Parnpanga

One of the first places the Philippine sugar industry took hold was Pampanga. Leaders of Pampangan society early on agreed to participate in the colonial order and duly benefited from that collaboration. The prehispanic social system was restructured and the population mobilized in the service of the native elite and the Spanish establishment. The contractual labor arrangement that resulted proved adaptable to the needs of the sugar industry as it began to exert an impact on the province.

Archaeological evidence indicates the existence of long prehispanic settlement in Pampanga, and when the Spaniards reached Pampanga, they

Map 6.
Settlement in Early Pampanga

found at least eleven communities along the banks of the Pampanga River system (map 6). The name of the area, indeed, derived from the Capampangan word pangpang meaning "riverbank," and people of the region largely earned their livelihood from that body of water. The river nourished their crops, especially their rice; provided them with fish; and offered them access to interior jungles as well as to Manila Bay and beyond. In the course of their habitation of some of the best grain-producing land in the Philippines, Capampangan developed advanced agricultural techniques, knowledge in the working of brass, and navigational skills that took them to trading emporia of the Malay archipelago. Their use of imported ceramic wares indicated fairly constant commercial intercourse with merchants

originating from the ports of southern China. In addition, Pampanga maintained contact with other parts of the islands through exchange of its excess rice for cotton needed in weaving local cloth. By the late sixteenth century, the delta had become sufficiently populous that Capampangan had moved up feeder streams to Masicu (later called Mexico) and Porac, thus extending their sway onto more elevated, drier portions of the great plain.^[16]

Europeans encountered this aggressive and skilled people who dominated a fertile edge of the great forest covering the Central Luzon Plain and began reshaping their social structure and refocusing their economic activities. In 1574 Pampangan warriors were enlisted to defend Manila against depredations of the Chinese pirate Limahong (Lin Feng), thus initiating a tradition of more than three hundred years of military service to the Spanish regime. Subsequently, Spaniards employed their most trusted mercenaries to suppress rebellious natives and riotous Chinese residents, to guard the citadel of Manila, and to make war against the Moros of Mindanao and Sulu. In addition, Pampangan regiments fought overseas, in the Moluccas and Marianas in the seventeenth century and in Vietnam in the nineteenth. Such service brought substantial rewards to their leaders in terms of officers' commissions, even the exalted rank of maestre de campo , and, for a rare few, assignment of an encomienda , a tax-collecting sinecure almost never granted to indios. The most renowned Pampangan soldier of the seventeenth century, Maestre de Campo Don Juan Macapagal, received such an encomienda of three hundred tributes in 1665.^[17] Military use of Capampangan provided an early occasion for collaboration between the native elite and the colonial regime, and other opportunities followed.

The Spanish government initially divided wealthy, strategic Pampanga into encomiendas; however, the malfeasance and ineptitude of early Spanish encomenderos made the system unworkable, so the crown moved to institute civil government. Small private encomiendas, like the one to Macapagal, continued to be bestowed until the mid-eighteenth century, but only for recognition of extraordinary service or for maintenance of charitable causes. After the early years of conquest, governance and major tax gathering in the province became the duty of an alcalde mayor (governor), a Spanish appointee of the governor-general, who served in both an executive and a judicial capacity.

Within the province indigenous personnel assumed substantial administrative responsibility because few Spaniards served there. With the disappearance of most encomenderos in the seventeenth century, only an alcalde, parish priests of the Augustinian order, and a handful of soldiers constituted the Spanish government community—in effect the whole of European society—for a law, on the books from the sixteenth century to

1786, prohibited Spaniards from living outside Manila, unless in an official or religious capacity. Spaniards in Pampanga never numbered more than fifty before the second half of the nineteenth century, and control of municipal government passed largely into the hands of gobernadorcillos and cabezas. Under the colonial system, parish priests exercised civil as well as religious authority; nevertheless, priests had to serve in very extensive parishes spread out over many square kilometers containing settlements often difficult to reach. Moreover, between 1773 and 1854 Augustinians did not even hold the Pampangan parishes, because of a clerical dispute with the bishop in Manila. During this time native secular priests represented the clergy, and by 1848 the total number of Iberians in this province of some 140,000 people had sunk to nineteen.^[18] A native leadership thus possessed ample opportunity to maintain jurisdiction over the population, collecting taxes, assigning corvee duties, administering justice, and, in general, serving as buffer between the ruling Spaniards and the bulk of the Capampangan.

