One
Introduction
Fortunes have been made in this Colony in cane-sugar.
John Foreman, The Philippine Islands (1906)
Sugar is chronically in oversupply, because it is one of the few products that can be produced in almost any country in the world.
Philippine Sugar Handbook (1972)
This book examines the influence of an export sugar economy upon the people4 of the Philippines through a study of its two most important sugar-producing areas. Although natives of the archipelago cultivated and chewed sugar cane before the coming of the Spaniards, the milling, consumption, and shipping abroad of brown sugar followed in the wake of the sixteenth-century Iberian conquest, when Catholic friars and Chinese entrepreneurs introduced the technology and created the first middlemen networks. Commercial sugar thus became intricately associated with the colonial experience. Eventually, the exporting of sugar brought the Philippines into direct contact with the outside world and provided a chief means for the introduction of new and foreign ideas into native society and culture. To a great degree, then, "sugarmen" shaped Philippine social and economic life. The main contention here is that the sugar industry had adverse effects on economic development, that it led to wide, harsh social and economic cleavages among the Filipino people, and that it skewed political power in the archipelago, in colonial times and later.
Social historians have commonly accepted the tenet that modern Philippine society and culture derived from the interaction between native traditions and Western ideas introduced through colonialism. They have acknowledged as chief vehicles of occidental penetration the Catholic religion and the American educational system, as well as the forms of government introduced by the two powers. Less well recognized, however, is the role of economic enterprise in the molding process, even though commerce has long been a staple of archipelago activity.[1]
Scholars, for example, have taken it for granted that commerce had minimal influence upon social life during the first two and a half centuries of Spanish occupation, when the tripartite galleon trade operated between China, Manila, and Acapulco.[2] This notion, however, is only partially correct, for, even in this early era, a pattern of foreign domination of export enterprise was already emerging. At this time, too, began the collaboration between members of the native elite and foreign merchants that has remained a characteristic of Philippine business ever since. This pattern of cooperation strongly informed the native socioeconomic structure and, subsequently, nationalist attitudes toward international and domestic affairs. The early choice, too, of sugar as a primary cash crop has played an important part in Philippine social development, for sugar production carries with it certain social ramifications that derive from its particular technology and from the nature of world market conditions.
Recent studies of the sugar cane industry in diverse regional and national settings have affirmed its role as a social determinant.[3] The methods of crystallizing sugar from cane syrup originated in India during the first millennium B.C.E. , and Arabs subsequently introduced this technology to the Mediterranean world in the seventh and eighth centuries. The beginnings of the modern mass production-mass consumption market, however, date back to the seventeenth century, to the time of the formation of estates in the French and English colonies of the Caribbean. Here European planters used African slaves to grow cane and operate mills.
Slavery proved an expeditious system because of the peculiar labor needs of planting and harvesting cane. The two activities follow closely upon one another: the growing period for cane is about one year, and the new crop must go into the ground as soon as the old one leaves. Moreover, because cane begins to deteriorate immediately upon being cut, it must be delivered rapidly and in proper amounts to keep mills operating efficiently. The harvest season, therefore, is very busy, and only a large, well-disciplined labor force capable of toiling in the tropical heat can meet its demands. During nonpeak periods, just a fraction of those workers are required to weed and maintain the fields. Thus, unpaid chattels best fulfilled the requisites of this sector of the industry.[4]
Milling—a capital-intensive activity that utilizes machinery to grind the cane, boil the extracted syrup, and crystallize it into brown sugar—is the other component of sugar production. In various eras owners have employed animal power, windmills, waterwheels, and steam and electricity to run their factories. Mechanical advances have gradually reduced labor costs, enlarged grinding capacity, speeded up manufacturing, and improved the purity of the end product, thus yielding ever greater profits to mill
owners. At the same time, because of the general availability of an abundant, cheap work force in tropical and semitropical climes, the invention of laborsaving field machinery has not kept pace with the technological improvements in milling. Only recently in places like Australia and Hawaii has sophisticated mechanical harvesting equipment come into use.[5]
During the eighteenth century, slave-produced sugar became a staple in the diet of Europe's expanding industrial labor pool. In the Caribbean world, sugar created a society of rich landowners and millers living with poor field hands in closed agricultural communities known as plantations. Over time the West Indian living pattern changed somewhat as more planters became absentee, but the socioeconomic dichotomy persisted in the manufacture of sugar. When the sugar industry spread to Africa, Asia, and Oceania, the legacy of slavery lingered on in the bifurcated income distribution of sugar societies. Sugar farming tended to find a niche in regions where the labor force could be turned to or coerced into doing field work for low wages. Henceforth, production became associated with extremes in social structure: the very poor who cultivated and cut the cane, and estate owners and millers who controlled the conversion of cane to
sugar.
