to innovate than the Pampangan landowner bound by a complex web of commercial and labor

relations. The aparceria system possessed social as well as economic dimensions, and landholders could not easily retrain their semi-independent peasant labor force or hire an alternate source of workers.

Between 1836 and 1920, sugar seemed to transform Negros more than it did Pampanga, but appearances aside, Pampangan society altered significantly. The landowning class became more oriented toward the business dimensions of farm management, prospered despite the depression at the turn of the century, and widened the social and economic gap between themselves and their poor tenants. The upper class earned a reputation for their extravagant lifestyle, hospitality, and cultural achievements, and the province itself became recognized as one of the most progressive and wealthiest in the islands. Despite similarities in social structure and geographic extension, the up-to-date province of 1920 hardly resembled the sleepy agricultural region of nine decades earlier.

To prosper within the cash-crop environment of the nineteenth century, Capampangan required economic acumen and managerial skills largely unknown to the eighteenth-century cacique described by Basco. In this new climate foreclosures and farm failures occurred, and on occasion former landowners ended up as tenant farmers. The pacto de retro presented dangers as well as opportunities for enterprising planters, and all agriculturalists had to sell their sugar on a competitive market. Purchase and maintenance of new processing equipment, employment of mill workers (often Chinese), keeping of tenants' accounts, and, perhaps, leasing land all demanded a new level of ability from planters and made them as much managers as agronomists. A talent for business, knowledge of market conditions, and comprehension of technical changes not only separated the nineteenth-century hacenderos from their predecessors, but also determined the degree of success planters had in the shifting economic conditions of the era.

Landed families in Pampanga did not comprise a single, homogeneous economic group; rather, they fit along a continuum that ranged from extremely rich hacenderos down to inquilinos not much better off than their share tenants. At the beginning of the era, much more uniformity characterized the principalia, but the growth of a cash-crop economy occasioned more differentiation as those with entrepreneurial skill, ambition, and good fortune progressed in a climate favorable to native capitalism. By the end of the period, one could usefully separate the elite into three rough groups: extremely wealthy entrepreneurs, average landholders, and urban professionals.

Almost all the very rich created their fortunes by supplying credit mainly through the pacto de retro: loaning money with land as collateral in good times and bad offered the surest way to profit. In the mid-

nineteenth century, Jose Mariano Panlilio of Mexico, Pampanga, and Don Vicente Lim-ongco of Guagua both aggregated extensive holdings through pacto contracts, and by the 1890s a Spaniard named Jose Puig, after a decade of buying land with pacto de retro, established a thriving business that included sugar mills and other farming equipment. During the first years of the twentieth century, Mariano Pamintuan of Angeles converted his retro buying into an estate of some 3,227 hectares and emerged as one of the richest men in the province. Others who achieved great wealth dealing in land and credit included Jose L. de Leon and Roman Valdes of Bacolor, Manuel Escaler of Apalit, and Isidoro Santos of San Fernando. The truly wealthy knew as well how to benefit from harsh economic times: entrepreneurs like Pamintuan, de Leon, Santos, Manuel Urquico, Valdes, and Escaler purchased large parcels of land cheaply through absolute and pacto de retro sales just after the Philippine Revolution. Besides providing credit local magnates invested in other commercial ventures; de Leon, for example, joined such big planters as Honorio Ventura of Bacolor and Miguel Heras of Floridabianca as well as prominent businessman E. J. Valdes of Tarlac in founding the Pampanga Electric Light and Power Company in 1919.^[73]

Pamintuan, de Leon, Toledo, and Augusto Gonzalez probably did not amass fortunes as grand as those of Esteban de la Rama, Eugenio Lopez, or Teodoro Yulo; however, aside from such Negrense moguls, wealthy Capampangan compared favorably with other great southern planters. Those Capampangan, along with a handful of others, ranked among the wealthiest in the islands and could truly be called sugar barons. By the end of the nineteenth century, Capampangan had earned a reputation throughout the Philippines for wealth and ostentation. When novelist-national hero Jose Rizal wanted to indicate in his classic Noli me Tangere the immense fortune of his character Capitan Tiago, he identified this Chinese mestizo as one of the big landowners of Pampanga.

