CHURCH LANDS IN THE

AGRARIAN HISTORY OF THE

TAGALOG REGION

by Dennis Morrow Roth

Throughout most of the Spanish colonial period,
ecclesiastical estates occupied nearly 40 percent
of the surface areas in the four Tagalog-speaking
provinces of Bulacan, Tondo (now known as
Rizal), Cavite and Laguna de Bay, and within this
generally fertile zone of the Philippines they
controlled the largest share of the most productive
soil.
The Estates
At the time of the Philippine Revolution of 1896,
four religious orders owned 21 haciendas in the
provinces surrounding Manila. Seven years later
the American colonial government bought 17 of
these estates for division and sale to Filipinos.
Four ecclesiastical estates remained. Three
decades later they were to become principals in
the Sakdal uprising of 1963.
During the 19th century the Dominicans, owners of
ten estates, were the largest landlords in the
region, followed by the Augustinians with seven,
the Order of St. John with the large Hacienda
Buenavista in Bulacan, and the Recollects, owners
of two valuable and intensively cultivated estates
in Cavite. The Archdiocese of Manila owned the
remaining estates which is the Hacienda of
Dinalupihan in Bataan Province.
Haciendas:
• Binagliang (Augustinians’ mini-estate) in Angat,
Bulacan – 294 hectares
• Hacienda Buenavista – 30,000 hectares

In Cavite and Laguna all of the haciendas formed

a compact, contiguous group.
The Law of Indies’ requirement that
each pueblo de indios have land which
was owned (either collectively or
individually, depending on the
indigenous forms of tenure) by its
inhabitants.
19th century hacienda towns had a municipal
center or municipio with a centrally located plaza
where the parish church, a government building
and perhaps a jail usually would be found.
The municipio was the home for the wealthier citizens of
the town which are the traders, artisans, and tenants who
leased but did not actually till the land.
Outside the municipio and scattered throughout the
several thousand hectare4s of rural landscape were the
barrios where the peasants lived near the fields they
cultivated as sharecroppers or subtenants and agricultural
laborers.
Origin of the Estates
The friar estates trace their beginnings to the land
grants which were made to the early Spanish
conquistadores. During the late 16th and early 17th
centuries, approximately 120 Spaniards received
grants within a 100 kilometer radius of Manila.
Spanish law required that land grants not encroach
on areas already occupied by Filipinos which
should have been followed particularly in those
areas which were thinly populated at the time of
conquest.
• Spanish success in owning lands in other parts of
the Empire poses the question of their failure in
the Philippines.

• The attractions of the high profits to be made in

the speculative Manilla galleon trade turned the
Spaniards’ attention almost exclusively to trans-
oceanic commerce. The field was left to the
religious orders. Largest haciendas were
donated to the orders by Spaniards seeking
spiritual benefit.
In Cavite and Laguna there are no recorded
instances of donations and only a few sales. In
Tondo, donations and sales by Filipinos were
numerous. There were fewer and smaller land
grants in Tondo than in other provinces, perhaps
because of the high population densities there.
Thus, land obtained from Filipinos figured larger in
the development of its estates.
In 1697 the government commanded the friars to
present their titles in a civil court. The orders
refused, invoking ecclesiastical immunity. This
jurisdictional dispute re-surfaced several times in
the early 18th century. Historical research has
shown that the friars had title to most of their
lands.
The Early Period
• The Spaniards brought with them to the Philippines their ideas
of landownership and their experiences from the New World.