Sugar's status in the modern world economy helped perpetuate this social division. The sugar market faces two givens: first, sugar, which can be produced in numerous settings, is a taste additive rather than an essential food, and second, world sugar supplies have usually exceeded demand. Sugar is a sweetener and preservative, the carbohydrate sucrose extracted chiefly from sugar cane in the tropics and from sugar beets in more temperate climates. It enhances flavor in food but has little nutritional value. Sugar contributes much less to human food requirements than, say, cereal staples, so it can be sacrificed from the diet more readily than the latter in times of privation and high prices.[6]
Because so many countries historically have fulfilled their own need for sweeteners, only a few areas, chiefly North America, northern Asia, and Western Europe, have had to import large quantities of sugar during the past two centuries. From the early nineteenth century on, the expansion of European and American beet sugar cultivation has somewhat reduced the dependence of even those markets on cane sugar. As a result, world sugar supply, except during wartime, has matched or surpassed demand, and sugar has usually remained a buyers' market; moreover, attempts to form international sugar cartels have consistently failed. To stay competitive under such conditions, sugar exporters have faced two options: to seek privileged access to specific markets, the quantity of export sometimes adjusted downward by some kind of quota limitation, and/or to reduce
production costs through investments in milling technology and minimal wages and thus eke out higher profits. Whether in capitalist areas like Hawaii and Louisiana, in colonies such as the Philippines and Java, or in the socialist milieu of Cuba, market forces have reinforced the old pattern of powerful mill owners and grossly underpaid field hands.[7]
Those who adhere to Immanuel Wallerstein's theoretical division of the "capitalist world-economy" into core industrial, semiperipheral, and raw material producing peripheral areas will identify the Philippines as a typical peripheral region given over to sugar production. Certainly that characterization aptly applies; however, visualizing insular society as structured like other peripheral areas offers only a partial view of its nature. Wallerstein's analysis refers mainly to political-economic formations and leaves out the social and cultural dimensions that specifically identify a human community; hence, such an approach will scarcely satisfy the concerns of social historians.[8]
The very diversity of the Filipino population makes it difficult to portray clearly the impact of the sugar industry. The early Philippines where sugar manufacture first took hold was not a unified society, but rather, several communities separated along ethnolinguistic lines. The great cultural traditions of India and China that had provided central organization and a common identity to other parts of Southeast Asia had not reached the sparsely settled archipelago, save for the southernmost islands, where Islam held sway. Spain managed to establish a uniform colonial government and to convert most denizens to Catholicism, but, because of the island nature of the country, regional variation—linguistic, ethnic and economic—has persisted ever since. How sugar affected such a heterogeneous population poses a problem for investigators.
A useful means of assessing the influence of the sugar industry upon Philippine society and culture resides in cultural ecology, a branch of anthropology that seeks to comprehend the creative way humans interact with their environment and the culture that results from those interactions.[9] Julian Steward points out that, as a means of understanding, cultural ecology rejects the contentions of human ecologists that the environment determines human adaptation, as well as those of anthropologists who regard the physical environment as far less important than cultural diffusion in shaping human adaptation. He maintains, rather, that "cultural ecology pays primary attention to those features which empirical analysis shows to be most closely involved in the utilization of environment in culturally prescribed ways."[10]
According to Steward, to understand the interplay between environmental exploitation and society, it is necessary to consider its "culture
core," which he defines as "the constellation of features which are .most closely related to subsistence activities and economic arrangements. The core includes such social, political, and religious patterns as are empirically determined to be closely connected with these arrangements."[11] He then describes the method to uncover the interaction between culture core and society:
First, the interrelationship of exploitative or productive technology and environment must be analyzed. . . .
