Muslim Migration to Cotabato City

The dislocations wrought by the massive migration of Christian settlers into Cotabato in the postwar period provided a major stimulus for an internal migration of Cotabato Muslims into Cotabato City. The migration of large numbers of Muslims within Cotabato was not in itself a novel phenomenon. The indigenous inhabitants of the region had long responded to perceived external threats by moving en masse out of harm's way. Laarhoven (1989) reports the 1693 migration of five thousand families upriver and away from the coastal capital because of the fear of a Dutch-English invasion. Another massive upriver migration followed the occupation of the Pulangi Delta by the Spaniards in 1861 (Ileto 1971). The postcolonial movements differed from previous internal migrations in two important ways. First, the direction of movement was reversed, with migrants transferring downriver rather than up. Second, this was a rural-to-urban migration, with most Muslims relocating to Cotabato City and taking up urban occupations. Those who arrived prior to 1970 were overwhelmingly economic migrants. While many were pushed into the city as the result of the rural disruption caused by Christian immigration, others were pulled there by the new economic opportunities made available by that in-migration and more generally by developments in the postcolonial economy.

The movement of rural Muslims into Cotabato City in the postwar period may be seen as one component of a gradual rehabitation of the traditional downriver capital after the withdrawal of its Spanish occupiers in 1899. That process began with Datu Piang's attack on Cotabato town in the wake of the Spanish evacuation and was advanced with Datu Sinsuat's move to Cotabato town in the 1920s. Regrettably, hardly any information exists about ordinary Muslims in the city proper prior to the 1950s. Chester Hunt, who conducted a survey in the población (provincial town) of Cotabato in 1953, reported a "considerable representation" of Muslims there ([1957] 1974, 194). He found a majority of Muslims in the city working as fishermen or stevedores, with a small number operating small businesses such as goldsmithing and a few in river transportation, a business of somewhat larger scale.

The ethnic geography of Cotabato City has changed hardly at all from the way Hunt found it in 1953. Muslims still tend to live and work close by the Pulangi River or along tributary streams on the outskirts of the city. All three major mosques in the city are located on riverbanks. Christians, on the other hand, generally reside in neighborhoods on the higher ground south of the city center or along the main highway running south.^[6] The Chinese still typically "occupy flats located above stores in the business district" in the center of the city (Hunt [1957] 1974, 197). The continued riverine orientation of city Muslims is most strikingly apparent on the banks of the Pulangi at the northern edge of the city. Virtually all of the economic enterprises and activities found here—water taxis, coffee shops, goldsmithing, furniture-making, fish-selling, vegetable-vending, cargo handling—represent uniquely Muslim occupations. Christians, by contrast, rarely travel on the river and hardly ever venture into the Muslim areas along its banks.^[7]

In 1963, ten years after Hunt's survey, the Mindanao Cross , a weekly newspaper published in the city, reported more than 750 "landless families" living in Cotabato City (August 24, 1963). In 1966, in a newspaper article by a local social worker, it was noted that there were about 1,000 families "living in slum conditions" in Cotabato City, most of them along the riverfront road that forms the core of the Muslim sector of the city (Mindanao Cross , December 10, 1966). Hunt's 1953 survey makes no mention of urban shantytowns or squatters. While some of these families may have been composed of destitute Christian immigrants, it is most likely that the great majority of them were Muslim urban migrants arrived since the mid-1950s.

In the early 1960s a new community of Muslim urban poor was created in the middle of the Pulangi River. This was Bird Island (also known simply as Punul , or "The Island"). Bird Island was originally a small, low-lying island in the Pulangi River directly across from the main city pier. The Spaniards had built a brick armory there in the late nineteenth century and the Americans had used it as a garbagedumping site during their short occupation of Cotabato City after World War II. After a disastrous flood in the city in 1960 caused by unusually heavy rains and the progressive silting of the Pulangi River bed, city fathers, with the help of Congressman Pendatun, successfully petitioned the national government to dredge a cutoff channel. The channel straightened the lowest portion of the river, from Cotabato

City to the sea, Part of the sand from that dredging operation was placed on Bird Island, creating five hectares of relatively high, dry land. Within a very short time a community of more than two hundred dwellings emerged in the middle of the river.

At the height of its occupation in the mid- to late 1960s, Bird Island was a vibrant multiethnic Muslim community with two mosques. The eastern, or upriver, half of the island was occupied by Tau sa Laya (upriver) Magindanaons, many of whom worked as laborers at the main city pier. Most of the residents of the western, or downriver, side of the island were Iranun from the coast, and they worked as fish vendors in the riverside neighborhood of Mabini. Bird Island was a convenient refuge for Muslim urban migrants. There they could live without the cost of land rent in a secure Muslim community only a few hundred yards from their work sites.