1. By the late 18th century methods of sugar production

began to change. Tenants grew their own sugar which
was then refined in the hacienda mill.
2. By the 19th century all aspects of sugar production were in
the hands of the tenants. Rice was the main crop and it
was grown in several ways.
3. In the 18th century direct contracts between haciendas and
sharecroppers became less common and in the 19th
century they vanished. .
4. In the late 18th century there was an increasing trend
away from translating money into palay on the unirrigated
haciendas, a phenomenon which reflected the monetizing
effects of the growth of a Philippine export trade.
In 1874 Ciriaco Gonzales Carvajal, Judge of the Royal Audiencia
or high court and the first Director of the Society of the Friends of
the Country, wrote the most detailed description of the
haciendas’ financial operations.
• For each water buffalo he pays three pesos at harvest time,
12 reales for a harrow, eight reales for the plough, and four
reales for the machete. The rental of these tools is
equivalent to about one-half of their price when sold by the
Chinese at the fair, while water buffalo costs at the most
eight pesos.
• A cavan, which costs two or three reales in February during
the harvest time, increases in August and the two
succeeding months to as much as eight reales. When the
harvest arrives, the hacendero requests the assistance of
the justice officials or assumes the responsibilities himself
and prevents the tenant from selling any rice until he
satisfies the rent and whatever else he may owe. With this
maneuver the hacendero pressures the tenant, who
immediately pays him the seed and the rent.
• This accomplished, the hacendero liquidates his other
accounts with the tenants.
Exempted Labor
• Repartimientos for the Spanish colonists were abolished
in the New World at about the time that land was being
granted in the Philippines, so the practice was not
introduced into the Philippines. However the state
continued to draft labor for its own needs. The Filipino
peasant living in one of the provinces near Manila gave
up a month each year to these tasks, and if the call came
at the wrong time he might be unable to plant or harvest
crops. Landowners would petition the government to
exempt some of their charges from forced labor.
• The casas de reservas or exempted households
could then be full-time workers on the haciendas.
Armed with the powers of exemption, the
hacenderos could attract Filipinos to their estates
to keep the services of those already there.
• In the 17th century the colonial government
granted a specific number of exemptions to a
hacienda. The entire population of Biñan and
Santa Rosa was exempted by sometime in the
1730s, and soon thereafter other large haciendas
were given the same treatment. On the other
hand, exempted tenants could also be required to
perform gratuitous labor on demesnes
• The institution of exempted labor largely accomplished its
main purposes of populating the estates and making them
dependable suppliers of agricultural products for the
Spaniards in Manila.

• The institution also has its negative side, at least for the
Filipinos. More exemptions meant that more Filipinos
were siphoned off from the non-hacienda villages which
then had to fill their labor quotas from diminishing
population bases.
• The 17th and 18th centuries were filled with complaints and
petitions from Filipinos outside the haciendas who felt
they were being discriminated against and who wanted
relief from excessive labor obligations.

• By the turn of the 19th century, most of the grants of

exemption had lapsed or had been revoked. During the
last century of Spanish rule, population growth had
replaced extra-economic pressures as the main
determinant of hacienda growth and exemptions were no
longer essential to their development.
The Revolt of 1745
• In 1762-1764, during the period of the British
invasion of the Philippines and the Spanish
government’s additional preoccupation with the
revolts in the provinces of Pangasinan and Ilocos.

• In 1745 five provinces near Manila erupted in an

agrarian revolt which directly expressed Filipino
anger with the estates
• The basic issues in the revolt were:
1. Land usurpation by the haciendas, and;
2. the closing of the haciendas’ land to common use for
pasturage and forage, a right which had been
stipulated in the Laws of the Indies and had been the
traditional practice on the haciendas.

The flashpoint of the rebellion was a dispute

between the Hacienda of Biñan and the
neighboring town of Silang, Cavite, over several
thousands of hectares of land which both claimed.
News of the events in Laguna and Cavite reached
Manila, and a Spanish municipal official was
commissioned to pacify the rebels with a minimum
force. His negotiations with the principals of Silang
were disrupted by the common people of the town
who demanded the immediate return of the
disputed land.
A new commission was given to Pedro Calderon y
Henriquez, a judge of the Audiencia, who set out
for the provinces with 27 heavily armed
cavalrymen. Rather than accede to particular
demands, he thought it more prudent to
encompass them in general proclamations.
Calderon’s combination of firmness and
concession was successful.
Change
Cultivating tenants grew subsistence crops, paid
their rents, and turned to the administrators for
loans. In the last century and a half of the estates’
existence, five interrelated developments took
place which greatly altered their social structures.
• First, before the late 18th century, tenants leased
on the average one-half a quiñon or less of rice
land which they worked themselves.

• Second, the hacenderos, who were no longer so

involved in the cycle of productive activities,
stopped extending loans and withdrew to a
position of passive rent-collecting. Rapid
population growth increased the competitions for
land.