Second, the behavior patterns involved in the exploitation of a particular area by means of a particular technology must be analyzed. . . .
The third procedure is to ascertain the extent to which the behavior patterns entailed in exploiting the environment affect other aspects of culture.[12]
In the Philippine case cultural ecologists would conclude that the methods by which Filipinos produced sugar shaped to a large degree their cultural and social behavior, especially those aspects closely associated with the industry. In regard to millers and landowners, their capitalist outlook and extravagant behavior sprang from their control over and ownership of land and energy-efficient equipment. As for field hands, the way they cultivated cane as tenant farmers or plantation workers molded their social behavior and attitudes. Where tenancy and barrio communal living prevailed, a cooperative outlook developed that expressed itself not only in mutual assistance, but also in joint resistance to oppression. On isolated haciendas where wage labor dominated, social anomie and a sense of helplessness became the behavioral norm. Moreover, because the industry grew to such importance, in terms of political power, economic prestige, and the great number of people who participated in it, the attitudes of both rich and poor sugarmen spread throughout the archipelago. Hence, to understand the values and attitudes of Philippine society, one needs to understand something about the manner in which the sugar industry functioned.
Large-scale sugar production eventually spread to regions possessing diverse social and labor systems; therefore, the resultant sugar society exhibited considerable variation in structure, norms, and behavior. To describe change in all these places in any meaningful fashion would require a work of massive proportions; instead, I have opted to focus upon just two areas, northern Pampanga and western Negros. Besides encompassing the two largest sugar-growing regions in the country, they also had very different histories and social circumstances. Long-settled Pampanga ben-
efited from its proximity to the colonial capital of Manila and began making sugar in the seventeenth century; Negros, more isolated, remained a wilderness until the opportunity to grow sugar led to its nineteenth-century transformation into a plantation economy. Landholders in the former area built their sugar agriculture upon a traditional patron-client relationship with their tenants; in contrast, newly arrived Negrense entrepreneurs exuding a frontier spirit established and operated haciendas through the more efficient, economical, and flexible use of paid labor. The determinants of the sugar market were common to both.
The sugar industry and Philippine society interacted in complex ways, and concentrating on two disparate local regions as well as upon the insularwide and international levels enhances comprehension of three dimensions of that interaction. First, examining what happened to Pampanga and Negros reveals the regularities in sugar's impact upon local farming areas. The development in both places of the classic pattern of very rich and very poor, millers and field hands, argues persuasively for the universal determinism of sugar in societal development.
Second, observing the contrasts between the two regions, even under the impact of sugar, indicates just how the original culture of each endured and continued to shape local society. Farmers could and did grow cane under differing systems of labor organization, and the degree of sugar's sway varied from place to place. Especially in Pampanga old traditions proved persistent. Moreover, ideas about society and social organization formed in the provinces sometimes affected the way people thought and acted at the insular level. In brief, the influence of the sugar industry did not move just one way.[13]
Finally, portraying broad changes in the industry focuses attention upon the emerging supraregional sugar elite, a small number of powerful and influential individuals and families, many of them from Negros and Pampanga. Because of their political clout and extravagance, derived from their ownership of vast lands and mills, they heavily influenced Philippine society, government, and economic life. On one hand, elite leadership at the local level encouraged the kind of regional identity and loyalty that has operated to the detriment of national political unity; on the other hand, their business and lobbying activities at home and abroad led to the acceptance of a national economic purpose on behalf of their industry. They forged social links in every sugar-growing area, and, through their interactions and business contacts with Europeans and Americans, they became internationalists. At the same time, their need to secure overseas markets strengthened the ties of dependency and neocolonialism that have characterized modern Philippine-American relations.