Mutual self-interest fostered the close collaboration between native leaders and Spaniards during this long era. Spain needed the military and logistical support of the Capampangan, and the local elite took up colonial service in order to continue their prehispanic leadership. In the old Pampangan barangay, authority had resided with the datu, a person exhibiting military, judicial, and administrative ability. The datu presided over a community of lesser datus, freemen (timaua ), and debt slaves in which agricultural land was communally owned and distributed on the basis of need. Members of the community owed labor obligations to the datu in exchange for his leadership, provided he could sustain his authority by virtue of his strength and ability; he could be replaced by another datu if he lost his power.^[19]

Sudden intrusion by Spain altered the old basis of authority, and the more ambitious among the datus readily adapted to the new order. Under the colonial regime, loyalty to the government became the main criterion for tenure, and chiefs could perpetuate themselves and their heirs in office merely by delivering goods and services and by not giving offense. In exchange for meeting their quotas, for facilitating native conversion to Catholicism, and for promoting peace and order, Pampangan leaders earned colonial recognition: the inheritable title of cabeza de barangay , head of a group of tribute-paying families. The new position offered its holders numerous advantages, most crucial of which was assurance of continuity. In addition, the cabeza received for his efforts, along with a title, exemption from certain taxes, corvee obligations, and legal liabilities. As a result of administrative reorganization near the beginning of the seventeenth cen-

tury, the new position of gobernadorcillo came into existence, the highest office a native Filipino could aspire to under Spanish colonialism. This official, selected from among and elected by cabezas of a given pueblo (municipality), was ultimately responsible for delivery of the town's tribute. Gobernadorcillos and cabezas in each town of Pampanga became the dominant class in native society, and they and their families became collectively known as the principalia . Principales were addressed as "Don" and "Doña." Although the principalia became a ubiquitous institution in the archipelago, those in Pampanga were especially noted for their reliability and devotion to Spain.^[20]

During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the principalia converted their political authority into social and economic dominance of Pampanga as well. They used their tax-gathering power and their control of the Spanish system of labor obligation, repartimiento , to reduce the population to share tenants working on lands controlled by the elite. A two-class society, made up of those in charge who monopolized positions and wealth and those who furnished labor for principalia and colonial needs, gradually replaced the more complicated prehispanic society with its various gradations of class, rank, and labor obligations. In each town of the province, a group of families, perhaps a dozen or so, achieved this higher status and perpetuated it with Spanish acquiescence. In exchange for a guaranteed source of goods and services, Spaniards allowed native leaders to control the means of supply, and the population as a whole remained relatively free from colonial interference.

In 1784, perhaps the most astute observer of the techniques by which the elite perpetuated their position, the great reformist governor-general José Basco y Vargas, toured the province and recorded his findings in a decree issued on March 3 at Arayat.^[21] In it he noted that farmers could have their implements and draft animals seized as payment for civil debts and that they could be imprisoned for debt during planting, plowing, and harvesting time, even if such incarceration meant loss of their crop. He saw cabezas and former gobernadorcillos avoiding all work on their farms, making others do the labor for no wages, even though legally only those who possessed eight cabalitas (2.24 hectares) of land were exempted from manual work. Principales also rented out land, an illegal practice. Basco observed widespread use of the samacan contract as well. Under this arrangement, a landowner and a laborer (casamac or aparcero ) agreed to farm land on shares, the owner lending seed, food, and money to carry the worker through the season, with repayment coming at harvest time. Basco understood that great abuses occurred under this system because owners charged high interest on loans, forcing their tenants into chronic debt. Moreover,

they loaned tenants rice when the price was cheap and demanded repayment in cash when the rice was dear. By these various methods the elite kept the lower class as the permanent underpaid labor force of the province.

