Negros Occidental: The Formation of Plantation Society

The peopling and exploitation of the western Negros wilderness between 1836 and 1920 shared much in common with the global frontier phenomenon taking place at this time. The expansion of agriculture onto hitherto underutilized territory of the Americas, Eurasia, Africa, and Oceania happened in response to social, economic, and political pressures, as well as to an imperative to feed the machines of the Industrial Revolution. The cycle of initial pioneering, succeeded by intense cash-crop agriculture, the encumbering of land, the harnessing of labor, and the gradual imposition of a full range of civilization's amenities and restraints, was repeated on Negros as on other frontiers. As elsewhere, forest lands were reduced and the local aboriginal population displaced as a rising entrepreneurial elite rapidly accumulated wealth. This era was indeed the heyday of unfettered capitalism.^[25]

Figures in table 5 depict in gross terms the transformation of western Negros. Between 1845 and 1918 annual sugar production increased enormously, while population rose more than 1,021 percent, an annual rate of 3.35 percent. The extension of agricultural lands resulted from the creation of hundreds of new plantations out of areas heretofore primary and secondary jungle. Amidst these haciendas, permanent towns rose, built upon earlier settlements or upon missions recently established by Recollect priests.

In the mid-nineteenth century, new migrants to Negros included farmers who established homesteads, mainly subsistence, in coastal and interior Negros alongside the already settled Negrense smallholders. Here they grew chiefly rice, corn, or cash crops such as tobacco and abaca. The reasons for this early migration remain obscure, but they must have involved some degree of desperation, since much of this immigration did not have official sanction; moreover, local histories contain lore that some of these settlers came to avoid the law, the military draft, or various tax and labor obligations imposed by the government. Also, most arrived from overcrowded and depressed areas such as Bohol, Cebu, Antique, and the textile towns of Iloilo, suggesting that many of them sought simply to improve their material conditions, as homesteaders have done on other frontiers. Whatever the reasons, these early settlers had little effect upon the great changes

that occurred later. Many were subsequently absorbed into the hacienda labor force after having lost their land to the new breed of planters who took over the island.^[26]

As noted previously, the original haciendas on Negros appeared in the 1840s and 1850s with the advent of such settlers as Agustin Montilla, Yves Germain Gaston, and Eusebio de Luzuriaga and his fellow refugees. Despite these early pioneering efforts and improving market conditions, Negros did not begin to attract large numbers of new hacenderos until the late 1850s. At least three factors seem to have featured in the delay. First, the threat of Moro coastal raiders lingered on and was not finally eliminated until the time of Governor Emilio Saravia (1855-57) who defeated them in the waters off Silay in 1857. Shortly after this engagement, the government stationed two steam gunboats to patrol the Guimaras Strait, discouraging further pirate depredations.

Second, Negros possessed a reputation as lacking the social and physical amenities of communities on the neighboring islands. The advent of the Augustinian Recollect friars to exercise religious control of the province

served to alleviate somewhat this concern. Recollects assumed jurisdiction of Negros Island in 1848 and began establishing missions, then parishes, as well as taking up parishes vacated by the old native secular priests. Coincidental with the arrival of the Recollects was the governorship of Manuel Valdivieso Morquecho (1849-55) who, like his predecessor Vizmanos, sought to encourage economic development of the island. From his headquarters at the newly created capital of Bacolod, Morquecho began formally delineating a number of new town centers along the west coast and barrios that later became municipalities along the north coast.^[27]

Third, there existed no pressing need earlier to consider Negros as a field for investment. By the 1850s, however, British cottons began to penetrate the Philippine market, cutting into the sales of indigenous textiles, a business controlled until then by Chinese mestizos from Panay. In addition, an influx of entrepreneurial Chinese into the Visayan region drove many of these mestizo merchants out of what remained of the native cloth industry and prevented them from finding niches in other branches of the wholesale and retail trades. Many held out until their market began to dry up rapidly between 1865 and 1873 in the face of renewed competition from imported cloth following the American Civil War. These conditions sent the mestizos in search of new arenas of economic activity, and, aware of a growing market for Philippine sugar abroad, they increasingly looked across the Guimaras Strait to Negros as an investment alternative. At a slightly later period Cebuanos from Cebu and Bohol began to turn to the eastern and northern coasts of Negros as regions to expand their sugar plantations.^[28]

Other factors, too, began to exert a magnetic pull on potential investors. The immediate lift of the Crimean War, with its boosting of world prices, induced them seriously to consider risking the establishment of new plantations in the western Negros hinterland. To facilitate this movement came British Vice-Consul Nicholas Loney, who reached Iloilo in 1856. Loney, recognizing sugar's potential as an export industry, acted as a stimulus in several ways. On the positive side, he arranged for the flow of new British milling equipment, the provision of low-interest credit to pay for it, the construction of better port facilities, and the first foreign international shipments out of Iloilo, to Australia in 1859. On the negative side, by importing British cloth, he helped drive mestizos out of the textile business.

