THE URBAN REGION: STRUCTURAL CHANGE, DECENTRALIZATION AND EMPLOYMENT IN A PHILIPPINE SECONDARY CITY

by

PATRICK VINCE OABEL

B.E.S. (Hons), York University, 2000

A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS

in

THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES (Department of Geography)

We accept this thesis as conforming to the required standard

THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA September 2003

© Patrick Vince Oabel, September 2003 In presenting this thesis in partial fulfilment of the requirements for an advanced degree at the University of British Columbia, I agree that the Library shall make it freely available for reference and study. I further agree that permission for extensive copying of this thesis for scholarly purposes may be granted by the head of my department or by his or her representatives. It is understood that copying or publication of this thesis for financial gain shall not be allowed without my written permission.

Department of bbObHAPH^

The University of British Columbia Vancouver, Canada

Date W&p, Cterofre& 3,9-009

DE-6 (2/88) ABSTRACT

In recent years, the Philippine nation state has viewed the spatial decentralization of the economy as a way to raise income levels and promote development in depressed peripheral regions outside the of Metro . This follows a line of argument in the international political economy of urbanization that often expresses processes of capitalist expansion, and indeed processes of globalization, in terms of a core-periphery model where major economic decisions regarding development take place in the core urban areas of so-called "peripheral" nation states. A conceptual weakness of such a perspective, however, is that the application and viability of such policies inevitably becomes entangled with local class structures and the interests of capitalists at peripheral regional scales. In light of the importance of local level actors and factors, a class-based view of economic regionalization is required. This represents an alternative view to traditional core- periphery thinking as it is a perspective that accounts for the role that local social class structures and elite social groups play in shaping processes of capitalist expansion in regional economies and cities with existing non-capitalist or pre-capitalist elements. This class fundamentalist view of economic regionalization is reflective of the story of economic development within the Province and City of Iloilo, an area located in the Western region of the central . This thesis argues that the failure of national spatial decentralization policies is only one of a number of agents responsible for the economic conditions found in the Iloilo urban region. By taking a historical structural examination of the province, it becomes evident that local social class structures, along with different spatial contexts of power relations and labour market segmentation, play important roles in manifestations of economic development, decentralization policy and forms of labour mobility in the urban region.

Drawing upon interviews conducted at the household level in both urban and rural settings, I examine how these structural dynamics affect different families and their income generating strategies as they deal with the perpetual stagnation of local labour markets. TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT ii LIST OF TABLES vi LIST OF FIGURES vii LIST OF MAPS ix ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS x

PART I: CONCEPTS

CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION 2 1.1 Introduction 2 1.2 Researching Iloilo's Regional Economy: Scales of Methodology and Positionality 4 1.2.1 National and Provincial Level Methodology 5 1.2.2 Accessing Familial Networks to Produce Knowledge in Iloilo 5 1.2.3 The Drawbacks of Positionality and Power 6 1.3 Thesis Structure: Theoretical, Empirical and Policy Focuses 7

CHAPTER 2 THEORIZING SECONDARY URBAN REGIONS 9 2.1 Introduction 9 2.2 The Urban Geography of : Grand Theory, Dependency and Urban Economies 10 2.3 The Viability of Secondary City and Regional Development 13 2.4 Power Relations in the City and Countryside. Marxian Approaches to Secondary Urbanization 16 2.5 Understanding Theories of Urbanization 18