This book is not exclusively about millers and planters, however, but also about those who toiled physically in sugar factories and fields. They too contributed to the development of both regional and insular culture, for, although their individual voices were seldom heard, they expressed themselves collectively through their work and through figures who represented them in various ways. Sugar hands contributed ideas about social and labor organization, about cooperation in the accomplishment of tasks, and about resistance to oppression and exploitation. Those who articulated their laments and aspirations ranged from rural rebels and messiahs to labor bosses, intellectuals, and politicians. Sugar's contribution to Philippine society and culture, then, includes the thinking and acts of its poor.
I use the term "sugarmen" throughout the book because others in the Philippines have and do employ it to refer to those who participate in the industry. I do not mean to imply that sugar was exclusively a male preserve, however, for it was decidedly not so. Women, young and old, labored in the fields, especially during planting and weeding season, and they participated in family derision making on economic matters. Some women owned sugar lands in their own right, supervised work on their holdings, and made all kinds of investments from sugar profits. The sources, however, proved somewhat stingy in yielding specific information on the activities of women and children, for in the Philippines the tendency is for men to receive much of the public attention in all economic and political endeavors, even when others deserve a goodly share of the credit. So, while I have not been able to describe the particular impact women may have had upon the industry, let it be recognized that they played a substantial role.
Broadly speaking, modern historians of the Philippines have pursued their subject by adopting either a general or a local approach. With the first they have sought to form an overview of the progress of the Philippine state from its origins in the prehispanic, protohistorical past to its more integrated national present. This approach has chiefly emphasized political evolution, especially in the Manila capital complex and the surrounding Tagalog-speaking region. The other avenue has focused upon change in circumscribed, variously defined subregions within the archipelago. Theory has it that such studies, when available in sufficient number and then integrated, will provide a more comprehensive vision of the Philippine experience. So far, local historians have adopted mainly a socioeconomic perspective, paying some attention to geographic, demographic, and political detail.[14]
Each approach has served an important role in illuminating Philippine history, but both have their shortcomings. The first concentrates too
narrowly on Manila-based happenings and assumes, as those who study national centers usually—and sometimes incorrectly—do, that capital events and politics serve as an accurate measure of the country's general development, mood, and sense of unity. The local studies, while concerned with occurrences in rural areas of a vastly agricultural country, have tended to be too region-specific and have merely provided samples of one. Furthermore, because each local history has stressed the unique aspects of its particular region, broad comparisons with other areas have proved awkward. The Philippines, in other words, is more than a nation in the making or the sum of its diverse regional experiences. A need exists for consideration of the ways the insular center and outlying regions have interacted and how and what influences have passed between them. A history of the sugar industry can offer a view of the linkages between the two spheres.
This book, then, is neither regional nor national history as heretofore done, but, rather, comparative and integrative history. Comparative history works best when the areas contrasted share common experiences. During the early centuries of Spanish occupation, Pampanga and western Negros bore little resemblance to one another; thus, I have treated the two regions during this time as distinct. However, in modern times, as their histories converged under the impact of sugar, I have intermingled the two accounts more. By looking at ways each area responded to insularwide forces, I have tried to add new insight into colonialism, the frontier, the Philippine Revolution, the independence struggles, and rural unrest, to understand better the diverse response of Filipinos to economic crises, political events, and social differentiation.
In the end, sugar created a native elite, prestigious and powerful who, despite their disparate provincial origins, acted together with the collusion of foreigners to shape the course of Philippine modernization. For more than a century and a half, sugar represented the most important and influential sector of an insular commercial life that this elite, with rare exception, exploited almost exclusively for their personal advancement. Their conspicuous consumption contributed not so much to the progress of the islands as to the outflow of cash and to the inequitable colonial economy. Among sugar workers the maldistribution of profits created not a consuming public but permanent pockets of poverty, and attempts to ameliorate their circumstances came mostly to naught.