Loney established his own export-import company in 1860 and with his brother Robert acquired a hacienda on Negros a year later. In his early dealings, Loney took cash loans from the prominent American firm of Russell, Sturgis and Company, which put up its own branch at Iloilo in 1863. Subsequently, the other American merchant house in the Philip-

pines, Peele, Hubbell and Company, and such British firms as Smith, Bell and Company and Warner, Barnes and Company entered the sugar business, encouraging the growth of the industry on Negros. Together these houses dominated foreign export of sugar from Iloilo and became the chief suppliers of imported goods and machinery, as well as a source of credit to Negros planters. Iloilo opened to international commerce in 1855, making it possible for exporters to bypass Manila as a transshipment point and thus to reduce shipping costs. By the mid-1860s Iloilo became the chief port for Negros mat, a position it held throughout the remainder of the period.^[29]

The efforts of the first Recollect friars and Governor Morquecho, the opening of the Port of Iloilo, the activities of Loney and the other foreign investment houses, and, above all, constantly expanding world demand for cane sugar made the period from 1850 to 1886 the time of greatest intrusion upon the Negros frontier. Planters and small farmers sliced into the wilderness creating farming communities, and priests turned missions and parishes into new town centers. The chronology of town erections reveals the course of sugar estate expansion in western Negros (see table 6). Sugarlandia's major boundaries took shape during these prosperous market years of the nineteenth century.

The sugar frontier originated along the western seacoast, moved south from Bago as far as Ilog, and north from Silay, following along the coast to Cadiz. Growth also occurred along the eastern shore, out from Escalante toward Arguelles (Sagay) and Calatrava. San Carlos finally succumbed to sugar after the turn of the century. Settlement of the interior, up the rivers from the western coastal towns, took place slowly over the course of the entire period, and as late as 1920 virgin land still existed.^[30]

Sugar flourished on Negros because of a new generation of entrepreneurs who created large plantations, employing imported and local labor to do initial clearing and then to work the estates for them. The entrepreneurs fell into two categories: actual settlers and speculators who bought or acquired estates by other means, fair and foul, combining, then developing, properties already cleared. Few of the old Negrense elite seem to have become successful hacenderos.

With his story of the Valderramas, Negros historian Modesto Sa-onoy provides a good example of a typical pioneer planter family. Catalino and Fortunato Valderrama, sons of a Chinese immigrant convert and his Ilongo wife, left their home in Molo on Panay at a youthful age, when the cloth business that had sustained their parents no longer produced profits. In the 1890s Catalino oversaw the clearing of some 300 hectares of frontier in Cadiz then opening up to settlement. During the following decade his younger brother established Hacienda Nazareth on 400 hectares in newly

founded Manapla. While pioneering was a game chiefly for the young, some older settlers also participated. Revolutionary leader Juan Araneta, who lost his lands in Bago during Spanish times, at thirty-nine and with his second wife penetrated the interior to start plantations in Ma-ao.^[31]

Many of the arriving planter migrants utilized prior bonds to ease their entry into the Negros wilderness. Domingo Cuenca, a Spaniard, commenced farming in Minuluan (Talisay) when his brother Fernando, a Recollect, became parish priest in that town. Similarly, the presence of mestizo secular priests Eusebio and Ramon Locsin in Silay and Bacolod facilitated the movement: of their Molo friends and relatives to these parishes. On a broader scale, groups tended to migrate to areas where they had preexisting contacts. Peninsular-born Spaniards, for instance, clustered in the municipalities of La Carlota, Kabankalan, Manapla, San Carlos, and Bacolod, while Boholanos and Cebuanos did the same along the north and east coast. Mestizos from Jaro and Molo fed the west coast settlements

of Talisay and Silay, but migrants from the second-ranked Ilongo textile area of Guimbal-Miagao concentrated at Hinigaran and Isabela. Often, too, when planters imported labor, they recruited from their home town, so that small rural communities on Negros sometimes consisted of barrio mates from Panay or Cebu. As time went on, intermarriage and movement about Negros tended to break down this pattern, but some of the early associations between towns and groups still linger. The east coast towns, for example, remain Cebuano speaking until the present day, and the majority of Spaniards lived in the same five towns until at least the outbreak of World War II.^[32]

Spaniards had to settle for a share of the plantations, but not a dominant one, and in no place, save in La Carlota and Kabankalan, did they become a major economic force. Indeed, like their predecessors Agustin Montilla and Eusebio de Luzuriaga, they tended to intermarry with the mestizo population, and their descendants were absorbed into the group broadly defined as the Negrense planter elite. Not all Spaniards made it to the top of the social hierarchy, for they held no privileged economic position in sugarlandia simply because of their nationality. Some became owners of small estates, while others served as hacienda managers or foremen.

Westerners from other countries as well as a few Chinese also entered the plantation frontier. Included among this group were Hugo Koch, a Prussian; the Swiss Frederick Luchinger, Charles and Samuel Bischoff, Paul Wuthrich, and the Jeanjaquet brothers; the English Loneys, Thomas Evans, and Frederick Ashton; Chinese such as Domingo Lazarte Yu-Bangco, Yap Waco, Lucio Echauz Tan-Suia, and Yee On; and, after the turn of the century, Americans J. Clayton Nichols, David Mulliken, and John Merrick. Eventually such foreigners either sold out, became absorbed into the local population, or like Luchinger and Loney concentrated on the exporting end of the sugar business.^[33]

McCoy, in identifying the origin of the Negros planter elite, points to the continuity of names between the leading merchant families of Iloilo and the largest landowners subsequently on Negros, and certainly that correlation exists. At the same time it should be noted that settlers from other areas and groups sojourned to and succeeded on Negros and that the hacendero group became more than a mere extension of Iloilo society. The Ilongos Teodoro Benedicto, Isidro de la Rama, Teodoro Yulo, and Eugenio Lopez held thousands of hectares of land, but many of the other 485 hacenderos listed in the 1896 enumeration came from a non-Ilongo background. Moreover, intermarriage among the often large families of the era tended to blur some of the distinctions of origin. For example, descendants of the great Iloilo merchant Basilio Lopez (ca. 1810-ca. 1875), many of

whom became Negrense planters, within two generations had intermarried into numerous other Ilongo families, but also with Cebuanos, Spaniards, Spanish mestizos, and Americans. Among the original settlers the Spaniard Agustin Montilla married an Ilonga, while the mother of Yves Gaston's children immigrated with him from the Tagalog-speaking province of Batangas. Montilla's daughter married Hugo Koch. The same 1896 census lists 151 Spanish men and 24 women, but also 332 Spanish mestizos.^[34]

