Negros

While Pampanga experienced considerable change socially and economically in the years between the coming of Spain and the 1830s, Negros showed little growth. At the beginning it might have been different. Between 1565 and 1571, the lieutenants of Miguel Lòpez de Legazpi moved about the Visayas in search of a permanent base within the archipelago, first trying Cebu, then Arevalo on the island of Panay. Had either sufficed, Negros, known initially as Buglas, would probably have been transformed into a major supplier of food and a thriving agricultural community. As it was, the lure of gold, access to China, and abundant available food in the surrounding area dictated the choice of Manila, thus determining Pampanga's transformation and Negros's continued somnolence. Lack of good anchorage contributed to the colonial government's paucity of interest in and late development of the latter area. Spanish officials largely ignored Negros from that time on, and its way of life stagnated until demand for sugar radically changed everything more than two and a half centuries later. Isolation marked the intervening years.

Spanish pilot Esteban Rodriguez circumnavigated the island in 1565 and provided the earliest firsthand information on life in western Negros. He confirmed a story circulating among Spaniards that many Negritos inhabited the island, but he learned they resided chiefly in the mountain interiors, while the coastal lowland belonged to people of Malay ethnic background who practiced the common Visayan custom of tattooing their bodies.^[29] Negritos so fascinated early Spaniards that they called the island "Negros" after them, allowing the original name to lapse. The new name

exudes a certain irony, for the nonaggressive Negritos, whose sole economic role lay in trading small, amounts of jungle exotica for staples, kept largely to themselves and never constituted more than a minority of the island's population.

Initial Spanish visitors to Negros had to tramp inland some distance to find settlements of Visayans, even though they noticed people along the shore as they sailed by. They came upon only one exception: a single large community situated where the mouth of a river, possibly the Himamailan, opened out on the Guimaras Strait. The position of most settlement inland and the reaction of fear or hostility the Spaniards encountered from inhabitants indicated that the people of Negros had experienced frequent difficulties with outsiders, probably Moro slavers, who raided Visayan shores.

Denizens of western Negros already depended on agriculture in 1565, and Rodriguez came across rice fields, while in a native vessel he found rice, yams, and fish. At this early period communities clustered along banks of rivers emptying out on the western and most populated side of the island toward Panay, and soldier-writer Miguel de Loarca observed in 1582 that these places produced much rice, swine, and fowl. Farmers could well have employed wet rice techniques, for they had the right terrain, ample water and, probably, some knowledge of the methods of paddy farming.

But Negrenses probably practiced dry rice agriculture as well, especially the swidden type, in areas away from rivers and on less even ground. Francisco Alzina, the great Jesuit commentator on seventeenth-century Visayan life, though not specifically mentioning Negros, did point out that slash-and-burn agriculture predominated in his time. Evidence suggests that wandering people of ethnic Malay origin farmed dry rice in the southwestern highlands and in forested interiors behind the sedentary coastal and riparian communities. Here they raised crops on temporary fields and gathered forest produce which they traded in the lowlands for cloth and other necessities. Known by such names as Carolanos, Bukidnons, Monteses, Mangyans, Mondos, and Ambaks, the most mobile bands have survived in less accessible portions of Negros for centuries, continually defying those who would change their way of life.^[30]

An apocryphal version of the founding of Hinigaran goes as follows:

As far as could be determined, the earliest people in these localities were the semisavage Mondos and Ambaks. Traders in sailboats from Panay used to land at [Barrio] Talisay to replenish their food and water supply and brought back to their home island (Panay) stories of the potentialities of fishing and farming in the land they had visited. Slowly but steadily Ma-

lay settlers from Panay came and drove the Mondos and Ambaks to the interior. The latter called the intruding settlers "taga Higad," vernacular for "by the side," meaning those who were beside the sea.^[31]

Such a story portrays the nature of the original settlement of western Negros, for that side of the island showed cultural, economic, and linguistic affinity with Panay from at least the time of the first Spanish observations of the place. For socioeconomic interactions, western Negros has always looked to Panay, eastern Negros to Cebu, because the waters of the Visayas have served as a link between people, and the mountains have kept them apart.