• Finally the declining fertility of rice land coupled

with rising rents resulted in decreasing crop
shares for the tenants.
• Following the British occupations of Manila,
Spanish colonial policy began slowly and
haltingly to open the Philippines to world
trade.

• Most of the Chinese were expelled from the

Philippines in 1765 and were not permitted
to re-enter in large numbers until the 1840s
• In the early 19th century, foreign commercial firms
were permitted to establish themselves in the
islands.

• Sharecropping also became institutionalized on

the friar estates that are no longer in its previous
form as a direct contract with a hacendero but as
a sublease with a tenant.

• By the close of the Spanish era in the Philippines,

most of the friar lands were cultivated by
sharecroppers whose meagre income was
diminished by the two nonproducing strata of rent
collectors above them.
• Until the late 18th century, the haciendas of
Biñan and Santa Rosa were also worked
by tenants in large measure.

• By the beginning of the 19th century the

Augustinian friar, Martinez de Zuñiga,
observed that most of the land of Biñan
was in the “hands of the rich” who
cultivated it by means of sharecroppers.
Chinese in the
Philippines th th
In the late 18 and 19 centuries,
• Chinese
mestizos moved onto the religious estates,
making up a significant part of the new class of
non-cultivating tenants.
• They were active, however, in the municipal
centers of the haciendas from which, according to
the administrators, they did all the buying and
selling with the tenants of Pandi and Lolomboy.
• The Chinese mestizos were in a position to
finance agricultural production.
• Rentals for sugar lands were generally less than
those for paddy fields.

• The sizes of many of the leased lands on the

Hacienda of Calamba were relatively large.
Several were above 50 hectares. Jose Rizal’s
family had one of the largest which was 350
hectares wide, although their land was classified
as third-class, the least productive types.
Conclusion
• Those Tagalog provinces with the largest concentrations
of friar landholdings led the way in the revolt of 1896.
Many factors lay behind the struggle against Spain.
Spanish and American officials referred in general terms
to the existence of agrarian unrest on the estates.
Unfortunately, neither their statements nor the archival
records discovered so far shed much light on the actual
dynamics of that unrest as it led up to the outbreak of
1896. Such was not the case in 1745 – then the hacienda
populations had been the eye of the hurricane and social
scientists have seen in agrarian conflicts which have
occurred throughout the so-called Third World.
• An islander who could not claim otherworldly prowess to
be reckoned as datu entered the penumbra of one whose
claim to individual supremacy was validated empirically by
deeds of valor. If the datu was not waging war on other
settlements, he was entering or cementing alliances with
other leaders, often by giving daughters in marriage.
• Datus :
- having the “duty to rule and govern their subjects and
followers, and to assist them in their interests and
necessities.”
- datu’s services were like gifts to his followers, which
amounted to the socially recognized debt the latter owed
their headman.
- his leadership was expected to be reciprocated by
followers and dependents with loyalty and gratitude
expressed in the form of obeisance, deference, labor
services, and crop sharing.
- his spiritually sanctioned authority covered such aspects
of life as we would today segregate into the legal, the
military, the political, and the economic.
- The datu was the broker of goodwill from the spirit world
to his followers and dependents.
• Followers of datus: “served in their wars and voyages,
and in their tilling, sowing, fishing, and the building of their
houses. To these duties the natives attended very
promptly, whenever summoned by their chief.
• The islander were won’t to “give their chief a little of
everything”, and in turn, were held by the datu “in great
veneration and respect”.
• Datu and followers could be seen as linked in a social
nexus consisting of norms prescribed by the indigenous
understanding of the cosmos.

• These norms entailed:

- economic
- political relations;
- and in a real way affected the flow of material
resources.
- To soothe the fear of his followers, the datu himself
through the courtesy of not treating his followers with
contempt, but rather relating to them as a “father” or
“friend”.
- The datu evinced wisdom from the spirits and became
even more respected and “esteemed as a father.”
• Barangay as a “family-based community” do not justify its
description. Such statements assume that “the family,”
was already in existence.

• Datuship is the practice of debt peonage evinced an

underlying disregard for what today would be revered as
“family ties.”