The image of the pioneer planter with spouse carving a hacienda out of the wilderness is slightly misleading. To be sure such individuals existed; however, planters coming in the 1850s and 1860s acquired land, usually along rivers and streams, mainly by buying the rice fields and unused property of local residents, often sitting or former officials. Heirs of these first arrivals would often clear and farm lands adjacent to the original settlements rather than move to the more dangerous interiors. In this way Negros grew out from the edges of prior settlement rather than from widely scattered nuclei in the middle of the jungle. Like many other pioneers, Juan Araneta did not live on his clearings, choosing rather to stay in his comfortable home in Bago. For a long time new haciendas and towns remained devoid of those amenities found in older settlements readily in contact by boat with the outside world. Furthermore, a high risk to health, especially from malaria, persisted for those dwelling in or on the edge of the jungle. Nicholas Loney probably died of that malady, contracted during a climb of Mount Canlaon in 1869. In 1902, Governor Locsin noted that malaria affected as much as 12 percent of the population and was particularly prevalent among workers dwelling in the interior portions of the province. With the threat of Moro raiders eliminated, the coastal town centers proved the more attractive places to live.^[35]

The matter of titling lands remained informal, given the absence of government surveys, good records, and land offices, as well as the apparent availability of unlimited land. Early purchase agreements might include a hand-drawn map roughly outlining the property (see figure 3) or a statement approximating the location of the land. Descriptions of property did not specify exact dimensions; rather, lot sizes were described in terms of the number of gantas or cavans of rice or corn seedlings or lacsas of sugar cane cuttings necessary to plant the land. Larger properties were simply referred to as haciendas. Over time the acts of buying and selling of property provided one form of recognition of land ownership and offered a basis for formalizing titles when the government introduced programs of land registration.^[36]

[Full Size]

Figure 3.
Map Accompanying Deed of Land Sale, Hinigaran, Negros Occidental,
1850. Protocolos , 1975, Negros Occidental, Philippine National Archives, Manila.

Legitimation for the acquisition of large blocks of agricultural land on Negros began in the mid-.1870s when the Spanish government devised a program for distributing public lands (realengas ), territory considered unoccupied at the time and, hence, belonging to the crown. Petitioners could purchase such lands at giveaway prices or with proof of prior cultivation (denuncia ) could claim them gratis. Prices for realengas rose gradually over the two decades from one to two pesos per hectare to six to ten. The biggest purchasers on the list were Alejandro Montelibano and Teodoro Benedicto, each of whom obtained more than 1,200 hectares in this fashion. The majority of petitions involved properties of more than 100 hectares of frontier land. Martinez Cuesta's list of those granted free tide based on prior occupancy includes many heirs of the first pioneers claiming lands settled by their parents in older, established areas. Lands offered by the government at such low prices accrued considerably in value and created great fortunes for the recipients. A 1918 estimate placed the worth of land in Negros at P100 per hectare for unimproved plots and as high as P500 for the choicest fields.

The U.S. colonial regime did not prove so generous in making large grants of the public domain, seeking rather to follow America's own ideal of turning the frontier into the realm of the yeoman farmer. The Home-stead Act of 1902 granted a maximum of 16 hectares of public land per individual. Sixteen hectares still represented a substantial piece of land, and on the edges of the sugar frontier, in San Carlos for instance, numerous claimants came forth in the first two decades of the new century. The attempt, however, to preserve sugarlandia for small farmers failed.^[37]

Actual registering of land presented something of a problem in Negros, for there was no functioning land office until about 1890, and the process of surveying property and legally establishing clear title proved cumbersome. Few owners, save those given public lands, had clear titles before the twentieth century. In 1902 the Americans instituted the Torrens system, which provided government-guaranteed titles, but the complicated nature of registration and the reluctance of planters to let a tax-hungry government know the size of their holdings reduced the number of early applications. By 1910 some owners in Negros, as elsewhere in the Philippines, were beginning to apply, but not in sufficient numbers to satisfy the government. In 1913, therefore, it inaugurated a cadastral survey of the whole Philippines, which included pro forma lawsuits intended to force all landowners to obtain Torrens titles, a monumental project that dragged on throughout the rest of the pre-World War II period. Negros Occidental was one of the first areas surveyed, and judges acted efficiently in settling the

litigation, so that by 1922 legal titles for much of the best farming land in the province were available.^[38]

During the process of claiming, amassing, and titling estates, planters sometimes displaced small farmers of the original Negrense population and those poor migrants who came to take up subsistence plots. The actual extent of this eviction and land grabbing (usurpacion ) must always remain a mystery, for they were carried out in various ways by hacenderos and their minions who made and kept the records. Sometimes removal occurred legally when planters with proper claims removed squatters who had simply occupied their land. At other times eviction took place with the aid of falsified documents obtained through collusion between corrupt officials and hacenderos. The planter group and their friends, relatives, and employees held almost all municipal and provincial offices as well as all judicial positions, and they had little difficulty turning such a monopoly to their own use. Finally, in unnumbered cases beyond the sight of witnesses, employees of the hacenderos forced peasants from their land. From the occasional evidence that does appear, a sense emerges that the taming of the Negros frontier was fraught with unrecorded violence. McCoy cites a complaint of Spanish farmers from La Carlota against the great landowner Teodoro Benedicto for his strong-armed removal of a group of Antique migrants who had worked the same land for years before Benedicto claimed it.