In 1982, Philippine newspaper columnist Arlene Babst wrote the following about the contemporary elite, whom she called "eternal":
I have been charged with belonging to this elite group myself. . . . The charge, to be fair, should be modified to the peripheries of such an elite group. At the risk of "treason" to this group, I must say that even one who has ties to it recognizes it
as an enormous obstacle in the process of building a kinder society.
This elite group has had more power than it should; more wealth than it has fairly worked for; more privileges than it deserves.
It has failed as a social institution because it has not used its leadership to better the lot of the majority; sadly, it has consistently bettered mainly its own lot, not caring enough about that majority which sustains the elite.[15]
Sugar no longer steers the Philippine economy, but its legacy endures in a native elite largely insensitive to the needs of the underprivileged.
Pampanga and Western Negros
Since the mid-nineteenth century numerous regions of the Philippines have yielded export sugar, among them Batangas and Laguna provinces on Luzon, southern Negros Oriental, and the islands of Panay and Cebu. More recently, the Cagayan Valley of far northern Luzon, and Davao Province on Mindanao have become significant sources. The fields of Pampanga and Negros Occidental, however, have remained the two most consistently productive areas in the archipelago (see map 1).
The sugar lands of Pampanga and western Negros do not conform to any provincial boundaries; rather, they follow certain edaphic and terrain features of the Central Luzon Plain and Negros Island, respectively. In both places, where the soil is a sandy, friable loam and the grade not too steep, farmers have regularly planted cane for a century or longer. The Negros lowlands and Pampanga plain where sugar predominates comprise some of the finest and most extensive stretches of flat alluvial farmland in the archipelago.[16]
Pampanga's sugar area forms a rough triangle with its southern apex at a point where Lubao and Floridabianca, Pampanga, meet Dinalupihan, Bataan (see map 2). The western leg of the triangle follows the slope of the Zambales foothills as far as Barrio San Miguel in the capital of the province of Tarlac. The eastern line skirts the edge of the delta of the Pampanga River, follows the San Fernando River, bends toward the slopes of Mount Arayat (1,026 meters), then slants toward Tarlac. The northern cap en-compasses the lands of Hacienda Luisita in Barrio San Miguel. Southern Tarlac was one of the last parcels of the Central Plain settled, and it still has the lowest population density in the area. Alongside the southeastern flank of sugar lands rise the Pampangan towns of the Pampanga River and the Candaba Swamp, very old communities where rice cultivation and fishing have long flourished. Even within the sugar area, because the lowest land has a hardpan suitable for growing rice, farmers possess a degree of
Map 1.
Philippines, Major Sugar-Producing Areas, 1939
flexibility in what they plant and on occasion convert to cereal production when sugar prices fall too low. Hence, the expanse of sugar varies somewhat from season to season. In a good year such as 1970, planters devoted 53,291 hectares to the growing of cane to feed the three modern mills, or centrals, that service the region.[17]
The enormous debris from the 1991 explosion of Mount Pinatubo (1,610 meters) has altered somewhat the physical shape of the Pampanga region, but the effects have mainly been felt in the lowland rice-growing areas. Some sugar farmers have even reported better yields as a result of the fallout of pyroclastic materials.
Pampanga has long benefited commercially from its proximity to Manila. Early on planters and middlemen shipped their product in light sailing vessels called cascos down the shallow streams entering Manila Bay. In the late nineteenth century the main trunk of the railroad that runs north from the capital reached Pampanga. Subsequently, feeder lines branched out to meet the industry's needs, and since then the raw sugar has gone mainly by rail, either to the port, from where it is shipped overseas, or to refineries that supply the insular market.
The sugar region encompasses eighteen towns of Pampanga, four of Tarlac, and one of Bataan, where cane has been grown on a significant scale. Provinces in the Philippines break down into town-sized municipalities subdivided into smaller communities known until recent times as barrios (currently barangays ). In central Luzon, as elsewhere, each town has its commercial, social, and administrative core, usually called the poblacion , where stand the Catholic church, the municipal hall, the more substantial residences of the rich, a covered or open air market, and bigger shops, arranged around or near a central green plaza.