Comparisons of Pampangan landholders with those in other provinces is difficult, given the paucity of similar information for provinces throughout the archipelago; however, as an example, Soledad Borromeo-Buehler notes that during the Philippine Revolution the very rich in land-poor Cavite Province, just south of Manila, owned estates of P50,000. At about this time, the will of Don Florentino Dayrit of Angeles, married to Doña Antonia Pamintuan, revealed assets of more than P176,000. Dayrit was rich by local standards but certainly not the wealthiest in his town. From another comparative vantage, a worker in a sugar mill earned 50 centavos a day.^[74]

No measure precisely defines boundaries for membership in the landholding class of Pampanga, especially at the lower end of the scale. Sugar

planters generally did not do manual farm labor, but even those peasant proprietors owning perhaps one to ten hectares might choose to contract laborers or rent their fields rather than work them personally. Productivity of land varied so greatly because of fertility and other physical factors that amount of hectarage owned did not always differentiate landholder from peasant proprietor either. Net income figures rarely surface in the data from the era; therefore, one gains only an impressionistic view of what constituted in provincial terms a landlord.

The following estimates of farm income of three Pampanga planters, each of whom owned a small sugar mill, appeared in testimony before the U.S. Congress in 1905:

As part of the same testimony, a hacendero from Floridablanca estimated that 95 percent of Pampangan planters produced between 20 and 200 tons of sugar annually. By way of income comparison, in the same period Pampanga's governor received annually P3,200; the provincial fiscal (attorney) made P2,700; the provincial treasurer, an American, collected P4,800, and a justice of the Supreme Court of the Philippines earned P20,000.^[75]

No data exist for this time on the amount taken in by a peasant proprietor; however, in 1913, when economic conditions had improved considerably within the province, a report indicated a range of incomes for such families of 100-300 pesos from agriculture. If they received less than a hundred pesos they had to supplement the amount with income from off-farm work.^[76]

Given the absence of savings institutions in the archipelago, the elite of the province invested their earnings in farmland, urban real estate, farm equipment, warehouses, jewelry, and other negotiable items. Agricultural property in particular provided the most security and served as an important element in conferring social status, and ownership remained concentrated in the approximately 10 percent of the population that comprised Pampanga's landed elite.

Besides holding all economic power, members of Pampanga's landholding families dominated those political and bureaucratic offices available to indigenes under the colonial regimes. Few of the ultrarich took time to

participate personally in local politics either under the Spanish or the American regime, concentrating, instead, on managing their vast fortunes. They left local political offices to their less well-heeled townmates (kabalen ), especially those who formed the landholding class of the province. For example, Ceferino Joven, gobernadorcillo of the old capital town of Bacolor, became the first American-appointed, then elected, governor of Pampanga. He was succeeded by Macario Arnedo (1904-12), of Apalit's most influential planter family that included prominent Tagalog politician Felipe Buencamino. Honorio Ventura, governor from 1914 to 1921, subsequently became secretary of the interior in Manila and, briefly, acting governor-general, as well as an opponent of Manuel Quezon in archipelagowide political circles. Members of less wealthy and less notable families filled other offices, becoming municipal mayors and councilmen and barrio lieutenants. Strategic jobs like justice of the peace, notary, and head of the telegraph office—all positions that conferred local control and provided access to information—remained the monopoly of the planter class or those in their service.^[77]

Access to educational facilities in the province and beyond buttressed elite dominance of local political and economic power, for the poor seldom had the chance to attend school beyond the first two mandatory primary grades. Americans placed great stress on public schooling, but the major beneficiaries of their efforts were the sons and daughters of the rich. Many landholders furthered their education at colleges and universities in Manila and Spain and, later on, in the United States. This educational advantage allowed the wealthy to turn the legal system to their benefit, to function in a complicated market environment, and to undertake such complex activities as registering property according to the stipulations of new land laws. The cadastral survey of sugar lands in Pampanga was largely completed by 1935, and the program worked almost exclusively to the benefit of the landholding elite.^[78]

Because of Pampanga's smaller size and better roads, Capampangan landowners focused more of their social life on town centers than did the planters of Negros. Churches, schools, rnarkets, and stores clustered near the poblacion, and sometimes residence there kept them closer to their scattered holdings. Wealthier landowners often maintained a residence in town and a country place near their farms, traveling between the two as their social schedules and business demands dictated.