PART H: BALANCED REGIONAL DEVELOPMENT AND THE RESPONSE OF CITIES IN THE PHILIPPINES

CHAPTER 3 URBAN PRIMACY, DECENTRALIZATION AND PHILIPPINE CITIES 20 3.1 Introduction 21 3.2 Class Divisions, and the Politics of Development 22 3.3 The Growth of Cities in the Philippines during the Post World War II Era 24 3.3.1 Cities in the Colonial Philippines 25 3.3.2 Philippine Independence and the Legacy of American Occupation (1946-1965) .. 26 3.3.3 The Philippine UrbanSystem (1946-1965): An Era of Increasing Primacy 27 3.3.4 The Marcos Era and Reinforcing Manila's Role (1966-1986) 29 3.3.5 The Philippine UrbanSystem (1966-1986): The Growth of Secondary Cities 31 3.3.6 The Post-Marcos Era and Economic Change (1986-2000) 32 3.3.7 The Philippine Urban System (1986-2000): Manila Supreme 33 3.4 Spatial Economic Decentralization and Philippine Urbanization 34 3.5 Economic Decentralization and Philippine Urban Regions 35 3.6 Summary 36 iv

CHAPTER 4 LIVING IN THE SHADOW OF A QUEEN - ILOILO'S PAST IS PRESENT 38 4.1 Introduction 38 4.2 Iloilo's Past: Land Tenure and the Sugar Trade Gone Sour 38 4.2.1 A History of Land Ownership in the Province 39 4.2.2 A Changing City: From Chinese Textile Trading to Sugar Entrepot 44 4.3 Contemporary Regional Development in Iloilo 47 4.3. 1 Economy and Labour in the Province 47 4.3.2 Economy and Labour in the Iloilo Urban Region 51 4.4 Iloilo in the : Hope for the Future or Trapped by the Past 55

PART HI: WORKING IN PERIPHERAL ECONOMIC SPACES

CHAPTER 5 THE URBAN LABOUR MARKET IN : REMITTANCES AND QUASI-INVOLUTION IN THE CITY 57 5.1 Introduction 58 5.2 The Social Class Structure of a Philippine Secondary City 59 5.2. J Investigating Arrangements of Work: The Problem of Dualism 60 5.3 Street Work and Street Life: From Sikads to Standby 61 5.3.1 Barangay Cuartero and Jaro after World War II 62 5.3.2 Cuartero's Labour Structure 64 5.3.3 Household Divisions of Labour and the Non-Working Population 69 5.3.4 Household Economic Conditions and Income Generating Strategies 75 5.4 Overseas Households and Out Migration: Structural Transformations and the Return to the Siesta and Fiesta Lifestyle 81 5.5 Standby and Street Criminality 89 5.6 Greater Expectations: Youth Perspectives on Local and Overseas Work 90 5.7 Conclusions 92

CHAPTER 6 AGRICULTURAL WORK IN BARANGAY BUROT: RESTRICTED LABOUR MOBILITY IN A RURAL PLACE 94 6.1 Introduction 94 6.2 The Social and Economic Dynamics of Rice Farming in Burot 95 6.2.1 The Social Relations of Land Tenancy 95 6.2.2 A View from Below: The Social and Economic Production of Rice Cultivation ... 97 6.2.3 The Social Divisions of Labour on the Farm and within the Household 100 6.3 The Rural Labour Market and Household Economic Conditions 103 6.3.1 Background on Burot 103 6.3.2 Labour Structure and Work Strategies 105 6.3.3 Average Income Households and Out Migration Ill 6.3.4 Everyday Expenses and Strategies to Finance Domestic and Overseas Trips .... 113 6.3.5 Standby and Banditry as a Way of Life 115 6.4 Youth Perspectives on Work and the Fate of the Farms 117 6.5 Labour Control in a Rural Setting 119 V