Change, however, is coming rapidly to the Pampanga region. The traditional homes of the wealthy with their wood and stone construction and sliding capiz-shell windows have given way to modern houses of cement and stucco with glass jalousies. The growing trend in the area is toward residential subdivisions separated from the commercial districts. The three biggest communities—provincial capitals San Fernando and Tarlac, as well as Angeles, now an incorporated city—have a somewhat different layout with their chief activities spread along main streets, and they have lost the old-fashioned hispanic character of the smaller towns with their plaza complexes. The former U.S. installation of Clark Air Force Base contributed to the distinctive character of Angeles.
In the barrios, usually comprising from one hundred to three hundred families, reside most of the workers in the area, including the tenants who actually grow the cane. They live chiefly in airy nipa palm and bamboo
Map 2.
Pampanga, Major Physical Features
houses and obtain their everyday necessities at small stores called sarisaris . Better-off farmers might have electricity, and a new feature of the countryside is the more permanent cinderblock house with metal sheet roof purchased with "Saudi money" earned abroad by the adventurous Capampangan. Within the past two or three decades barrios have become much more crowded, for Pampanga has the second highest density among all the provinces in a populous country. The 1980 census revealed that for the first time urban residents in Pampanga outnumber rural ones.
All the towns have in common a central place where barrio folk visit to transact business, to socialize, and to find entertainment. Communities in Pampanga are accessible by a strong network of local, provincial, and
Map 3.
Pampanga, Main Roads
national roads over which stream jeeps, buses, tricycles, and horse-drawn calesas that make travel easy and fairly inexpensive. The many roads and short distances between settlements have facilitated strong social interaction among the local denizens. The predominant language here is Capampangan, one of several important regional dialects in the country; however, one also hears the national language, Pilipino (Tagalog), spoken, especially in town centers. In Tarlac, Capampangan is interspersed with the Ilocano spoken by descendants of settlers from the northern Ilocos area who joined migrants from Pampanga on this nineteenth-century frontier.
The northbound expressway out of Manila passes by San Fernando and Angeles, bisecting the heart of sugar country; near Barrio Dau the highway
becomes a typical provincial road as it proceeds toward more rural Tarlac. Arteries off this central highway offer entree to old towns with many fine examples of colonial architecture, as well as to barrios large and small (see map 3). In such communities people tend to be outgoing and curious toward strangers. Two things are likely to strike the contemporary observer: the myriad children one sees everywhere and the variety of economic activity. The province possesses not only a dense population, but a young one as well. The imperative of maintaining an economy for the many seems dear, and to meet that need enterprising Capampangan have sought numerous solutions in the face of a currently depressed sugar industry. Interspersed among the still extensive sugar fields are paddies, now double cropped and planted with strains of the "miracle rice." Padi dries everywhere, on cement roads, in house yards, and on basketball courts, and seed beds turn deep green with new seedlings. Piggeries appear frequently on roadsides, as do retail and repair shops and fruit and fresh coconut (buko ) stands. Perhaps sugar will revive one day; in the meantime, the rice, pigs, housing subdivisions, and stores suggest that the Capampangan avidly seek to diversify their agricultural economy.
On Negros Island a forest-covered central mountain spine dominated by the dormant volcano Mount Canlaon (2,465 meters) separates the western from the eastern coasts (see map 4). Numerous rivers flow down the sides of this chain of peaks, carving deep cuts and providing irrigation and alluvium to the crop lands below. Gradually rising plains surround this cordillera from the northeast to the southwest, and where the slope is not too steep farmers plant their cane. The flatest sections of the coastal littoral drain too poorly for sugar, and there farmers grow rice or other crops; but not far inland, from Kabankalan to San Carlos, stands an almost continuous band of fields that identifies Negros as the premier sugar region.
