TOPIC:

AGRARIAN
RELATIONS
AND THE FRIAR
LANDS
Main Question:

What is the broader history of the friar lands?

Why did the Hacienda de Calamba become a site of
agitation in the late nineteenth century?
Two lengthy articles entitled
“Petitions” and “ The
Authorities in the Philippines”
were published by a newspaper
of Manila to effect that the
principales of the towns are
despicable people, liars,
depraved, troublesome,
treacherous, prone to evil
doing, indifferent to everything
good…
Towns in the Philippines have different groups:
1. Filibusteros

• the educated, the independent, those who live by themselves

without the necessity of crutches or sponsors, those eager for
justice and peace, those filled with reproaches against
iniquities and tyrannies of some classes, those denounced by
their enemies
• Composed of honorable men and from which group the real
filibusteros would come if the present lametable system
continued
2. Party of the Friars

• Composed of the shiftless, the intriguer, they are

called the party of the friars because they obey and
serve them, because they are considered as strong
supporters of the friars, although the latter have
neither love nor resepct for them and may become
their most contemptible enemies when they are no
longer useful
3. Neutral

• The indifferent ones

❑The columnist of La Voz de Espana mentioned
petitions signed by the principales who knew nothing of
their contents
❑Many cabezas de barangay have signed, on urgings of
the curate papers written in Spanish the contents of
which they have not read
❑The excuse given was they were threatened by the
curate
❑This is why friars works hard to make the native
remain ignorant and blind; but it would not be difficult
to understand how these blindness and ignorance have
turned against him, and how the ways the friar taught
him are now against the friar
All the writings directed against the friars are
different from what they unleash against their
enemies: the former ask the Government to clarify
facts, the latter do not allow the enforcement of
the law or the defense of the accused
Church Lands in the Agrarian
History of the Tagalog Region
(Dennis Morrow Roth)
Origin of Estates
The friar estates trace their beginnings to the land
grants which were made to the early Spanish
conquistadores.

• Generally, a land grant consisted of a large unit of

land known as a sitio de ganado mayor (equivalent to
1, 742 hectares) and several smaller caballerias (42.5
hectares)

• Larger grants measured two or three sitios and may

have included a sitio de ganado menor (774 hectares)
Requirement:
Spanish law required that land grants not encroach on
areas already occupied by Filipinos

This injunction is followed in some instances,

particularly in areas which where thinly populated at
the time of conquest

In areas where population density is greater, this principle

is disregarded
Spanish hacienderos show their unwillingness and inability to exploit
their lands

• Spanish landowners sold their lands to other

Spaniards, who, in turn, mortgaged or
donated their estates to religious orders
Reasons for failure of the Spaniards in owning
lands in the Philippines:
1. The Spanish population in the Philippines was highly transient
and its impermanence was not conducive to settled landowning.

2. Small Spanish population, together with the absence of mining

and other large-scale economic activities, restricted the market
for livestock products which were the mainstay of the early
estates

3. Attractions of the high profits to be made on the speculative

Manila galleon trade turned the Spaniard’s attention almost
exclusively to trans-oceanic commerce.
Religious orders acquired their estates in a
variety of ways:
1. Several
of the largest haciendas were donated to the
orders by Spaniards seeking spiritual benefit

2. Some lands were purchased directly from their

Spanish owners

3. Estates were heavily mortgaged to religiously

endowed funds known as Capellanias. The orders
simply assumed the old mortgages when the properties
were transferred to them at auction
Filipino donors and sellers also contributed directly to
the formation of the religious estates, though to a lesser
extent than the Spaniards

• Former Filipino chiefs and headmen were invariably

the ones who sold or donated land. Collectively
known as principales by the Spaniards, they were
converted into villages and town officials by the
colonial government. Principales often dealt in large
tracts of land

• Most Filipinos living in the late 19th century knew

nothing of the actual origins of the friar estates
Colonial Sugar Production in the Spanish
Philippines: Calamba and Negros
Compared
(Filomeno V. Aguilar Jr. )
 Calamba Negros
The Hacienda de Calamba epitomized a large- Showcased a range of haciendas of varying
scale estate under a single corporate sizes in a frontier setting where different
(religious) entity, which was essentially an actors and ethnicities sought to carve a niche
enclaved economy

Relied on a sector of wealthy leaseholders Sugar planters (known as hacenderos)

(known as inquilinos), generally local Chinese comprised a multi-ethnic immigrant class of
mestizos, who mobilized a stratum of landowners most of whom directly hired their
subtenants on sharecropping agreements own tenants while others employed overseers
who supervised the tenantry
Chinese mestizo lessees relied on their own Sugar haciendas relied on loans and capital
capital or on Chinese moneylenders and advances that were sourced directly from
middlemen who brought the goods to foreign foreign merchant houses based in Iloilo on
merchants in Manila nearby island Panay

Colonial Social Formation Evolve a distinctive plural society

 Calamba Negros
Unlike Negros, there was There are various schemes
only one way to acquire for acquiring land-ranging
land for sugar cultivation in from outright purchase to
a friar estate: enter a lease leasing, land grabbing
hold contract (inquilinato) (usurpacion), acquiring
with the hacienda owner foreclosed property
through the administrator (embargo) and opening up
or friar administrator, also new land.
known as hacendero
The growth in the sugar cane cultivation was ‘ most
spectacular’ in Calamba, where the inquilinos were
more dependent on sugar cane than most tenants of
other friar estates-making Calamba an exceptional
sugar-producing friar land and the Dominicans quite
enterprising compared with other friar orders in
supporting sugar production.
Hacienda de Calamba
Land was rented out on three-year contracts
New lands are cleared at the cost of the leaseholder rather than the
hacienda management
Because of the inquilino’s start-up expenses, the rent was suspended
for three to four years until the land could be made productive
In 1890, when Rizal’s older brother Paciano was negotiating to lease
more land for sugar cultivation, the administrator of the Hacienda de
Calamba claimed that abundant land was available; he offered five
years of rent-free usage, the prolonged grace period purportedly to
encourage a wider sugar cropping area
▪Rizal’s family in 1890 was considered as one of the
largest leaseholders in Calamba
▪They rented 66.2644 quinones (about 382 hectares) of
sugar land and 1.6952 quinones (about 9.8 hectares) of
rice land
▪The Rizals’ farm holdings were considered huge by
Calamba standards and compared favourably with may
of the larger haciendas in Negros, enabling Rizal’s family
to accumulate wealth
▪But their landholdings dis not measure up to the largest
properties in Negros
▪In Calamba, Sugar planters, such as Rizal’s family, were
constrained in accessing cultivable land by both the size
and administration of the Dominican estates
▪The hacienda de Calamba’s income from sugar
increased from a few hundred pesos in the late 1830s to
more than 40,000 pesos in 1895.
▪Rent for sugar lands, although less than that for rice
lands and certainly not onerous in good years, doubled
from the middle to the end of the 19th century: from 15
pesos for a quinon of first-class land in 1840s, it was
increased to 20, 25, and finally 30 pesos, where it would
remain until the revolution
▪If for any reason the annual rent could not be paid,
the rent for the following year was doubled which
happened in Calamba in 1886 and 1887
▪The ‘specie payments for sugar were at their
highest point in 1887 at a time when the country
was facing commercial and agricultural crisis. It was
also the beginning of the rinderpest epidemic, and
a few months later the legal battle of the inquilinos
in Calamba begin to unfold
Sharecropping
in Calamba and Negros
Foreign Merchant Houses and
Investments