Such usurpacion still occurred at the end of the period, as evidenced by the case of some La Carlota homesteaders that came to the attention of Senate President Manuel Luis Quezon. Small farmers found themselves threatened by three of the most influential hacenderos in that district (see appendix C). In another case going on at the same time, Governor Matias Hilado of Negros Occidental faced a charge of land grabbing brought by another government official. Confronted with such pressure throughout the era, peasant farmers could only retreat further into the wilderness or stay and work for hacendero claimants to their lands.^[39]

The plight of the aboriginal inhabitants of the island is more difficult to document but appears even more tragic, similar to the situation found on other contemporary frontiers around the world. As original owners of the interior they either farmed the land as swiddens or used the jungle for hunting and gathering. Since they possessed no formal titles, their land became officially crown property and could thus be granted to others. To resist the government directly or even indirectly meant to risk extermination. Governor Saravia supplied a frightening example of what could happen to an uncooperative population when in 1856 he caused the mass

murder of non-Christians in Barrio Carolan, Kabankalan, while trying to bring them under colonial control. Hill people learned early in this era that retreat represented the better part of valor. The interior mountains and foothills became final havens for all the displaced, where they could practice their ways and avoid becoming part of a work force for the sugar economy and servile members of the colonial pyramid. Land grabbing burdens the modern history of Negros, and even today tension mars the relationship between uplanders and sugar people.^[40]

A comparison of names of sugarland holders in 1896 with those who had made purchases at mid-nineteenth century reveals a considerable turnover of property ownership in the early years, demonstrating the high risk of venturing into sugar farming. Alongside early pioneers in the 1860s appeared speculators like Ricardo Mascuñana and Marcos Villaluz, who purchased agricultural land cheaply and sold it at a higher price to new-comers. In the 1870s wealthy merchants commenced putting together big estates for themselves and their relatives. In that decade alone Teodoro Benedicto purchased 5,590 hectares for P32,477, or about P5.813 per hectare. From this time on, some consolidation of ownership occurred, and by 1896 twelve families controlled almost one-third of the 53,211 hectares of sugarland in twenty of the twenty-six sugar-producing towns on Negros. About four hundred other planters having smaller haciendas possessed the remainder, so that the size of holding averaged about 109 hectares per owner. Investing in working plantations became a common way of entering the sugar business, and by 1887 the Iloilo newspaper El Eco de Panay carried advertisements for Negros haciendas complete with machinery, work animals, and crops in the field.^[41]

Constant traffic in land serves as a reminder that transforming the Negros frontier was first and foremost a capitalistic enterprise, that haciendas represented investments first and homesteads second. Other forms of associated business activity included supplying agricultural credit, trans-porting sugar to market, and sugar brokerage. Foreign and native entrepreneurs, if they had cash, turned to these other activities, which offered greater and more reliable opportunities for profit. Owning several haciendas and leaving their day-to-day management to employees or relatives allowed bigger operators to concentrate on other economic pursuits. Teodoro Yulo over the course of his lifetime acquired seventy-five haciendas, some from his debtors, and ran his diverse financial kingdom, which included banking, from his home in Iloilo. The ultimate success story was Isidro de la Rama, a petty Ilongo cloth dealer who migrated to work a plantation in Minuluan. After seven years of farming, de la Rama switched to buying sugar and loaning money to fellow planters. Eventually, he

moved into the shipping (interisland and international) and warehousing of sugar, and by the time his son Esteban took over his enterprises in the 1890s, the de la Rama fortune was one of the largest in the Philippines.^[42]

Supplying credit offered the best entree into sugar-related business activities, for a shortage of working capital always plagued farmers on Negros. At the outset, the island boasted cheap, readily available land, but little else, and it took infusions of foreign funds to nurture the budding industry. Such foreign firms as Loney and Company; Russell, Sturgis and Company; Smith, Bell and Company; and Lim Ponzo and Company loaned money to planters chiefly to acquire rights to their sugar, usually at slightly below market prices. To obtain guaranteed deliveries, brokers sent agents throughout the province who would offer loans on favorable terms, sometimes as low as 8 percent and well below rates for other mortgages, which could top 30 percent. Such anticipatory crop loans worked effectively because they reduced some of the heavy competition among brokers for the sugar of the hundreds of planters spread all over Negros. Brokerage firms operated most actively in years. of good market conditions when sugar was both expensive and scarce.

Foreign houses served as links in a chain of credit institutions with the large English banking concerns like Baring Brothers and Hongkong Bank at the top and planters at the bottom. Import-export firms borrowed from banks as well as from such private investors as the friar orders and Manila Spaniards. With this capital and their own earnings, the firms invested in crop brokerage, importation of Western goods, and local banking, providing a large share of the money for new plantations on Negros and elsewhere. A series of untoward circumstances led to the demise of Loney and Company in 1875, Russell, Sturgis in 1876, and Peele, Hubbell in 1887, putting a dent in the credit market just at a time when world sugar prices turned downward. In 1887 a group of Negrense farmers lamented the lack of cheap credit and petitioned the government to come to their rescue, and as late as 1918 farmers in northern Negros complained about usurious interest rates. Newer companies like Warner, Barnes and Company and the Chinese firms took up some of the slack, but they did not entirely replace the early pioneer lenders; nor did the alternate sources of credit provide capital at the same favorable rates. One of the most active brokers was Lim Ponzo, who lived in Iloilo but operated at least one store in Victorias and a warehouse in Silay. He loaned money to hacenderos in Silay, Saravia, Victorias, and Murcia in order to acquire their sugar for as much as 12 to 40 centavos below the prevailing market price—a considerable saving to himself. He charged interest for mortgages at rates from. 2 percent all the way to 15 percent, still low by prevailing standards. However, farmers

really in debt to him were required to buy hacienda supplies and rice for their workers at his Victorias store; also, they might have to pay an additional 12 percent interest on their loans, offer land as security, and pledge to deliver a given number of piculs of sugar to his bodega in Silay.

