Introduction

The postwar transformation of the economic and ecological bases of Buguias society was rapid and complete. Within a few years, dry fields had been marginalized, pastoralism was fading, and the livestock trade was derelict. The Buguias people had become full-time commercial farmers, buying agricultural chemicals produced overseas and growing produce for the Manila market. In tracing this transformation, the second half of this work is ultimately concerned with a question that receives increasing attention as the analysis proceeds: to whit, in what ways and to what extent was this dramatic material transfiguration reflected in social and cultural change.

In Part I, Buguias was viewed in a largely synchronic framework. For the postwar period, a more diachronic approach becomes not only possible (the texture of documentable chronological detail being much finer) but in many ways preferable (the pace of change having increased sufficiently to lessen the utility of a single-moment analysis). The shift is one of emphasis, however; as with any historical geographic inquiry, this work must illuminate not only the flow of events but also the simultaneous differentiation and interaction of distinct places.

Such dual organizational imperatives have been accommodated here by hinging the analysis on the period between 1972 and 1974, a watershed within the postwar era. Up to that point, the vegetable-producing districts experienced rising prosperity; afterward, the dominant tone became one of crisis and restructuring. The chapters concerned with the earlier period detail the establishment of vegetable culture. Because this was an expansive time, when new agricultural technologies were fitted to the local environment and when a new economy offered prosperity to most (and riches to a few), the stress here is on successful adaptation. To explicate the basis of this new prosperity, both the evolving agricultural ecology and the development of the market on which it depended are explored at length.

Social conflicts did not disappear during this period, however, and some were even exacerbated. More ominously, environmental safeguards maintained during the prewar period were gradually eroded. By the end of the 1960s, the stable economy of the prewar

years had been replaced by a vibrant but precarious one. This new vulnerability, and the undercurrents of discord that had remained subdued throughout the fifties and sixties, became increasingly clear and urgent as a succession of shock waves in the global economy began to undermine the community's collective livelihood. The chapters concerned with the difficult years since the early 1970s accordingly deal explicitly with the breakdown of harmony, opening with a lengthy exposition of the market crisis before focusing explicitly on ecological deterioration and social turmoil.