Almost all the sugar lands lie within twenty-two municipalities of Negros Occidental[18] and the portion of Vallehermoso, Negros Oriental, that belongs to the San Carlos mill district. In 1970 Negrense hacenderos devoted 190,592 hectares to sugar cane more than three times as much as did the Capampangan—which they shipped by truck or narrow-gauge railway to the region's thirteen centrals. Western Negros lacks good harbors, and before World War II exporters shipped mainly from Iloilo across the Guimaras Strait on neighboring Panay; however, raw sugar now reaches its overseas destinations via lighters that transport it from the long pier at Pulupandan or from the wharves along the shallow coastline near several centrals to oceangoing vessels off shore.
Bacolod serves not only as the capital of Negros Occidental, but also as its hub of commerce, entertainment, and transportation. While five other municipalities—Silay, Cadiz, Bago, San Carlos, and La Carlota—boast the
status of incorporated cities, only Bacolod truly seems like an urban center. A sprawling market area with a variety of shops and restaurants abuts the large central plaza with its big church and other religious buildings. The city contains colleges, one of the most impressive provincial capitols in the archipelago, and the local offices of the major planter organizations; furthermore, its hotels, movie houses, and other amenities attract visitors from all over the region. From one of its several terminals commence all journeys through sugarlandia (see map 5).
Travel through Negros proves more difficult than through Pampanga because of the greater distances between communities, the poorer road system, and the less frequent, more expensive public transportation. A two-lane highway parallels the shore slightly inland all the way around the island, and through sugar country is mostly macadamized. Off that trunk, feeder roads and paths, frequently gravel and dirt, head inland. Since their main traffic is cane trucks, they become rutted, and access to and from most haciendas is best accomplished by private vehicle.
A highway running northeast from Binalbagan makes it possible to drive through the middle of sugar country. Part hard surface, part gravel, the highway passes through fields of tall cane that block the view on both sides. In the midst of this overwhelming expanse rest the quiet, spare towns of Isabela and La Castellana, for most of those who own land in the vicinity either reside on their haciendas or elsewhere. Not far beyond La Castellana the hills start to rise, and the road crosses the central chain near Mount Canlaon and connects with the main highway along the east coast just above Vallehermoso. From there it is only a short distance to the busy mill town and port of San Carlos.
Along this portion of the coast live speakers of Cebuano, revealing their origin on the neighboring island of Cebu. Only as one proceeds toward the great northern shelflands does the language gradually shift back to the Ilongo of the western Visayas, the dominant tongue in Negros sugarlandia. The northern cap contains large fertile tracts with the highest cane yields in the whole region. This section from San Carlos to Victorias, with its mixture of languages, its rich soils, its timber stands and newer towns, reflects its frontier status as recently as seventy years ago. The cathedral at Silay and the quiet Spanish plaza of Talisay with its stately homes and church offer a contrast to the structures in later-settled northern Negros. The closed sugar mill on the outskirts of Talisay not far from Bacolod serves as a reminder that the sugar industry currently faces a serious economic crisis.
While Negros Occidental has traditionally broken down into the same municipalities and barrios as Pampanga, sugar workers (duma'an ) in the former area do not usually live in barrio communities but on haciendas in
Map 4.
Negros Occidental, Major Physical Features
the immediate vicinity of their employment. Such plantations vary in size from as small as five hectares to as large as many hundreds, and their borders do not necessarily coincide with any political boundaries.
Ruttan described the hacienda, a typical one, on which she undertook research in 1978, in the following manner:
From the town plaza of Murcia, a sand and gravel road passes through several haciendas and leads after three kilometers to
Map 5.