Aside from anticipatory crop loans offered by sugar brokers, hacenderos obtained mortgages and, to a lesser extent, pacto de retro contracts from private individuals and, infrequently, from sugar firms. Wealthy Ilongos like Teodoro Yulo, Isidro de la Rama, and Teodoro Benedicto made considerable money in mortgages, as did the occasional foreigner. When Yves Germain Gaston, founder and great pioneer of Negros sugar farming, died in 1863, the bulk of his P53,000 estate consisted of P40,000 worth of agricultural loans and a P9,000 investment in the Scottish firm of Ker and Company, the original Iloilo employer of Nicholas Loney. Rates for mortgage money commonly ran higher than for anticipatory crop loans and varied considerably in length, from as short as three months to more than a decade—as a rule, the longer the mortgage, the less favorable the terms. Lenders preferred land as collateral, but they occasionally took other forms of agricultural property; moreover, mortgages usually went on rather extensive properties valued in thousands of pesos. In 1915 the Spanish firm Ynchausti and Company picked up a hacienda as payment of an especially large debt of Pl12,500. That entries in the notarial records indicate few foreclosures in Negros reflects a high level of reliability on the part of the mortgagees; even so, lenders usually gave little money for agricultural land in terms of its true value.

Until creation of the Agricultural Bank of the Philippine Islands in 1908, and more especially its successor, the PNB, in 1916, even planters with good collateral did not have access to credit on really favorable terms. Government-sponsored lending institutions gave relatively larger loans on property, at 8 percent and 10 percent; even so, they only partially alleviated the credit problem, for they did not possess sufficient funds to meet the total need, and they demanded Torrens titles as security. Supplying agricultural credit persisted throughout the era as a lucrative business activity.^[43]

Differences in the size of holdings created a two-tiered structure of wealth in Negros with the most influential families having the most capital, frequently living in and conducting their business from Iloilo. Out on plantations and in the towns of Negros dwelt working hacenderos who lacked the economic cushion to carry them easily through hazardous times without borrowing. The wealthy group not only knew more security, they had money to lend and could profit from hard times and, in promising times, invest in progressive changes. When sugar tramways, centrals, and shipping lines were to be built, they had the financial resources to profit

and to increase their already extensive fortunes. Within the planter class of Negros considerable differentiations of wealth existed, and the gap grew wider as the era of the centrals approached.^[44]

At the heart of economic and social life on frontier Negros lay the hacienda, locality for the majority of the province's inhabitants. In the 1903 census, organizers took the barrio as the smallest unit of enumeration in all provinces save Negros Occidental, where they used haciendas as well as barrios; furthermore, in the big Negrense sugar towns, haciendas represented a very large proportion of reporting units. In the earlier 1896 enumeration of the province, haciendas were the main unit. Haciendas varied in size, from a few hectares to several hundred; the 489 listed in 1896 averaged 74 hectares, and most included a mill—steam, water, or animal driven.

Lack of easy transportation on Negros caused most haciendas to remain isolated, self-contained communities. In Spanish times the only reliable road ran between Silay and Bacolod. Elsewhere, a trail roughly paralleled the island's western shore; however, along most stretches it was only a crude path and even in the better places was rutted during the rainy season and dusty during the dry. Furthermore, because so few bridges existed, the many creeks and rivers emptying out into the surrounding seas needed fording, and travel off main roads moved along narrow tracks or up shallow waterways. Americans took a more aggressive approach to road and bridge building; nevertheless, as late as 1916 only 142 kilometers of first-class highway covered the province. The best highways provided access to town centers and allowed for some automobile traffic, but large numbers of haciendas were then, as they are today, difficult to reach. Planters often had large families and on more remote haciendas created their own community. An officer of the Spanish Guardia Civil seeking to establish a post in an outlying community found the center of a particular hacienda as busy and with as many buildings as a proper town plaza.^[45]

However, table 7 indicates that those Wealthy enough to own a substantial home (una casa de materiale fuerte ) chose most frequently to reside in town rather than in a barrio or on a hacienda. Towns, especially Bacolod, Silay, and San Carlos, possessed active social whirls, zarzuelas and other entertainments, large churches with regular religious services, business opportunities, and transportation facilities to other islands, as well as such twentieth-century niceties as electricity, ice houses, telegraph offices, and frequent mail service. In general, the focus of a family's business interests strongly influenced its residence pattern and social orientation.^[46]

While absentee ownership became a common feature on Negros, each hacienda had a planter in charge, either the owner of a small estate, a

leaseholder (arrendatario, acsa , or agsador ), or the owner's surrogate, an administrador or an encargado (overseer). No figures exist on how many owners actually operated their farms, but the sparse evidence suggests that the number diminished over the period. Hard times such as the decades of the 1880s and 1900s seem to have reduced the number of small planters, the kind most likely to run their own estates. A turn-of-the-century roster for the town of Eustaquio Lopez lists only four owner managers, all relatively small, out of forty planters. Owners of modest estates lived in houses little better than those of some of the paid supervisory personnel on larger haciendas.^[47]

Leaseholding arrangements came with a complex set of options on Negros and altered according to prevailing economic circumstances and the changing lifestyle of landowners. Straight cash rentals seem to have been the least favored choice, for they provided tenants with the least protection against fluctuating sugar' prices; moreover, owners did not prefer this option, because the lessees possessed little incentive to do long-term maintenance on hacienda machinery and land.