When asked today to recall life in Cotabato City in the 1950s and 1960s, Muslim residents invariably recollect a cleaner, safer, and more prosperous city. One lifelong resident offered a typical remembrance: "When I was a boy I could dive for five-centavo pieces in the Pulangi River at Matampay bridge, the water was so clear. The river was filled with large shrimp, clams, and fish. Fishermen would give fish away. One peso would buy a string of large dalag [mudfish]. [Muslim] Women wore nothing but gold jewelry, and they were ashamed if they had only one piece. They wore heavy wrist and ankle bracelets, hairpins, necklaces, earrings, and brooches—all gold." Even allowing for the soft focus of reminiscence, such memories suggest that life for ordinary Muslims in the city then was appreciably less difficult than today. The remembered abundance was due in large part to a relatively thriving provincial economy stimulated by at least three new sources of external revenue. First, the immediate postindependence period saw an influx of wealth into the province in the form of war-damage payments, back pay awards, and reconstruction aid received directly or indirectly from the United States. We shall consider the political effects of that new source of wealth shortly but may presume for now that some significant proportion of it benefited Cotabato Muslims. Second, the 1950s and 1960s brought not only a flood of new people into the province but also large amounts of government resources to pay for road building and other infrastructural improvements and as loans and other forms of aid to Christian migrants. Muslim urban dwellers benefited indirectly in that virtually all Christian migrants to the province

passed through Cotabato City, thus making more work available for cargo handlers, fish vendors, and transport workers—all occupations where Muslims predominated.

The third novel source of external wealth was largely the result of Muslim enterprise and most directly benefited significant numbers of ordinary Muslims in the city. Beginning in the mid-1950s, a lucrative Philippine-wide trade in contraband American cigarettes became centered in Cotabato City as a group of Muslim entrepreneurs—mostly Iranun speakers—began to take advantage of a newly opened economic niche: an enormous, unfilled demand for low-cost, high-quality cigarettes. Until the outbreak of World War II, the Philippines had exported significant quantities of high-quality cigars and cigar tobacco. While much of the productive capacity of the tobacco industry was destroyed during the war (Reed 1963, 351), equally damaging to the national industry was a shift in domestic and world market demand away from cigars (which the Philippines produced) to cigarettes (which it did not). American cigarettes flooded Philippine markets in the immediate postwar period and, for the first time, the country became a net importer of tobacco products.

The government passed legislation in 1954 intended to revitalize domestic production through a combination of government price supports, high tariffs, and import restrictions (Hartendorp 1961; Golay 1961). The price supports discouraged, however unintentionally, the production of higher grades of tobacco, and by the mid-1950s the combination of high demand for quality cigarettes, severe import controls, and continued low quality of domestically produced cigarettes led to large-scale smuggling of American cigarettes into the country (Reed 1963). The so-called back door to the Philippines from Sabah in Borneo through Sulu to Mindanao was the ideal entry route for illegally imported cigarettes, and Jolo (the capital city of Sulu) and Cotabato quickly became the two key points in a very substantial contraband trade.^[8]

The Iranun residents of the Cotabato coast were perfectly situated to participate in the cigarette trade-with Borneo. As seafarers, fisher-folk, or fish traders, they were familiar with the sea routes and maintained long-distance ties (including kinship connections) with partners in Zamboanga and Jolo. Iranun smugglers, usually working with partners from Sulu (who were sometimes also Iranun speakers), captained kumpits —large motorized boats with a loading capacity of thirty

tons—manned with an armed Iranun crew. The kumpits would sail to a port in Sabah where they took on cartons of American cigarettes (actually produced in Hong Kong under American license) as well as umbrellas, perfumes, and enameled goods. They would then proceed to Cotabato, attempting to avoid government anti-smuggling patrols.

On their arrival in Cotabato, the boats put in at isolated moorings in the river delta west of Cotabato City. New Muslim communities grew up at the river mouth whose residents ferried cargo from the boats at night to the city and other distribution points. From Cotabato City, cigarettes were shipped by truck throughout Mindanao and by interisland ferry to Manila and other northern cities where they were readily available for sale on most street corners. I found no evidence of non-Muslims participating in or funding smuggling ventures and only very limited involvement by the Cotabato Muslim political elite. The smuggling economy did, however, have wide-reaching effects among Muslim residents of Cotabato City. It not only provided direct employment for a significant number of ordinary Muslims in various stages of the smuggling operation but also infused money into Muslim urban communities by stimulating the growth of numerous secondary enterprises ranging from boat building to the fabrication of nipa-palm panels for simple urban housing. The two main Muslim riverfront communities in the city, which today are noted primarily for their poverty and high unemployment, were both economically vigorous in the mid-1960s at the height of the smuggling economy.

By 1970, cigarette smuggling had been largely curtailed due to an anti-smuggling pact negotiated by Ferdinand Marcos with Malaysia, to more efficient antismuggling patrols in Cotabato, and to a drop in demand for imported cigarettes as better quality cigarettes came on the Philippine market.^[9] The most successful smugglers invested in legitimate business ventures in and around the city, but the widespread prosperity of the smuggling economy was not restored.

The relative prosperity enjoyed by urban Muslims in the postcolonial city was also on the wane by 1970. Early in that year Bird Island was ordered demolished by the Christian city mayor as an eyesore and a hindrance to shipping in the river. The Pulangi had silted up once again and it was decided to remove Bird Island entirely to facilitate the free movement of river traffic,^[10] By June of 1970 the dismantling of Bird Island had begun, with no relocation sites provided for its residents. They dispersed to various Muslim areas in or near the city, and

some went to the low-lying, swampy area on the edge of the city that came to be known as Campo Muslim. It was a far less desirable location than Bird Island and, as we shall see, a more difficult place to live.