Basco also described the process by which principales acquired control of most land in the province, the pacto de retrovendendo (pacto de retro, or pacto, for short). Through this contract, land was sold for less than its true value, but with the proviso that the seller had the right to repurchase within a specified time limit, with the addition of an interest charge. In essence this arrangement amounted to a way of pawning land to raise cash; however, the system was subject to much abuse, including excessive interest charges. Moneylenders employed the pacto de retro as a means of taking land from poor farmers.

But the pacto de retro was only the latest method for obtaining farmland; other practices had been going on for two centuries. When Spaniards first arrived, they claimed all land in Pampanga for the crown, but because of early datu support, they received large tracts as a reward. The government ceased bestowing such favors after 1626, and all other territory in the province remained royal lands or communal lands to be held by natives in usufruct, rather than in fee simple.^[22] In other words, farmers and householders could take up agricultural and residential plots that, theoretically, when vacated became available for reassignment. Such lands could not be bought, sold, or otherwise alienated without court permission. In practice, however, the Pampangan elite acquired real property, purchasing, selling, and renting it out on shares to casamac without ever obtaining a formal right to do so; and they also gained the legal skills to defend their claims in court. Furthermore, they added to their landholdings by picking up, again without official permission, household lots in payment for debts. The principalia thus institutionalized a system of private ownership of land, even though based on faulty legal titles, despite Spanish attempts to maintain a communal system of property control.^[23]

Finally, Pampangan officials enriched themselves by abusing the repartimiento system. They inflated the Spanish labor requirements, exempted their friends and kin from service, and charged others, mainly poor farmers, fees to avoid such obligations, which interfered with the latter's own vital agricultural activities.

Basco, ever anxious to increase output of Philippine produce to cut the dependence on imported silver, decreed that the above inhibitions to good farm practice should cease. He was especially concerned about the abuses in Pampanga, for it remained the most productive agricultural region in the Philippines. Despite his decree, however, the practices continued unabated, for they had become part of the provincial way of life, and the Spanish

government had neither the will nor the personnel to alter the situation. By this time, samacan had become the main labor system of the province as well as an enduring form of social organization. Basco failed to realize the paternalistic characteristics of the system: tenants looked to their landlords for various kinds of assistance, social and economic, as well as for protection from the abuses of colonial authority.

The elite of Pampanga derived originally from prehispanic datus, particularly those who most cooperated with the new regime. From the few extant lists of town officials, there appears a marked continuity in the families that composed the earliest principalia down to about the middle of the eighteenth century, when a new group began to infiltrate elite ranks. Mestizos descended from early Chinese migrants to the province began to assert themselves, first as an economic factor, then as a political and social force when they intermarried with the indio governing class.^[24]

A Chinese community throve in Pampanga after 1603, when merchants fled there following a massacre of their compatriots in Manila. The refugees established themselves in Guagua, chief outlet for the province to Manila Bay, and entered into commerce in produce that flowed to the Spanish capital from central Luzon. Being mostly single males, the Chinese took native wives, and in time, a mestizo society developed, first in Guagua, then in its economic satellite and capital of the province, Bacolor. By the mid-eighteenth century, Chinese mestizos formed a distinct community in those two towns where they organized their own gremio , a separate legal category under Spanish law, with their own chosen leaders (capitanes de mestizos Sanglayes ). In a setting remote from the sources of Chinese culture, mestizos began increasingly to assume the culture of their native mothers, while remaining, initially at least, in business rather than farming. First they acted as collecting agents for established merchants of Guagua, buying, for example, the sugar that ended up in the farderias of Manila. Eventually, mestizos took commercial leadership when Chinese were excluded by law from the province between 1766 and 1849. Mestizos moved more and more into agriculture, too, as they made loans to farmers directly and through the pacto de retro, finally ending up as landowners themselves. They entered the ranks of the elite, partially as a result of their acquiring land and partly through intermarriage with the traditional indio ruling class, and from the late eighteenth century on, the principalia of Pampanga became increasingly Chinese mestizo.

