Answering Rural Insurgency: The Southern Philippines as a Terrain for Postcolonial Promise

• In Event: Global Capitalism, Migrations, and the Creation of the "Asia"/"Pacific World": 1850-1970

Abstract

In 1935, as the Philippines began its ten-year transition to independence, leaders of the Commonwealth government expanded the nation’s homesteading program. Designed to bring Christian Filipinos from overpopulated regions onto tracts of land in majority-Muslim areas, the plan confirmed and extended a colonial model of nation building and modernization. Undeveloped public land on sparsely populated islands, state leaders promised, would deliver millions of Filipino farmers from the dire poverty that shaped their lives. State leaders imagined themselves inventing a new kind of agricultural space reshaped by internal migration: one that would free farmers from the cacique relations of power that trapped them in debt peonage and produce a nation ready for its postcolonial future.

This developmentalist solution to poverty was rooted in the idea that by crossing internal borders national populations could slip into new political economic relationships. It was a response to widespread insurgencies against rural inequality, debt peonage, and starvation wages in the Philippines’ agricultural sector. Insurgents’ critiques would be answered with a plan that kept established plantations and distribution networks securely in place on the most populous islands, since these institutions were the foundation of the national political economy and elite Filipino’s interests were intimately intertwined with their preservation.

Homesteading contributed to a reconfiguration of Philippine, but not in the manner that state leaders had promised. By the 1950s, Mindanao continued to be cast as the nation’s breadbasket, but farmers who had moved south were embedded in rural relations of power that kept them impoverished.

Author

• Karen Miller, Laguardia Community College