The acsa or agsador system of share rentals proved somewhat more popular, for it offered many protections not available under the cash tenant

system. Acsas as mere share tenants farming their own plots date back to the beginning of plantations on Negros when owners personally managed their haciendas; however, as absentee ownership became more common, the acsa system changed character and became one of lease management, used by both native and European entrepreneurs. By the late nineteenth century ambitious young Spaniards eager to enter the sugar business came out from the metropolitan country to work as acsas on haciendas of Spanish and native owners.

On some estates, larger ones especially, an acsa leased a particular portion, supervising laborers and delivering cane to the mill. On other, smaller properties he managed the whole hacienda and paid the owner a percentage of the total sugar produced. Size of shares varied considerably, from 10 percent to 75 percent for the lessee, depending on the owner's and acsa's contributions of working capital, farm implements, and animals and according to prevailing economic conditions. With muscovado sugar, for instance, the division could normally range from one-third to two-thirds; however, if a central processed the sugar, the mill's share reached 40-50 percent and the tenant's dropped to 8-10. Of course, in the latter instance, he did not have to do his own milling, and the sugar sold for a better price. Acsas rented haciendas as small as ten hectares and as large as several hundred. Landowners of one hacienda might sometimes lease others. In all cases, the acsa acted as planter, taking complete responsibility for the successful performance of the estate. A rare firsthand description by an acsa of his farming activities appeared in the Philippines Free Press in 1912.

I am working on the hacienda of my uncle where I cultivate my own sugar field. If the present price of sugar holds, I will make this year some P900 to P1,000 which is not a bad start.

I also have pigs and farm birds, and I am cultivating, besides, a little patch of Indian corn that within three months will give me sufficient maize for the feeding of my hens and hogs. With that I hope to obtain enough to cover the costs of the cultivating of my cane.

I go to the fields very early to begin the farmwork. As it is now cool, I can plow the ground by myself, at which activity I am engaged until nine in the morning. In the afternoon, when the sun no longer shines so intensely, I resume my work. And to these simple country folk it is amusing to observe, to pause before me and to express their astonishment, at seeing me work; it's not part of their comprehension that "amo [master] Ramon" holds a plow, being a student from Manila and a "gentleman."

I have also two carabao and I care for them with great solicitude. The idea that they can die frightens me, because if that

should come to pass, all my spirits, my hopes and my dreams will be buried with them. Lord, preserve them!^[48]

By far the most common system of sugar farming in Negros was owner or employee management of a hacienda of salaried workers. In 1911 Renacimiento Filipino published an article describing operations on a 2,700-hectare estate (one-third devoted to sugar) owned by the de la Rama interests in Bago. Under overall supervision of an administrator, the hacienda was broken up into eight units, each under the control of an encargado and each with its own complement of fields, mill, and workers. The administrator kept the books, oversaw the machine shop, supervised distribution of tools, and allocated use of the hacienda's three tractors. Encargados oversaw foremen, or cabos , responsible for the daily work activities of the hacienda's seven hundred permanent employees (duma'an, jornaleros ) who tilled fields, ran tram cars (bagones or bagonitas ), and operated mills. With variations in scale, machinery, and top administration, this plantation represents the typical sugar farm structure of Negros from the mid-nineteenth century to the advent of central milling.^[49]

A chasm divided the Negrense hacendero families socially and economically from their workers. Some physical distinctions may have surfaced to separate the planter class from its more "indio-looking" help, but such differentiation was more likely a matter of social perception than of empirical reality. No clear racial division such as that between the Caribbean white planter and the black field hand or the migrant Hawaiian kanaka and the Australian planter existed. The gulf in Negros remained social, economic, and, increasingly, cultural. True, some bonds of paternalism formed on Negros haciendas, yet such ties usually remained at their core pragmatic and contractual rather than socially intimate—discipline could not have been maintained otherwise. The distinction between those who did manual labor and those who did not was the cutting edge of a differentiation in wealth, education, mobility, and wider economic opportunity.^[50]

The permanent work force of the hacienda included persons with a variety of skills, responsibilities, and remuneration. The encargado, usually a relative or trusted employee of the owner, acted as hacendero in his absence and on bigger estates enjoyed a salary that allowed him and his family to live in a home of permanent materials. The following wry description, taken from Echaúz, illuminates the role of the estate supervisor (encargado or cabo-cabo):

Heart and soul of the little hacienda where he ordains and arranges is the factotum, he who must know everything, he who overlooks nothing. . . .

At dawn and dusk, he rings the bell, calls the roll with a thundering voice, distributes the work of the hacienda, and puts checks where he should not. . . .

Riding a nag of little worth, he uses a European saddle, he accompanies his bosses to town or to nearby haciendas, and looks after the fighting cocks bound for fiestas of greater importance.

During the cockfight he does not lose sight of the cocks held by the most trusted workers. . . . He collects the money if the cock wins and pays if things go badly.

Knowledgeable about the lands of the hacienda, he consults his boss in passing (as a courtesy) about the work of the following day; after a brief conversation, he handles all civil matters—and some more not civil—reads letters, writes, adjusts accounts, and officiates, once in a while, as a Cupid without bow and arrow.

