Introduction

Prewar Buguias was by no means a wholly self-sufficient community. The inhabitants of the upper Agno Valley were widely noted as long-distance merchants. Through trade the Buguias people procured part of their subsistence needs; more importantly, through incessant buying and selling they developed a mercantile orientation. In Buguias it was commercial endeavors, not agrarian practices, that formed the pivot between the economic and the ideological realms, the mundane and the spiritual. And it was the legacy of prewar trade that nurtured the postwar vegetable industry.

Paralleling the community's economic linkages were political ties. For just as prewar Buguias was not self-sufficient, neither was it wholly autonomous. From the beginning of the twentieth century, the village lay within an international structure of power relations centering on the American colonial government in Manila. Compared to many other peripheral regions of the world economy, imperial power was relatively light here, but in many respects American policies, intentionally and accidentally, molded the development of Buguias society.