The American Intervention
The first American surveying team arrived in Buguias in 1903, determined to isolate private land from the "public domain" (owned, in their eyes, by the Insular Government). The surveyors sought out property owners, hoping to award them with genuine titles.[3] But American conceptions of land tenure clashed with the indigenous system, and the officials sent to carry out the work lacked the dedication that would have been necessary for success. They meted only the more accessible sites; Buguias's upper reaches were ignored, and thereby "legally" transferred to the Manila government. Eventually these lands were included within the Central Cordilleran Forest Reserve—reserved for American mill and mine owners elsewhere in Benguet. Although administrators set aside small "communal forests," these were utterly inadequate and largely ignored. Compounding the imbroglio, the surveyors titled large blocks as single properties, blocks encompassing pastures, dry fields, and terraces—and controlled (in varying degrees) by many different parties. The surveyors, it must be said, received little help from the mistrustful residents. Most baknangs, suspicious of the surveyors' intentions, put forward dummy owners; one such newly propertied man was a poor, blind, and completely pliant priest.
American land policy was revised in the 1930s, when two contradictory policies were implemented. A new cadastral survey, less fraudulent than the earlier one, measured only cultivated plots and awarded titles to the actual cultivators. Indeed, the teams preferentially surveyed the fields of individuals requesting the action. But
despite this meliorative effort, most land remained either "public" or under titles established earlier. The companion American land program of the period, that of the "municipal tax declaration," formed a strikingly divergent tenure system. Although made possible and encouraged by the Insular Government, the tax declaration arrangement formed, in effect, a quasi-official local tenure system, run by the American-recognized Buguias administration. To confirm limited rights to a parcel, an individual had simply to declare ownership annually and pay a small municipal tax. Such property boundaries were loosely fixed through descriptions of natural features. Any uncultivated plot could legally be declared, so long as the declarant paid the required taxes—regardless of whether it was previously titled to another or officially within the public domain (see Arenal-Sereno and Libarios 1983).
In general, the elite welcomed the tax-declaration system, since it allowed them to aggrandize their own holdings with imperial blessing while retaining control of the tenure system itself. The poor resented it during this period, as they could scarcely afford the requisite taxes. Through the 1930s, considerable pasturage and even some forest stands were made quasi private through tax declarations. Indigenous communal usufruct rights were not thereby cancelled, but the preexisting tendency toward land privatization was strengthened.
Three incompatible land-tenure systems coexisted uneasily at the end of the American period. Many parcels were covered by overlapping claims, each of which could invoke the backing of a different level of authority: the Insular Government in Manila, the American-recognized municipality, or the body of customary law. Individual rights to land and its products varied both within and among each of these disparate systems. The contradictions did not surface until the postwar period, but the inhabitants of Buguias in the later twentieth century are vexed by the land-tenure policies of the American bureaucracy.