Responsible for his actions, sometimes he is the intermediary between the worker who asks something for his sick mother, dead father or uncle, and the owner who pays. . . .

He distributes rice among the workers, which always results in a reduced quantity, something similar to the miracle of the Loaves and Fishes.

His handling of that cereal makes him friends and gives him influence, and when the owner complains about how quickly it is consumed, he always attributes the shrinkage to robbery, mice, or some other simple and innocent cause.^[51]

Cabos carried out encargado's orders, providing formal and informal leadership and liaison between hacienda management and the labor force. If the encargado might sometimes have been a European, the cabo was always a native Visayan. According to Echaúz, the cabo lived closer to hacienda worker families, in a nipa house only somewhat better than their own. Often literate, he held supervisory responsibility for day-to-day agricultural activities but did not do manual labor; he received two or three times more pay than the most senior duma'an. Other personnel on the plantation included the maestrillos who supervised the crystallization of muscovado sugar, the machinists, and clerks, all of whom received pay according to their skills. A tax survey of 1894 indicated that Chinese immigrants may have constituted a significant portion of the work force at sugar mills.^[52]

The bulk of the permanent labor force (duma'an) consisted of semiskilled workers, from as young as six to an advanced age, who prepared and maintained fields and looked after carabao and other stock. Duma'an cut

cane points from sugar stalks, weeded around young ratoons (plant stools), and saw to the repair of buildings and. carts. The number of workers depended on the size of the plantation, from as few as two or three up to hundreds of individuals; however, work varied little on all the estates. Living on or near the hacienda in nipa houses, duma'an were employed year-round, but they received little pay. Wages on sugar estates remain one of the more confusing and mysterious matters, because they varied so much. Foreman lists the duma'an salary at P4 per month in 1890; Landor places it at 25 cents per week, plus board, in 1902; and the Manila Times set it at P. 50 a day in 1919. None of these figures took into account use of land upon which a worker might build his house or the availability of rice and cash loans, which also figured in the salary equation. Often, the hacienda ran a store at which duma'an, isolated from the towns, could purchase necessities on credit; interest charges often produced debts that lasted for years. Salary thus became meaningless, for duma'an essentially ended up as subsistence workers on estates. So tied did workers become to individual haciendas that some sales of estates included all buildings, machinery, field crops, and the help.^[53]

November to April was the peak labor season: workers had to cut cane, make sugar, and put down a new crop simultaneously. Permanent workers could not handle all these burdens, and planters had to employ temporary help. To Panay, Cebu, Bohol, and other, smaller, offshore islands, hacenderos sent their agents with advance wages (antesipo or anticipo ) to enlist migrant labor (sacarias ) to come to Negros for from three to six months to cut and carry cane to the mills in exchange for a salary slightly higher than that of duma'an. Planters returned to the same poor Visayan communities annually to hire sacarias, or they engaged contractors (contratistas, capataz ) to make those arrangements. Contractors often recruited workers from their own home town, loaned them money, paid their salaries and their transportation to and from Negros, and supplied their food and necessities on the haciendas. Opportunities for contratistas to exploit sacadas abounded; however, economic necessity drew many migrant workers back to Negros regularly, as long as they could handle the field work.

Plantation work was (and still is) repetitious, dangerous, and physically rigorous, and only a closely supervised, industrious labor force could produce sugar profitably. Obtaining such a work force persisted as the ongoing challenge for planters throughout the period. Complicating the problem was their need to obtain such labor cheaply. For Negros sugar to contend successfully on the world market required that production costs be kept to a minimum, especially after the onset in the 1880s of the challenge from European beet sugar. Since Philippine yields per hectare

remained the lowest among the world's sugar-producing areas, maintaining a permanent poorly paid labor force on the haciendas and seasonally bringing in low-cost, migrant labor appeared to hacenderos the most reasonable solution to their dilemma.^[54]

Negros did not originally possess an available pool of hacienda labor, since the peasant population planted rice in the south and swiddens in the interior. Hence, workers had to be imported to begin sugar planting. To expand the agricultural frontier required that more labor come in, that the Negrense peasants move to the haciendas, and/or that the aboriginal population join the plantation work force. Labor migrated from other islands, and some independent farmers were absorbed into the hacienda system as their lands were usurped. Peasant farmers had a choice either of moving to new homesteads, working on plantations, or joining one of the bands of outlaws and cattle rustlers that preyed upon haciendas and towns. Recollect friars attempted for both religious and economic reasons to persuade the aboriginal population to become part of lowland society and the sugar work force, an effort at which the priests had little success. Curiously, Philippine Constabulary officers in the American period sought the same goal, in part as a matter of public order, in part to "civilize the natives." The constabulary, too, failed in this endeavor; thus, migrants and locally absorbed peasants fed the island's plantation labor force.^[55]

Once on plantations, workers usually found themselves bound there for life. Local judicial and executive authority, justices of the peace, and town officials were selected by and usually from among hacenderos and those who worked for them in the communities and on estates, so that legal controls supported the domination of the sugar elite. Runaway workers could be jailed for debt and returned to their amo, and laws still on the books in the American years supported these actions. The pattern of chronic indebtedness and lack of an alternative means of livelihood were the chief forces holding duma'an on plantations; however, in a frontier setting, with their farms remote from legal supervision and restraint, planters sometimes employed force as well. White noted that two legal codes existed on Negros: one for planters and one for the poor. Hacenderos possessed firearms and used them, along with other forms of physical abuse, to keep workers docile and acclimated to the discipline of hacienda work. Laborers might occasionally flee to a neighboring work place, but they seldom escaped from the system.^[56]

