Patterns of Immigration to Campo Muslim

The migration histories of the families of Kasan Kamid and Imam Akmad provide qualitative context for the quantitative census data I collected on migration to Campo Muslim. Nearly half (47.3 percent) of current Campo Muslim household heads moved to the community before 1976. The great majority of those arrived in the years between

1970 and 1976, the period when political violence was most pronounced in Cotabato. In contrast to Kasan Kamid and Imam Akmad, the majority of pre-1976 arrivals (63.8 percent) moved to Campo Muslim directly from their birthplaces. Of the eighty individuals who moved directly to Campo Muslim from birthplaces outside the city prior to 1976, thirty-four (42.5 percent) left their rural communities as refugees from either sectarian violence or the Bangsamoro war. Forty (50 percent) moved to the city for economic reasons. The great majority (89 percent) of all pre-1976 arrivals to Campo Muslim reported that they chose to reside in that community because they already had relatives living there (28 percent), or because it was the safest, most convenient, or only available place to live (61 percent). Census data indicate that Campo Muslim grew together from its edges. The areas nearest the two already established communities were occupied first, often before 1970. The swampier inner portions were then taken up by later arrivals.

Campo Muslim, then, has never been a community made up entirely—or even primarily—of war refugees. It is, nevertheless, an urban refugee community to the extent that the great majority of its pre-1976 arrivals (93 percent) migrated to the city to escape political or economic problems in the countryside. In particular, 63.3 percent of pre-1976 immigrants were farmers forced, for one reason or another, from the land. All the same, Campo Muslim is not a community of landless cultivators. Some 32 percent of pre-1976 arrivals reported that they "owned" agricultural land.^[5] Thus, many Campo Muslim residents had rights in land but had (temporarily or permanently) abandoned that land either because they could not make a living from it or, as in the cases of Kasan Kamid and Imam Akmad, conditions became far too dangerous to continue to support themselves on it.