PART IV: RESULTS AND CONCLUSIONS

CHAPTER 7 MAKING SENSE OF THE URBAN AND RURAL ECONOMY OF ILOILO 122

BIBLIOGRAPHY 128 APPENDICES 135 vi

LIST OF TABLES

Table 1: National Population and Labour Force, 1960-1980 27 Table 2. Urban-Rural Distribution of Philippine Population 28 Table 3: Primacy and Four-City Index, Philippines: 1960, 1970,1980, and 1990 29 Table 4: Rank - Size of Cities in the Philippines: Census Years (1960, 1970, 1980, 1990)(pop. in thousands) 29 Table 5: Major Industries, Exports and Imports in the Philippines 32 Table 6: Population levels, National and : 1960, 1970,1980 and 1990 33 Table 7: City of Iloilo Population Growth (1948-2000) 47 Table 8: Selected Socio-economic Characteristics for Iloilo 48 Table 9: Crop Production, Province of Iloilo, 1998 and 2000 48 Table 10: Export Performance, Province of Iloilo, 1998 49 Table 11: Employment Status for Population 15 Years Old and Over, Province of Iloilo, By Quarter 1998 (in thousands) 50 Table 12: Total Number of Families, Average Family Incomes, Expenditures, and Savings, Province of Iloilo 1997 50 Table 13: Population Size of the Iloilo Urban Region 51 Table 14: Employed Persons by Class of Worker, Gender, and Primary Occupation, City of Iloilo, 2001 52 Table 15: New Business Establishments by Major Classification/Industry, City of Iloilo, 2001 53 Table 16: Registered Business Names in the City of Iloilo, 2001 53 Table 17: Classification of Industry by Size, City of Iloilo, 2001 53 Table 18: Employment Status by Gender for Population 15 years Old and Over, City of Iloilo, 2001 (in thousands) 54 Table 19: Total Number of Families, Average Family Incomes, Expenditures, and Savings, City of Iloilo 1997 54 Table 20: Primary Source of Household Income by Gender, Cuartero, 2002 70-71 Table 21: Primary Source of Household Income by Sector and Gender, Cuartero, 2002 72 Table 22: All Household Occupations by Gender, Cuartero, 2002 73-74 Table 23: Total Occupational Structure by Gender and Sector, Cuartero, 2002 75 Table 24: Number of Overseas Workers, Immigrants and Returnees by Household, Cuartero, 2002 82 Table 25: Current Overseas Workers from Cuartero, 2002 82 Table 26: Location of Overseas Work 83 Table 27: Remittances Per Month in Overseas and Immigrant Households, Cuartero, 2002 .... 84 Table 28. Overall Type of Household Occupation, Cuartero, 2002 84 Table 29: Average Rural and Urban Household Incomes, Average Cuartero Overseas Remittance Per Year 85 Table 30: Current Labour Practices within Overseas Households, Cuartero, 2002 85 Table 31: Farm Ownership and Tenancy in Burot, 2002 97 Table 32: The Cost of Rice Farming - Amount of Boltos, Selling Prices and Inputs 98 Table 33: Buret's Physical Geography, 2002 103 Table 34: Average Monthly and Yearly Household Incomes in Burot, 2002 106 Table 35: Primary and Secondary Sources of Household Income, 2002 107 Table 36: Low Income Households and Expenses, 2002 108 Table 37: Housing Material Composition 108 vii

Table 38: Below Average Income Households and Expenses, 2002 109 Table 39. Number and Type of Livestock in Burot, 2002 110 Table 40: Average Income Household Occupational Structure and Sources of Income, 2002 .112 Table 41: Average Income Households, Expenses and Value of Remittances 112 Table 42: Total Overseas Workers from Burot 114 viii

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1: Age and Sex Structure of Barangay Cuartero, 2001 65 Figure 2: Age and Sex Structure of Burot, 2002 106 ix

LIST OF MAPS

Map 1: The Philippines 40 Map 2: Iloilo Province 41 Map 3: 42 Map 4: Author's Map of Barangay Cuartero 63 Map 5: Author's Map of Barangay Burot 104 X