The largest town homes usually contained a sala grand enough to host balls, the favorite provincial form of upper-class entertainment, often sponsored by such social clubs as the Circuito Recreativo Pampangueño of San Fernando. The social occasions provided more than mere amusement,

for they also created an environment to encourage the marriages among the elite that held their property within a tight circle of families, despite the practice of equal inheritance among all the children. The endless round of dances and parties that introduced travelers and outsiders to the elite of the province ironically served the function of perpetuating Pampanga's landholding class as a closed society.^[79]

In the second half of the nineteenth century towns already boasted regular mail service and telegraphic communication with Manila, and by 1900 Bacolor, Guagua, and Angeles claimed theaters for the performance of plays, especially zarzuelas , musicals written either in Spanish or in the local dialect. Temporary platforms set up in plazas allowed traveling drama companies to perform in other municipalities throughout the province. By 1913 automobiles traveled the local streets and all-weather roads, and before 1920 the larger towns featured boxing matches, jazz concerts, vaudeville shows, and silent movies. About this time electric lights started to appear in homes in central San Fernando, Guagua, and Angeles. The pull of urban life drew the provincial elite first to core areas of the province's most progressive towns and then, a select few, into the Manila orbit.

Urban activity and the educational system helped create an adjunct to the provincial upper class, a group of town-dwelling professionals and government functionaries who served the demands of the agricultural community. Lawyers, pharmacists, engineers, office workers, teachers, and minor officials found employment in the poblaciones, especially in Guagua, Bacolor, San Fernando, Angeles, and Tarlac, where commerce and legal business concentrated. A prominent example of this new category among the elite was the Abad Santos family. Vicente Abad Santos, the son of a merchant, received legal training and in the late nineteenth century practiced law in his native San Fernando. He was chosen to the position of juez de ganados (superintendent of livestock) and did well enough to acquire several residential lots and educate most of his children before he died in 1894. His eldest, Pedro, began his legal education at the prestigious Letran College in Manila.

To achieve full elite standing within the province and to hold higher political office persons in this professional group had to own agricultural land. For example, Honorio Ventura, ancestor of a later governor with the same name, was admitted to the bar in 1851 and practiced in Pampanga. He and his children improved the family's social status by transferring to sugar planting, which conferred the greatest prestige within the province. Similarly, among the children of Abad Santos, some became hacenderos, while three, Quirino, Jose, and the aforementioned Pedro, took up legal careers.^[80]

During the nineteenth century the standing of these urban professionals appeared modest, but in the twentieth it rose appreciably in the face of mounting commercial and political activity. In 1916 Attorney Pedro Abad Santos, though still not a landholder, was elected to the Philippine Assembly from Pampanga, and other of his contemporaries served as municipal mayors and in high provincial office. This group also supplied many prominent members of the provincial literati: poets, playwrights, essayists, and journalists who wrote in the dialect and in Spanish and made the province at the turn of the century and afterwards one of the most important cultural centers outside Manila. As the twentieth century progressed, Pampanga's elite began to shift their social and cultural orientation toward Manila and the United States, but up to 1920 the province still served as the focal point of their interest. Professionals and Chinese merchants made life in the urban centers of Pampanga comfortable, active, and profitable even as extraprovincial diversions appeared on the horizon.

The bustle of Pampanga's towns substantiates the prosperity sugar brought; nevertheless, as in Negros that wealth remained maldistributed, for while the landholding mestizo families grew rich, their indio tenants continued at the subsistence level. Hard data on the condition of Pampanga's peasantry in the nineteenth century is difficult to find, and those for the early twentieth prove spotty at best. Old peasants did not recall any improvement in their livelihood in the early twentieth century, and records do not reveal any success stories of peasants rising to landholding status. The samacan system, with its seasonal loans of cash and staples and the inheritability of family debt, kept tenants perennially at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder. Regardless of the paternalism inherent in the tenantlandlord relationship, catastrophes left the poor vulnerable. After battles of the Philippine-American War destroyed crops in Pampanga in 1900, starvation beset barrios of the province during the subsequent season.

Two notable changes took place in Pampanga between 1900 and 1910 under the impact of disastrous occurrences. First, as already mentioned, rich proprietors with cash to lend took advantage of the dearth of credit to increase their holdings. Their gains came at the expense of small proprietors and planters without sufficient resources to weather the continuous years of hardship. Unfortunately, no data exist on the number of landholders forced out of business at this time, and strong family support probably reduced the losses; furthermore, the government offered tax relief to stave off foreclosures. Nevertheless, enough landholders failed to allow Jose L. de Leon and others to profit from the downturn in the economy. Second, Pampangan farmers wherever possible shifted from sugar to rice cultivation. This temporary solution permitted them to im-

prove their subsistence and to enter the rice market once again. By the end of the decade and for the first time in years, Pampanga produced a surplus of rice. So long as sugar prices stayed depressed, planters stuck to rice, for despite its limited profitability, it allowed them to retain their relationships with their casamac.