The early emergence of commercial agriculture and cottage industry in Pampanga facilitated this rise to power and position. In the period from the Spanish conquest to the 1830s, rice persisted as the chief export of the province, providing the population with their main source of wealth; how-

ever, other products—sugar in particular, but also anil, cotton, oil of ajonjoli, fish from the Candaba Swamp, woods, palms, fruits, and vegetables—offered additional income. Descriptions in 1819, 1833, and 1860 stress the variety of crops shipped from Pampanga, as well as the wide range of local manufacturing pursued there, much of it for the interprovincial market. Among other activities, Capampangan made pottery, including water and sugar jars; built boats and other items out of wood and rattan; wove and embroidered fabrics; operated distilleries and limekilns; and did primary processing of the province's agricultural produce. Throughout the first half of the nineteenth century Pampanga's considerable wealth derived from this broad range of industry, with sugar only gradually assuming a primary role.^[25]

As noted earlier, Pampangan sugar probably began to enter the export trade in the seventeenth century and became an important part of that commerce by the mid-eighteenth. Before 1786 Pampanga was already the largest sugar-making area in the Philippines, averaging between 1,150 and 1,288 metric tons per year; by 1796, output had climbed to 2,045 tons. In the early nineteenth century, Pampanga and Pangasinan together produced more than 7,000 tons in one year, more than 2,000 of which entered the foreign market, and sometime around 1838, sugar surpassed rice as the province's major cash crop. Farmers grew cane and made muscovado in most of the river towns until the upper region opened up to settlement in the mid-nineteenth century., and the center of the industry slowly migrated north. As sugar farming expanded, mestizos benefited most, first as agents for Chinese merchants, then as separate middlemen buying on their own account, then as credit suppliers to those switching from rice to sugar agriculture, and finally, as owners of sugar lands and makers of sugar. While sugar production in Pampanga showed a pattern of gradual increase, the 1820s and 1830s appear to have been a time, too, of active road and bridge building in Pampanga, due in part to the initiative of mestizo sugar planters eager to improve their access to markets and to interior portions of the province where new plantations sprang up.^[26]

Demographic shifts in Pampanga during those two decades reflected the northward advance of population and sugar cultivation. Mabalacat, Magalang, and Porac, still on the frontier edge of settlement, grew very rapidly, as did most other towns that devoted considerable land to cane. Candaba was known for its mixed economy of fish and vegetables that derived from its swampy lowlands and that found their way to Manila's burgeoning markets; however, the town's residents turned its western elevated, drier portions to sugar. The general provincial trend was movement of people and sugar farming away from the river.^[27]

Angeles provides a dramatic example of change. The community started to develop in 1796, when Don Angel Pantaleon de Miranda directed his servants and tenants to begin clearing land for cultivation in that remote northern place. De Miranda, former gobernadorcillo of San Fernando and a soldier by trade, removed permanently to Barrio Culiat with his wife Doña Rosalia de Jesus in 1811 upon his retirement from the service. Once there, de Miranda and Doña Rosalia supervised the growth of the new settlement, establishing the first church and primary school; at his instigation, Culiat became the municipality of Angeles in 1829. In 1822 he built the first muscovado sugar mill in town, as well as the first alcohol distillery. De Miranda's heirs married local Chinese and Chinese mestizos, and the progeny of these unions became the principalia of the newly founded town, providing the leading officials and landowners in succeeding generations. Angeles remained the fastest-growing community in the province throughout the rest of the nineteenth century.^[28]