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Before embarking on graduate studies, I never expected that my academic training would lead to travels in Southeast Asia as I originally set out to become an expert on Canadian cities and immigration. It seems that fate is not without a sense of irony as I am a Canadian born Filipino now studying the Philippines. For this reason, my MA project really served as a way to negotiate my own identity in attempting to both embody and struggle against family traditions and to combine my deep commitment to my family with my own academic interests. These beliefs have greatly guided and shaped this research and it was in trying to understand what I saw in the Philippines that I better understood the story of myself and of my kin. I am very blessed and grateful that I have become involved in the rich tradition in Asian research in the Department of Geography at UBC. This is due in large part to Dr. David Edgington who granted me the privilege of being able to join the department. I thank him for his guidance and supervision over the last two years, a time where I have experienced exponential social and intellectual growth and these are simply debts that I will never be able to repay him. I also owe a great deal to Dr. Jim Glassman, who in only a short time has further opened my eyes with his insights and guidance and whose intellectual 'voice' allowed me to articulate many of the ideas in this thesis. I also thank Dr. Philip Kelly, a geographer at York University, who permitted me to use his study of to act as a template for my own research. Flis ideas and his correspondence are greatly appreciated. It was some of his earlier research that originally inspired this study on Iloilo. Dr. Nora Angeles of UBC's School of Community and Regional Planning also aided me with ideas and institutional contacts. I must also acknowledge my 'support' group of friends at St. John's College, especially the breakfast group, who made sure that I didn't spend too much time in extended periods of isolation in dim lit rooms contemplating ideas while writing this thesis. It is my belief that without the help of my first-degree family in the Philippines, I would have suffered from a severe lack of inspiration in conducting my research in Iloilo. Without them the project would never have taken place. My aunt, Doctor Lydelia Seribo, and my grandma, Palacios Seribo, were my patrons in Iloilo. It was through my aunt that I became affiliated with the Central Philippine University in Jaro where President Juanito M. Acanto graciously allowed me to use the university as a research base. My thanks go to the Cathedral and Grino clans who showed me the finest of Ilonggo hospitality. In Cuartero, Myrna Mana-ay and Jenelyn "Pakha" Suizo were my maestras in Ilonggo everyday life. They provided me with much friendship. I also thank Mrs. Mary-Ann Barde and Mrs. Ellen Dayhon for their assistance with my research, Dr. Elma S. Herradura and Dr. Grino for their instructional texts on Ilonggo, and Barangay Councilor Eduardo Jucaban who allowed me to conduct the study in the neighbourhood. In Burot, I thank both Evelinda Castellano, who greatly aided the research with her excellent records and for her permission to study the area, and all of my farming friends who accepted me for who I am. Finally, I kindly acknowledge the financial support of a University Graduate Fellowship from UBC in the second year of my MA degree (2002-2003). For my family 'back home' and for my family 'abroad' PART I: CONCEPTS 2 CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

Regional development seeks to reduce the disparity between Metro Manila and the rest of the regions. Urban centers in various parts of the country will be encouraged to grow so that they could be attractive investment sites and catalyze growth in the regions. Philippine Medium- Term Development Plan (2001-2004), Chapter 14.

You are a Filipino but you have not lived as a Filipino here in the Philippines. Cuartero Resident (September 2002).