The situation for muscovado remained so poor that, despite the passage of the Payne-Aldrich and Underwood bills, Capampangan devoted more attention to rice than to sugar production during the second decade of the twentieth century. A steady demand for the grain in the archipelago and a severe rice crisis in 1919 discouraged planters from returning to cane. An estimate made about 1890 placed hectarage in Pampanga devoted to rice at 51,732, to sugar at 36,252; in 1921 the figures were 72,099 to rice and 36,500 to sugar. The province's sugar planting had not grown in three decades—but change was imminent.^[81]

Access to American markets and the extraordinary wartime prices for sugar encouraged Capampangan to consider moving to better milling. Pasumil (Pampanga Sugar Mills, Inc.) was a central built with American money, the same interests that had constructed the factory at Canlubang, Laguna. Undoubtedly the fact that Pampangan planters had previously been shipping enough cane to extract 4,000 tons of sugar at this latter facility encouraged its owners to build a second plant in the north. Pasumil received strong encouragement from big planters Roberto Toledo III of Floridablanca and Martin Gonzales of Lubao and constructed the central near their haciendas; nevertheless, the company drew cane from all over Pampanga and as far away as Tarlac. Pasumil signed contracts with planters that split the output fifty-fifty and, to encourage farmers to begin milling with them, offered mortgages on their crops at 8 percent. The central experienced' few difficulties obtaining contracts and was an immediate success, shipping about 19,400 tons to American West Coast refineries by 1921. Its clientele subsequently included big Spanish and native planters as well as a few Americans, Warner, Barnes and Company, and the Catholic archbishop of Manila.^[82]

The other factory, Pasudeco, stood as a monument to native entrepreneurship and provincial solidarity. In response to a need for increased modern milling capacity, the leading planters and businessmen in the province met in 1918 and organized a stockholding corporation that borrowed money from the PNB and erected a central at San Fernando. Unlike comparable enterprises in Negros, Pasudeco was funded not by a single powerful native family or by foreign capital, but by a group of individual and family interests in a kind of cooperative effort that reflected the homogeneity, trust, and myriad interrelationships that existed among the

Pampangan elite. Under the leadership of founding members Jose L. de Leon, Augusto Gonzalez, sugar broker Manuel Urquico, Governor Honorio Ventura, former governor Francisco Liongson, Assistant Secretary of Justice Jose Escaler, and prominent planters Jose P. Henson and Tomas Lazatin, the agricultural interests raised. sufficient internal capital for a down payment on a P5,000,000 central. Even more unprecedented in terms of provincial cooperation was that individuals like magnates Emiliano J. Valdes and Mariano Pamintuan and great planter families such as the Davids, Hizons, Lucianos, Felicianos, and Jovens gave Jose L. de Leon power of attorney over all their properties. to secure the loan from the PNB. Through their financing program the Pampangan group lowered the amount they needed to borrow from the bank and became the first native corporation to redeem their mortgage. The rapid success of the central also came about as a result of the planters' great willingness to switch to centrals from rice farming and from muscovado production.^[83]

Because of increased demand for sugar and the subsequent rise in milling capacity, new sources of credit became available that eventually led to a reduction in use of the pacto de retro. Loans at 8 and 10 percent from the Agricultural Bank and its more active successor, the PNB, provided big planters with cheap money, and Calamba and Pasumil began to offer mortgages to encourage planters to mill with them. Pampangan Chinese sugar brokers and local native houses like Valdes and Urquico vied with one another to provide credit in loans and in anticipatory crop sales to guarantee their supplies of sugar. Planters found it relatively easy in this period to obtain mortgages on their crops, processing machinery, houses, and draft animals if they would sell their produce to a particular broker. After years of economic drought, 1915 to 1920 turned into the best years in the whole frontier era.^[84]

The advent of centrals portended significant change for the social and economic structure of the province's sugar society. For planters with sufficient wealth to invest in the new centrals the future promised big rewards, for such investments allowed them to profit from both the farming and milling sides of operations. Hacenderos who had previously done their own milling now had to split the output fifty-fifty with the central. The higher prices obtained for the centrifugal sugar and the better markets available helped offset the reduced share, but planters still had to split their portion with their tenants, further reducing profits. In general, those with ties to the processing side of the sugar industry fared better than those who only planted.