The pattern of Spanish neglect emerged at the onset of colonial rule, and by the beginning of the seventeenth century, Negros's position within the Empire had solidified; it stayed almost static over the next two hundred fifty years. A corregidor (military-political commander) at Ilog, first appointed sometime between 1608 and 1618, represented colonial authority on the island; tax payments in kind continued going directly to Panay until 1734. In that year, Spain transformed all of Negros into a single administrative and revenue collection district with its capital, or cabecera , at Ilog.

Corregidores seem to have done little to promote better conditions; however, these officials had some excuse for their inactivity, because they faced, without much help from Manila, frequent devastation from Moros who ravaged coastal areas as late as the nineteenth century. Each corregidor after 1734 had a military officer to assist him with defense; still, protection remained inadequate on the west coast, for throughout most of the eighteenth century the government stationed hardly any troops on Negros. At least some corregidores faced the Moro threat by removing to Iloilo, leaving the general population to escape danger by either fleeing temporarily or moving permanently into the interior.^[32] The government left Negrenses without any real means of improving their welfare and with imperfect guarantees for their personal safety.

What little support Spain provided came chiefly from the Church. At any given time, from their parishes in the coastal lowlands, a small group of priests, sometimes members of friar orders, at others Spanish or Filipino seculars, offered sacraments, served as missionaries to the wandering peoples, and supplied comfort after Moro raids. From the 1770s until almost the mid-nineteenth century, native priests held responsibility for five very large parishes, including many visitas , that stretched from Cauayan as far north as Silay.

The vast expanse of these parishes meant, necessarily, that pastoral care was attenuated, and one Spanish commentator, Robustiano Echaúz, re-

ported as late as the 1850s the persistence and prevalence, even in the lowlands, of many old Visayan superstitions and religious practices. Religious care on Negros, although more consistent and substantial than government services, proved deficient because of inadequate commitment on the part of the Church. The attitude of both Church and government in western Negros through the 1840s is reflected in that up until then not a single stone church or permanent public building existed in the region, so that Spanish Catholicism and royal authority were represented only by structures of the most perishable materials.^[33]

Agricultural conditions on Negros scarcely showed any real change before the 1840s either. A government report of 1739 revealed that the island still met its tax obligations largely with the same produce as that shipped in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: rice; cabo negro, a palm fiber woven into ship's cable; and a variety of forest products. When the Frenchman Jean Mallat wrote about Negros in the early 1840s, he indicated that only a small crop of cacao and some coffee and tobacco were being planted in elevated areas behind the lowlands. On the plains, farmers still harvested mainly rice and some tobacco, cabo negro, and abaca, paying their government tribute in kind in these commodities. In some years harvests were so poor that alcaldes had to plead for understanding in the delayed collection of tribute, as happened during a long spell of bad times from 1832 to 1835. The only commercial activity on Negros involved some cottage industry weaving of such native fabrics as lornpotes and sinamay , commissioned by great mestizo cloth merchants from Molo and Jaro, on Panay.^[34]

Life in western Negros remained brutish and insecure up through the 1830s. Pillaging by Muslim marauders, hostilities with the mountain folk, and government neglect made habitation in the area dangerous for the indigenous population and lacking in amenities for foreign colonials. The first Moro raid reported in colonial times came in 1599, although they had probably occurred before the Spaniards arrived as well. Periodically thereafter Moros plundered the coastal settlements in search of goods and slaves, usually destroying what they could not carry away. Attacks appear to have happened most frequently in the second half of the eighteenth century, declining in the nineteenth. As late as 1829, however, Moros captured a hundred or so natives from Bacolod, Talisay, and Silay as slaves. They took Spaniards, too. In 1771 the governor of Negros was held captive, and sometime in the 1840s Don Agustin Montilla, Spanish founder of the settlement at Pulupandan, had to be ransomed from the Muslim south.^[35]