1.1 Introduction The first quote above speaks to the role of the Philippine nation state and its recent attempts at the spatial decentralization of the economy, seen as a way to raise income levels and promote economic development in depressed peripheral regions such as Iloilo, outside the primate city of Metro Manila. With the Filipino population expected to increase by 40 million people by 2025 (approximately 110 million people is the projected total) and with the Province of Iloilo's rate of poverty incidence at 46 percent, many would argue that spatial decentralization is necessary to improve the quality of life for many . Patterns of'urban primacy' are deeply entrenched in many Southeast Asian countries, with current policy initiatives, especially in recent years, attempting to build up secondary regions and urban areas to stimulate economic growth and alleviate poverty. But inherent to this first quote lies a fundamental debate for geographers interested in the Space Economy and in processes of urbanization. Theoretical perspectives within international political economy have often expressed processes of capitalist expansion, and indeed processes of globalization, in terms of a 'core- periphery model' where major economic decisions regarding development take place in the core urban areas of so-called 'peripheral' nation states (Wallerstein, 1974; Timberlake, 1987).1 From the purview of this approach, forms of city growth and the arrangement of secondary urban and regional economies are perceived as dictated by events usually taking place in national capital cities and beyond to an international economy. But a conceptual weakness of such a perspective is that the application and viability of such policies inevitably becomes entangled with local class structures and the interests of capitalists at peripheral regional scales. In light of local level actors and factors, a class-based view of economic regionalization, represents an alternative view to core-periphery thinking as it is a perspective that accounts for the role that local social class structures and elite social groups play in shaping processes of 3 capitalist expansion in regional economies with existing non-capitalist or pre-capitalist elements (Smith, 1985). The argument, then, is that local capitalists in regional economic centres and secondary cities can be seen as playing a significant role in forms of economic development as they often negotiate how local economies should be arranged to serve their own interests. In this sense, they construct their own meanings of national state initiatives, such as forms of spatial economic decentralization, and how (or if) these types of policies are allowed to take manifestation at the provincial levels. As local capitalists shape local economic and political processes, so too, do they shape the structures of local agrarian and urban economies, and this has a significant effect on local labour markets and the lives of working families in secondary urban regions.

This class fundamentalist view of economic regionalization is reflective of the narrative of economic development within the Province and City of Iloilo, an area located in the region of the central Philippines. In this way, the central research question of my thesis asks: how do class social structures shape the organization of the regional and urban economy of Iloilo, and what are its implications for the human scale of work, household economic conditions and labour mobility for Ilonggos in the city and in the countryside? This thesis argues that the failure of national spatial decentralization policies is only one of a number of agents responsible for the economic conditions found in the Iloilo urban region, and that by taking a historical structural examination of the province, it becomes evident that local social class structures, along with different spatial contexts of power relations, play important roles in manifestations of economic development, decentralization policy and forms of labour mobility in secondary urban regions.

Given this thesis's main objective and to fulfill my great passion for ethnography, I devoted much of my empirical observations to how these structural dynamics affect households and their income generating strategies as they deal with the perpetual stagnation of local labour markets in both urban and rural settings. In Iloilo, many lower income households make the most of the economic resources and work opportunities available to them as they find ways to have a "good" life. Many hope for a better material standard of living, especially the young people, who want to bring higher cultural status to their families by going abroad. But it was my experience in Iloilo that to undertake any project that aims to bring material advancement and upward socio-economic mobility, such as overseas migration at the household level or new industrial development at the municipal level, typically meant engaging the class structure of

1 The 'World Cities' approach is a variation of this model (see Friedmann, 1986; Friedmann and Wolff, 1982). 4 Ilonggo society as the wealthier and well educated, shape local forms of development and had the resources to send members to sites of capitalist production and benefit from the sending of financial remittances. It was through my interviews conducted with families in the city and countryside, in observing how they made a living and how they understood the cultural meanings of work, that I gained a better sense of how everyday life plays out in peripheral spaces of the Philippine economy.

To sum up the main argument thus far, the thesis is concerned with the limitations of traditional core-periphery analysis that neglects dimensions of class structures in peripheral urban regions. The study exposes the deficiencies of Philippine national policy aimed at decentralizing economic growth, and also examines the strategies families in Iloilo use to improve their living conditions. The significance of this thesis is twofold. First, the viability, practicability and usefulness of spatial decentralization policies along with the effects of class influenced forms of regionalization on the economic conditions of households is a key argument helping to frame the study. What measures can be taken and how can families improve their living conditions given these structural limitations are a few of the questions I address in the final chapter. Second, it is my hope that this research contributes to the academic literature on secondary cities and regional growth in developing countries within Southeast Asia. More specifically my aim is to provide a richer understanding of how this ongoing spatial debate within political economy relates to the geography of different regions in the Philippines.