• Warriors could transfer loyalty and move from one

barangay to another without encumbrance from the
kinship system, a practice that would be considered
incongruent with contemporary nations of family.
• Personal possession even in non-Islamized areas
was socially recognized. Both chiefs and ordinary
people were entitled to rights of possession.
Owing to the inseparable unity of possession and
personal honor, personal ownership of things was
valued, and stealing within the settlement was
considered a most serious offense.

• The datu could engage in “removing and giving

lands.”
• The datu served as the main conduit
through which trade goods flowed in and
out of the settlement. The mighty chief
deserved the act of appreciation expressed
through the buwis.

• The datu claimed a larger proportion of the

objects gathered.
• Following Maurice Godelier, preconquest
cosmological principles could be said to
have constituted the preconquest relations
of production. Cosmology determined
social control over resources such as land
and labor and the disposition of the surplus.
• Contrary to what the Spaniards perceived
as the datu’s high-handedness and tyranny,
people willingly submitted to the datu and
cheerfully consented to the socially
accepted exactions of labor and produce.
Individual survival and day-to-day existence
were inconceivable apart from the
barangay.
• There were culturally defined limits to the datu’s
prerogatives that, when exceeded, were felt as
oppressive. However, there was no reason for a datu to
impose his will upon the weak. Followers could strike
against an unreasonable head, their last recourse being
the offering of their allegiance to another Big Man or to
one with such a potential. In the end, loyalty was prized
and the datu sought to minimize internal disputes or
resolved them immediately.
• Everyone in the barangay was expected “to aid
one another mutually”, while decrying the
“avarice” of the Visayan, also offered the
concomitant observation that “among
themselves” they were “very liberal and helpful of
one another.”

• If rice was needed for ritual purposes but the

supply had been exhausted, one had to borrow it,
which was returned during the next year’s harvest
doubled in quantity to express gratitude and ward
off anger and retaliation, a custom Spanish
chronicles interpreted as avarice an usury.
• Debt was view in the pre-Hispanic settlement as arising
from the present-day sense of a subsistence level of living
– that is, poverty – would be inappropriate.

• William Henry Scott viewed precolonial debt using the

poverty lens and even conjured refined patron – client
relationship as though the pre-conquest settlement had
been a rigidly structured feudal society. Debt could have
been induced by the lack of ritually prescribed goods,
particularly marriage gifts, prompting some bachelors to
obtain those goods from seniors with larger families and
more family labor and, hence, more marriage-validating
resources.

• If a violator did not have the required quantity of gold, it

had to be borrowed from someone – a parent, sibling, or
another person in the settlement, the datu especially –
who was then repaid by the offender in terms of obligatory
labor.
• After the establishment of colonial rule and the
atrophy of the preconquest datu’s charisma in the
face of the Friar power, a fundamental change
had occurred in native society: the decline of the
ancient debt peonage. The ties that bound had
been loosened.
• No longer were indios under compulsion to bring
contributions of food and drink to feasts and celebrations;
somehow the tables had been turned. The “conquista
espiritual” had broken the unitary canopy that, in the
precolonial world, subsumed economic relations of
production under cosmological tenets. Simultaneously
being subordinated to an external overlord, the indio
became peasant. The evolution of a new societal
arrangement found the indio-as-peasant in a new
contested terrain.

• The old norms were replaced by expectations organized

around conformity to the friars’ religion and personal
dictates and to fulfillment of the colonial state’s demands
for head tax, corvee labor, and a quantity of produce
known as the vandala.
• In the 1640s, Spain passed a law prohibiting
loans in excess of five Spanish pesos, not even
“under pretext” that the money was advance pay
for rice or some other product.

• In the 1780s, an edict reiterated that

imprisonment or coercive payment of personal
debts in excess of five pesos was illegal.