A wall of distrust and dislike also separated Christians from pagans on Negros, making forays into the interior hazardous. Those who lived be-

yond the pale of colonial control and the sway of the Catholic Church included nomadic Negritos; other aboriginal groups; former lowlanders called remontados who preferred the isolation of the jungle to the colonial order; and a miscellany of wanderers, bandits, and escaped criminals known collectively as cimarrones . Often Spanish attempts to bring these people "under the bell," that is, within the orbit of civil and religious authority, induced hostile reprisals and armed attacks upon the coastal settlements; and in the 1840s Mallat still advised against overland travel between west and east coasts because of possible hostilities along the way.^[36]

The thumbnail sketches of all major communities in both Pampanga and Negros in the mid-1840s that Buzeta and Bravo supplied reveal the sharp contrast between the two regions. The former contained wealthy towns, most with substantial churches, schools, permanent municipios (town halls), and private homes of stone and wood. A network of all-season roads connected these communities, bringing them into regular contact with one another and, via the port of Guagua and the postal road, with Manila; thus, Capampangan, at least those in the central poblaciones, received capital news, market prices, and mail weekly. In contrast, western Negros resembled much more a frontier area than a long settled place. The seven widely scattered main towns boasted few solid buildings, religious, gov-ernmental, or residential; and land transportation consisted of narrow, rough paths crossing rivers often unfordable during the rainy season. Access to the outside world, difficult and infrequent, depended on coasting vessels from Cebu and Iloilo; thus such important items as mail and commercial news were available only infrequently. The low depth of rivers and streams closed off interior communities to all save shallow-draft boats.

In the 1830s, Pampanga already possessed an entrenched native elite, infused with economically aggressive Chinese mestizos who controlled the land, monopolized town political offices, and dominated the local professions of soldier, priest, and lawyer, as well as the lower echelons of the colonial bureaucracy. They had already accumulated knowledge of cane agriculture and the art of sugar manufacture and were, indeed, prepared to take advantage of the expansion of commercial farming when it reached their region. The Negros leadership was not, either by virtue of their agricultural ability or by their absorption of entrepreneurial techniques. Two comments speak to the socioeconomic status and economic preparedness of the pre-1850 Negrense principalia:

All the political power and wealth of the island belonged to one or two caciques in each town who possessed a smaller or larger number of carabao, some gold beads hanging around their necks, a few cavanes of rice, scarcely enough necessities

to maintain their families, and houses enclosed with thin walls of bamboo.^[37]

In his memoirs, Nicolas Belleza, an old resident of Bacolod, originally from Molo, Iloilo, presents a very interesting list of gobernadorcillos from the capital of Negros, when that capital was still situated at Himamailan. The list begins in 1770. . . .

Now then, very few of those distinguished family names from that remote time still exist within prominent social and economic circles in the province: such names as De los Santos, De la Cruz, Maguilan, Vivencio, Palandangan, Espino, Gabaton, Andicoy, Guiouin, Varientos, Dopillo, Muncal, Salomon, Laurente, Guiquin. . . . On the other hand, starting in 1840, at the dawn of the sugar era, mixed with some of those old names on the list appear new ones, new immigrants, new gobernadorcillos. . . some of whom were still living a short time ago.^[38]

In short, the old elite in Negros was scarcely better off than the poor farmers around them.

However, western Negros began in the 1830s, and especially the 1840s, to receive more attention from the government and to show signs of emerging from its lethargy. Perhaps the most important circumstance that made change possible was the diminution of the Moro threat. Their raid along the coast in 1829 that netted so many prisoners proved to be their last big success, and from that time on, governmental protection and local resistance reached the point that, while occasional attacks took place, they did not have such devastating consequences. Governors Luis Villasis (1833-40) and José Saenz y Vizmanos (1840-48) attempted to shore up coastal defenses, and in 1844, when Don Agustin Montilla petitioned for official recognition of his new agricultural settlement (estancia ) at the visita at Pulupandan, town of Bago, he assured the government that he could adequately protect his laborers from the Moros who stopped at the nearby island of Inampulugan.^[39]