1.2 Researching Iloilo's Regional Economy: Scales of Methodology and Positionality To carry out this study, I employed a number of methods typically used in urban geography research, from reviewing statistics on incomes and investments to conducting interviews with different households. At a personal level, there were deeper motivations for conducting this study in Iloilo as it is a region with a great deal of personal meaning for me, hence, the second quote given at the beginning of this introduction. I am a Canadian born Filipino. My father is a Tagalog and my mother is an Ilonggo. Iloilo is the city of my mother's birth, and the act of doing my thesis was also an act of identity negotiation, a process very common with first generation Filipinos (sometimes called fake Filipinos for Canadian borns) living in Canada or in North America. It was not only a way to negotiate my feelings of "displacement" in Canada with "belonging" in the Philippines as Pratt (2002) suggests, but it was also a way to address my own fluid and overlapping identity, to "represent" and "resist" 5 traditions in both of my places of origin (Le Espiritu 1994; 1996). One of the underlying aims of the project was to allow me to match the names to the places and faces that I heard about while growing up. I think I was able to accomplish this, while tying it together with my enthusiasm and excitement in the study of cities. In a sense, then, this research really is a combination of my passion for observing city life, and a biography of my family's history.

1.2.1 National, Provincial and Municipal Level Methodology With respect to national and provincial level methodology, I reviewed policy documents and official statistics. Reviewing policies about economic and spatial development and decentralization, along with examining statistics on population, income levels, and regional levels of investment, I developed a better sense of how spatial development was progressing among urban areas outside of Metro Manila. In addition, I closely observed the aims of the current Philippine Medium Term Development Plan for 2001-2004 (PMTDP) under the Arroyo administration that charts the future economic and social development for the country. It gave me the chance to see what types of metaphors are being used to justify regional development and economic growth in the countryside. I could then compare how these developments manifest themselves in the Regional Development Plan for Area VI that covers the Western Visayas and the Province of Iloilo.

1.2.2 Accessing Familial Networks to Produce Knowledge in Iloilo To examine the nature of everyday life at the local level, I accessed my familial networks. They helped a great deal in finding interview respondents, and in shaping my selection of research localities. Over 5 months in 2002 (July to November), sixty-four household interviews were conducted lasting anywhere from half an hour to two hours. Thirty-five of them took place in an urban barangay called Cuartero with the remaining twenty-nine in a farming barangay called Burot. In addition to the interviews, my fieldwork in Cuartero consisted of a household labour survey covering 483 households. Similarly, a farming survey was successfully administered to all 64 households in Burot. My reason for choosing Cuartero as an urban locality was simple. It is where my family has lived for the last fifty years. The position of my grandmother to the people in Cuartero helped the most. She was born in a neighbouring barangay called Tabuc Suba in Jaro located east of Cuartero during the 1920s. Shortly later, her family moved to another adjacent barangay called Fajardo. The family history on this side can be traced back 150 years to the heyday of the 6 weaving industry in Jaro and the opening of the international shortly before the emergence of the local export sugar trade during the 1850s. Many families know her well. In addition, the role of my aunt was also instrumental. Thankfully for me, she is a prominent medical doctor (obstetrician and gynecologist), one of only a small handful in the area. Her social networks allowed me better access to data at the local branch of the National Statistics Office and various other government institutions and in setting up interviews with local government officials. Still, other strategies were used to find a way to speak to the people that somehow tied me to my family's home on Cuartero Street. For example, it was suggested to me "that I could speak with the family of a good friend of your uncle's" or "the family of one of your mother's high school classmates". It was in this way while carrying out my interviews that 1 was introduced as the apo (grandson) of Cha Consing (my grandma's name) or the hinablos (nephew) of doctora (doctor)2 Regardless of what type of familial network approach was used, it served to develop a greater rapport with my interviewees. The reasons were similar for my choosing of Burot as a rural locality. If it was my grandmother's and aunt's position that granted me better access in Cuartero, then it was my grandfather's old ties that allowed me access here. My grandfather's family history can be traced back about 150 years in this area and his ties are still very strong more than twenty years after his passing. Like most of the people in Burot, my family also makes a living in harvesting rice. They are absentee landowners living in the city. The ties between by family in Iloilo with Burot are very old and span many generations and this made conducting the research, I hope, very pleasant and enjoyable for all involved. Similar to Cuartero, the same types of networks were accessed with the same type of results. My research assistants in both localities played a very significant role in the research. In Cuartero, a friend of the family named Mary Ann Barde guided me around the area. She is a local manicurist and pedicurist, very popular and familiar with the residents in the barangay. She introduced me to the people and showed me the hidden alleyways and forbidden places where I was not supposed to go. Her presence also contributed to the good rapport during interviews where she also provided help with translation when it was needed. I was also lucky to have a guide and research assistant in Burot named Myrna Mana-ay. Myrna's family lives in Burot, and she attended university in the city and is a recently graduated high school maestra (teacher). She was essential to my access to the community, introducing me to the young people of Burot, and the types of local activities and behavior that are customary in the area. Even though many of