• By the mid-seventeenth century, indios who had

inherited the preconquest peonage status could
have ignored the calls of the by then hereditary
village chiefs to abide by customary norms.
• With the marginalization of the babaylan,
the friar’s disapproval of indigenous
practices, and the disappearance of the
magical datu from the scene to lead the
customary rites of agriculture. Peasants
were left to their own devices negotiate with
spirits. A process deemed imperative to
enhance good fortune in agricultural
production.
• As the epitome of the atomized native’s
strategy of negotiating with the spirit-world,
the anting-anting was marshaled by
colonial state. The anting-anting was also
relied upon in the cockpit, the arena that
expressed the indio’s contradictory
relationship to the colonial state.
• In the precolonial Visayas, sacrifices were offered
to the diwata in supplication of good fortune for
an undertaking such as rice planting or a sea
expedition. One’s overall destiny was already
foreordained and etched in the palad, the palm of
one’s hand, which showed whether one was to
become a datu or an ordinary person. The
negotiation with the spirit-world was later to be
seen as also attainable by “selling one’s soul to
the devil,” which people deduced from wealth
accumulated from export agriculture.
Transactions with the spirit-world are a form of:
- propitiation but also of contractual exchange;
- a seeking of favor but also a quid pro quo.

The offering somehow obligating the spirits to

respond favorably. Fatalism, with its unchangeable
givens, nonetheless makes room for human
cunning and manipulation in order to avoid the
snares of fate.
• By the end of the 17th century, the old
protectorate concept had been utilized to claim
control over barangay lands, and the buwis were
reduced into a contractual form of land rent.
Lease holding and farm tenancy, as well as
economic debt owing to failure to pay rent, had
their formal genesis. As functionaries of the
colonial state, the elite also found a pretext, illegal
of course, for seizure of private property in case
of noncompliance with regulations on tribute.
• The terms of sharecropping contract, on the face
of it, ran counter to what James Scott has
referred to as “the moral economy of the
peasant,” as the cultivator’s right to subsistence
was not assured but cleric’s right to ground rent
was.

• To be within the penumbra of Spanish magical

men also meant added protection from colonial
state exactions, because the religious shielded
their ward from tribute collection and had them
exempted from the crash corvee labor of timber
cutting, log hauling, and shipbuilding in the face
of the Dutch threat during the first half of the
• In their respective parishes, priests, extracted
alms and cheap produce; kept part of the tribute
as well as a hundred bushels of rice, along with
fish, as the parishioners’ annual support for each
of them; mobilized domestic servants, rowers,
and porters at will; called on native labor to
construct and repair ecclesiastical buildings; and
demanded excessive sacramental fees.

• As a later elucidation of folklore in Negros would

show, the Catholic Church was depicted as
singularly exploitative, in that it “ate money.”
• By the 1070s the Chinese Mestizos, those
masterful opportunists, were numerous enough to
form a distinct category within indigenous society
and were on their way to supplanting the
increasingly inactive, impoverished, and
uncharismatic old elite.

• In the 1820s, despite institutional difficulties in

equilibrating supply and demand in the Manila
market, “the peripatetic capital of the mestizo,
who buys only in the years when he calculates
that he must make a profit” nonetheless provided
“the irregular and transient stimulus” to colonial
agriculture.
• In the second half of the eighteenth century,
mestizos began to lease farm lots from the
monastic estates that far exceeded the average
of about 1.4 hectares rented by indios during the
previous century.

• In the 19th century, the mestizos sustained their

lease holding activity despite the cumbersome
three-year contracts and the rising ground rent,
which doubled from the 1840s to the 1890s, the
mestizos also took over the estate’s role of
providing cash advances to tenants. Rice and
sugarcane were planted on many such inquilino
lands.
• In the contract of retrocession, the indio
cultivator who pawned his property for a
determine time period – often to raise
money for cockfighting and gambling – was
converted temporarily into a sharecropper.
• Sharecropping – known in Ilonggo-speaking areas as
the agsa system. The original moneylenders would
appear to have been the ethnic Chinese who, because of
nominal conversion to Catholicism, could reside in the
weaving districts of Molo and Jaro and profit from the
lucrative textile trade.

• In the Hokkein, acsa is an old curse word, the equivalent

of the American term “shit.” The use of acsa would
therefore seem to be suggestive of Chinese contempt for
the indio. The Chinese mestizo descendants who
observably formalized the sharecropping contract
continued to use the term acsa to refer to their indebted
tenantry. At any event, what seems rather clear is that the
term agsa or acsa is inseparable from the historically
conflictive relations between indios and mestizos.