Montilla appeared as the first of a wave of new settlers to western Negros, beginning around 1840. Why they chose this area remains unclear, but it may well have had something to do with the extremely low price of land, extolled by Vizmanos and other government officials. Montilla, a Philippine-born Spaniard married to a mestiza from Iloilo, Vicenta Yanzon Locsin, appears to have been something of an adventurer who resigned from a military career before choosing commercial farming. He left the relative comfort of Manila and Iloilo to become a planter on Negros, raising in those early years rice, coconuts, cotton, abaca, maize, and mongo

beans. He succeeded very well, as the estancia at Pulupandan represented an extension of his original settlement along the Bago River and involved the effort of 118 laborers. In 1844 he sought the assignment of a teniente de justicia to look after the welfare of those workers; three years later the community had grown so much that Montilla requested permission to erect a chapel, because it was too far for the more than eight hundred villagers to go to Bago for church on Sundays.^[40]

Whatever his original motivation, Montilla did not go to Negros to plant sugar. Although he owned extensive cultivations along the Bago River and an iron cane-grinding machine when the English entrepreneur Nicholas Loney visited his hacienda in 1860, he had showed no interest in that crop in 1844.^[41] It would appear that he learned about sugar from the second significant migrant to Negros, the originator of commercial sugar production on the island, Yves Leopold Germain Gaston.

A twentieth-century source asserts that in 1836 Negros milled 280 tons of sugar, and by the mid-1830s ships at Manila accepted for export Visayan type muscovado wrapped in bayones; nevertheless, the commercial sugar industry on the island really began with the arrival of Gaston in 1844. A sugar expert by profession, he came from Mauritius in 1837 to make sugar for Domingo Roxas in Batangas. That project failed, and Gaston transferred seven years later to Negros to enter business for himself. His application for permanent residence on the island had the enthusiastic endorsement of Governor Vizmanos, a booster of Negros agriculture. At Buen Retiro, his estate in Silay, Gaston constructed the first sugar mill (trapiche ), built an horno economico (a more efficient furnace for boiling the syrup), and planted the first large crop of cane. By 1848 his influence had spread, and Negros production reached 3,000 piculs, around 190 tons, manufactured by four planters: 1,000 piculs by Montilla at Bago, 400 by a certain "Tia Sipa" in Minuluan, 900 by Gaston, and 700 by Eusebio Ruiz de Luzuriaga in Bacolod. The latter was one of a group of Spanish political refugees moving into Negros in the 1840s and 1850s to pursue agriculture, business, and the professions just as the tide in favor of commercial sugar was coming in. Spaniards from the Iberian Peninsula along with Philippine-born Spaniards and Spanish mestizos were to form a significant component of the emerging Negrense elite.^[42]

The changing situation in western Negros is reflected in the rise in population from some 18,000 in 1818 to about 35,000 in 1845. The annual growth rate was substantial for the whole area—2.5 percent—but was most spectacular in that part north of the oldest settled area around Ilog.^[43] Indeed, that the demographic center of gravity was gradually shifting is indicated by the movement of the capital of the province northward. In

Map 7.
Settlement in Early Western Negros

1790 it migrated from Ilog, where it had been since earliest colonial times, to Himamailan; then in 1849 it moved again to its present location at Bacolod (map 7). Population in the region not only increased rapidly, but people settled more permanently along the coast and moved toward new agricultural land where they grew more nonrice crops—all reflections of better security and an improved economy.

Immigration of agriculturalists and burgeoning population did not serve as the only evidence of economic development in western Negros; in 1834

mail service on a fortnightly basis commenced, connecting Himamailan with Manila via eastern Negros, Cebu, Leyte, and Samar.^[44] And in 1849 the Recollect Order of friars acquired pastoral supervision of Negros, assuring more extensive religious assistance for the province and indicating that western Negros had reached the point that it merited more attention from the Church establishment.