Negros Occidental Main Roads
Hacienda Milagros. A large acacia tree marks the place where the road splits in two, continuing to the left through other haciendas and entering Hacienda Milagros to the right. There is no gate or fence, but the boundaries of the property are known to all who live on its grounds. Two concrete buildings are situated close to the entrance. One is the warehouse (bodega ) where the tractor and cane trucks are parked, the implements and sacks of fertilizer are stored, and where the small office is
housed. It is the central place of the hacienda: here each morning the laborers assemble for the assignment of daily work, and here the weekly payment of wages takes place. The other building is the sacada house . . ., the living quarters of the migrant laborers during milling season, and partly occupied by the security guard and his family. Behind these buildings some twenty-two bamboo and nipa houses line a narrow, winding path. There are the houses of workers and salaried employees—the overseer and timekeeper, foremen and drivers. Across the fields on the northern side of the hacienda is a second group of ten houses built along a river, while a third cluster of six houses lies further downstream. Eight more houses lie scattered in the hacienda. Vegetables and fruit trees are grown in the small, well-kept yards. The house lots border on the sugarcane fields, and when the cane stands tall it hides the houses from view.[19]
Sugar laborers rarely leave the haciendas, for their workdays are long, and they can buy most necessities in shops on the premises. Their isolation, their strong dependence on their jobs, and their constant supervision by management personnel have made the duma'an shy—more so than the sugar tenants or casamac of Pampanga. Only recently have conditions in Negros become so harsh that on a number of estates some duma'an have resorted to protest and to union organizing. Nevertheless, the strongest opposition to landlord control remains among those who have joined the New People's Army (NPA) on the fringes of sugarlandia or among the political demonstrators in. the streets of Bacolod.[20]
Hacenderos, at the same time, seem more outgoing and gregarious, usually eager to defend the vaunted Negrense way of life, by which they mean the planter style of doing things. Planting consists of borrowing from the bank enough money to have others place a crop in the ground in hopes of gaining great profits. If the balance sheets look good, spend those profits lavishly; if they look bad, borrow more and replant. These hacenderos perceive themselves as gamblers, forever ready to raise cane if credit is available; however, they do not appear as willing as the Capampangan to gamble on alternate investments to sugar. Despite a recent tightening of bank funds in the face of poor overseas market prospects, despite a deterioration in the quality of the soil, and despite the mounting threat of the NPA, the majority of Negrenses remain committed, more so than the Capampangan, to the monoculture that has sustained them, identified them, and shaped their way of life since the nineteenth century.
No matter how else the hacenderos from Negros and Pampanga differ, they respond alike to the physical elements that have long determined their
agricultural calendar. Pampanga and western Negros have similar growing seasons susceptive to an annual weather cycle prevailing throughout tropical Asia. Usually the southwest monsoon begins to blow in May and brings an increased amount of moisture, frequently in the form of torrential rains, to fields left dry by the prevailing northeasterlies. The rains abate in November, and farmers commence the harvest of cane planted the preceding year.[21]
From the dissipation of the southwest monsoon until mid-May, gangs of workers take to the fields where they laboriously cut, trim, and load the cane onto assorted vehicles—carts, trucks or tram cars, depending on the location of the hacienda and on the milling district—for transfer to centrals. The cane reaches the central according to an intricate schedule designed to avoid backlogs that would allow the sucrose-laden stems to deteriorate. What complicates this process is that the Philippine sugar industry is structured differently from that in other countries, for the central operators do not, for the most part, own or manage the majority of farm property in their districts. Rather, these lands belong to numerous private planters who contract with the mills to process their cane for a share of the finished raw sugar. Thus, each central must arrange its grinding to accommodate the harvesting timetables of its numerous clientele.
Meanwhile, the emptied fields must be replowed, harrowed, fertilized, and planted once more with foot-long cuttings from the tops of the cane. In some select fields the stubble is cultivated, and another crop grows from the stools, a process known as ratooning. Later on, the young cane crop requires weeding and cultivating to assure good growth, and farmhands pass along the rows several times with plows and hoes accomplishing those chores. With the overlap of planting and harvesting that necessitates a large manual labor force, even women and children find employment in the fields. Planters also normally hire temporary workers from neighboring regions to cut and load cane.
During six or seven months each year, life in sugarlandia revolves around the frenzy of making raw sugar, but in May the pace slackens. As the southwest monsoon reasserts its domination, field work comes to a close, most mills shut down, and migrant laborers return home. All that remains of activity are the repairs around the haciendas. While the next crop matures, even the business of marketing sugar lags.
For those who still plant and mill cane the seasonal rhythms are old ones.