If planters easily controlled the permanent work force on their haciendas, they had less success coping with the sacadas who came annually to work the cane harvests. When the first migrant workers traveled to Negros remains uncertain; however, they probably did not arrive before

production made very rapid advances in the 1870s. Loney does not mention them in his extensive account of Negros in 1861, and one of the first references to their periodic journeys to the island appears in del Pan's description published in 1878. Ideally migrant laborers offered hacenderos a high degree of economic flexibility, for they worked only in response to seasonal demand. In practice, however, sacadas proved less malleable than duma'an, demanding more money for their part-time labors and working only when they chose to. Planters and their spokesmen often complained of the scarcity of labor, meaning that sacadas came in insufficient numbers to meet planter desires. Hacenderos became desperate enough to give advances to migrants and contratistas, although sometimes sacadas simply took the money and did not show up or left the fields early. Planters frequently spoke of a need for vagrancy laws as a way of coping with this flight, for, they presumed, culprits took the money and spent it on various vices in the towns.

Some disreputable workers and contractors may, indeed, have set out to defraud hacenderos, but others may simply have fled certain haciendas because conditions of employment and living became intolerable. A government report of 1911 stated (without intended irony):

In Occidental Negros local conditions seem to be the chief causes of the crimes against chastity, which are designated as being the most frequent in said province, in the same categorical line as crimes against property and person.

They are mostly committed at the time of the cutting of the sugarcane, and particularly, at the rice harvest time—from November to April—owing to the fact that during the sugar-grinding season a great number of laborers are gathered on the estates with their families, who live in crowded and narrow dwellings [quartels ]. . . .

In the said dwellings, which would hardly hold 3 or 4 persons, 3 or 4 families live and sleep closely and promiscuously, there being no separation of men from women, of the married from the unmarried, of old men from young men. As a resuit of the immorality growing out of this mode of living, the crimes of adultery, abduction, rape, and seduction are committed.^[57]

Hacenderos never completely solved the dilemma of controlling migrant labor, and another often-heard planter plea in the twentieth century was for importation of Chinese and Japanese workers, who had a reputation of industriousness and docility. Americans;, ever fearful of an inundation of "Asiatics," always dismissed such demands.^[58]

Despite incidental difficulties with labor supply, the Negros plantation system functioned well, to the advantage of hacenderos. Planters ruled absolutely, managing estate finances, fixing the schedule of agricultural activities, making technical choices, and setting work requisites. Few restrictions, save those of the marketplace, interfered with their control over property and workers. Colonial governments for the most part chose to support agricultural expansion by, among other things, not meddling with management of haciendas; meanwhile, the Church sided with hacenderos in almost all matters, for parish priests depended mainly on their largesse for survival. Negros plantations came to resemble, in many respects, those of the American antebellum South and the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century West Indies: worlds unto themselves, with the hacendero the unchallenged master. Flexibility built into the labor system allowed larger hacenderos to expand or contract their plantings according to market demand. Furthermore, in periods of economic downturn enterprising planters profited by absorbing the lands of the failing ones.^[59]

Wealth generated by sugar farming served as a springboard into other activities as well. The Valderramas, for example, went into lumber, for although large stands of Negros timber were cleared to make way for plantations, the northern region from Cadiz to Escalante became in the second decade of the twentieth century one of the first important Philippine lumber-producing areas. Lesser endeavors included one organized in 1919 by a group of Negrense planters to build a hotel near the health spa at Mambucal Springs in Murcia. Bigger entrepreneurs extended their empires beyond Negros, to Iloilo, Manila, the Visayan region, and the international arena. Children of the planter aristocracy not choosing to enter farming often used public and private primary and secondary schools in the province as a springboard to more advanced study in Panay, Manila, Spain, and the United States. A corps of Negrense professionals—doctors, lawyers, engineers, and technicians—serviced the island's communities and entered the ranks of government employees. Privileged families exploited sugar farming to create new economic activities and to reduce their dependency on agriculture as their. sole source of livelihood. Their wealth presented them with the opportunity to participate in the social and political life of the archipelago, increasingly focused on the capital city of Manila; and Negrenses like Jose Luzuriaga, Rafael Alunan, and Esperidion Guanco became leading politicians during the early American period.^[60]

Conversion of the Negros frontier into a plantation society represented a complicated process involving both foreigners and native Filipinos from all sectors of society: pioneer farmers, boatmen, rural workers, entrepreneurs, agricultural specialists, representatives of organized religion, and

government officials. From all these elements Negros society developed, similar in many ways to the rest of Filipino lowland society, yet different in others because of the nature of the frontier experience with its opportunities for the accumulation of enormous wealth. Despite rough surroundings, poor roads, and an atmosphere of violence, visitors wrote glowingly of the opulent planter lifestyle. A Negros planter might walk around his hacienda all day with a pistol on his hip, but at night he would shed it and dress in elegant clothes to dance with his family at a lively ball, one of the province's favorite entertainments.

Absence of societal and governmental restraints in a climate of unfettered capitalism permitted the lavish expenditure of resources, land grabbing, and exploitation and abuse of labor to go unquestioned. Surviving and thriving on the frontier entailed great risks, and many entrepreneurs did not succeed. Those who did felt that the risks taken justified their monopolization of wealth. Further, absenteeism and use of migrant labor on Negros reduced the sense of paternalism that marked other agricultural regions. Workers on Negros probably felt less sense of security than those in other, more settled agricultural regions. One son of Negros in this period simply and eloquently expressed their plight: "To the laboring class or the peasants belonged the miseries of life."^[61]