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]