As more and more planters switched to the centrals and as the price of sugar rose, the use of the aparceria system came into question among hacenderos and sugar specialists. It is almost axiomatic in the Philippine

sugar industry that when the price for finished sugar goes up hacenderos prefer to pay fixed wages, but when prices descend they like tenants to share the depression with them. In Pampanga the shift away from share tenancy remained mostly talk before 1920, but the future did not bode well for the aparceros.^[85]

Sugar and Philippine Society, 1836-1920

From its modest origins in the nineteenth century the sugar industry emerged as one of the archipelago's economic giants. In 1920 it represented almost one-third of all Philippine foreign trade; moreover, the industry boasted the islands' most advanced manufacturing technology. For all its economic strength, however, the sugar business was vulnerable, because its prosperity depended largely on world demand and access to the dutyfree U.S. market. While improved milling facilities represented a degree of industrial modernity to the Philippines, they did not stimulate growth of other kinds of processing, save distilling.

Yet the very status achieved by the sugar industry worked to the detriment of other Philippine enterprises. Sugar soaked up much of the private and governmental credit available to local commerce. Further, because of peak harvest labor demands and low field productivity, hacenderos discouraged cultivation of other crops, including important foods, with the result that their activities contributed to the Philippines' becoming a net rice importer from the end of the nineteenth century onward.^[86] Absorption of peasant farms and open lands in northern and western Negros and upper Pampanga did more than add to planter holdings: it destroyed an alternate way of life for sugar workers and tenants.

During Spanish times collaboration between sugar planters and colonial officials served to sanction the political and economic hierarchies of Philippine society. Moreover, patterns of agricultural management on sugar farms as well as the economic gulf between rich and poor profoundly shaped the exercise of political power within society and precluded any real possibility of instituting participatory democracy, despite American efforts to install such a system. Political domination by the elite in Negros and Pampanga was complete; although sugarlandia's politicians had to share power with representatives from other regions, the sugar barons, by virtue of their economic power and size, had their way in important matters of finance at the insular level as well. The stronger the voice sugar interests gained in Manila and Washington, the more dependent they became on colonial support and protection.

Ironically, the very influence planters held with colonial governments sometimes hindered development of their own industry. In the matter of taxation Spaniards never instituted an exaction on agricultural property,

and Americans imposed only a very modest one; instead, both administrations drew their major revenues from monopolies, head taxes, tariffs, and excises that shifted the burden onto others often less able to pay. Even with its modest levy on land, the American regime, rather than foreclose on their properties, allowed tax relief to planters during the early years of crisis. No other group received gentler treatment at colonial hands than did the landholders of sugar country. Accordingly, colonials never raised sufficient revenues to construct good infrastructure that would have aided agriculture and related activities in the two sugar areas and elsewhere in the archipelago.^[87]

The period from 1836 to 1920 encompassed the establishment in the Philippines of a great network of family-owned sugar plantations. At the same time in Java, Hawaii, and Cuba, businessmen formed estates based on large, efficient central mills. In those places agro-industrial corporations directly controlled most of their cane supply, either through ownership or rental of fields. Filipino planters continued far longer as the primary producers of both cane and sugar, preserving for themselves a substantial share of industry-generated returns. When centrals finally arrived in the islands, hacenderos already occupied a protected niche within the industry, and through their milling contracts they persisted as active participants, sharing returns that elsewhere frequently reverted to foreign concerns.

Survival of family-owned and -managed landholdings prolonged traditional socioeconomic patterns in sugarlandia, often to the detriment of its inhabitants. In Pampanga a tenant system scarcely found in commercial crop zones lingered on as a vestige of a peasant economy, as farmers maintained the tenant-landlord pattern of their riverine heartland. Despite the impact of so modernizing a force as the sugar industry, the Capampangan, unable easily to change their methods of production, lost access to more desirable markets until late in the era.

Negrense society reflected its plantation structure. For all the wealth generated there, highways on Negros remained inadequate, central markets barely suitable, and public schools only average. The want of amenities serves as further evidence of the weaker sense of community that characterized frontier Negros. Planters might come together for entertainment and to assist one another in times of crisis, but society as a whole consisted of a series of segmented., producing units. Town centers played a less important role in social life than in Pampanga, and hacienda workers lived a more isolated existence than did casamac in the north.^[88]

In both Negros and Pampanga the chief beneficiaries of the frontier era were the entrepreneurs of sugarlandia who gained wealth, prestige, and influence from their exploitation of rich new lands. Class differentiation

between planters and workers became more pronounced as time passed, and the duma'an of Negros and the casamac of Pampanga found themselves increasingly trapped through debt and low returns in a permanent subsistence condition. As it did elsewhere, the sugar industry enchained Philippine field hands, casamac and duma'an, and left them little recourse against further exploitation.