2 These are terms in the local dialect called Ilonggo. 7 my interviews were conducted in English, Myrna helped a great deal with translation, as the local dialect in the province of Iloilo is a high bred mixture of Ilonggo and Kiniray-a.

1.2.3 The Drawbacks of Positionality and Power One of the drawbacks of using this familial network is the position of power that it placed me in as the interviews were conducted with households of significantly different socio• economic profiles. Being a brown Canadian born with a rudimentary knowledge of Ilonggo, along with my harsh sounding usage of it, initially put me into an unusual situation in dealing with residents. My family's position along with the permission given to me by local government officials helped to provide legitimacy and authority, but I did not always view this as a good thing. I felt in some ways that I was abusing that power, even though the questions I asked were not controversial or too personal. I think my being brown contributed to the harmony during interviews. In many ways, I felt at home and in place since I am from Iloilo in a way. But at times I was like any westerner visiting a foreign country, a person that was out of place.

1.3 Thesis Structure: Theoretical, Empirical and Policy Focuses To better address the aforementioned theoretical debate within political economy, Chapter 2 reviews the existing academic literature with respect to core-periphery models, the structure of urban economies, regional development models and a class relations approach to urban primacy. The main objective of this chapter is to address a number of theoretical issues that take place through interactions of scale, the global, the national, the regional, the municipal, the barangay and the household.3 Parts HJ and IV represent my empirical observations of national and regional economic development policy, along with the historical origins and present role of local actors and social structures in forms of economic development. Part III is entitled, Balanced Regional Development and the Response of Cities in the Philippines, At the macro level, Chapter 3 shows the specific historic factors that shaped integration of the Philippines into the global economy, along with how the state has approached issues of spatial economic decentralization during the post World War II period given present social class structures and the nature of the local political scene in issues of secondary city development. Even with neo-liberal reforms pushing for further export-oriented growth in the Philippines during the early and mid 1990s, the

3 A barangay is Pilipino for an administrative ward. 8 effectiveness of political and economic decentralization has done little to promote regional growth in many Philippine secondary cities. Chapter 4 scales down the analysis to the provincial and municipal levels. The focus here is on the changing economic structures and the regional specificities of Iloilo's integration into the world economic system and its consequences for present social and economic conditions. With the rise of its textile industry during the late-eighteenth to mid-nineteenth century controlled by locally oriented Chinese merchants, Iloilo was a "core" urban area, with its own international group of capitalists well connected to other areas in the global economy. The shift in Spanish colonial policy to one of agricultural export by the late eighteenth century, tied Iloilo's fate to the rise and fall of the sugar industry. Different social and ethnic elites turned their interests to sugar and out-migrated to build their plantations on the neighbouring island of Negros. This allowed Iloilo to fall under the control of international trading casas (houses). With shifts in logistical services moving to the coast of Negros and the Gulf of , the casas abandoned Iloilo as a key port area, giving way for local elites to take hold of the city and regional economy by the beginning of the twentieth century. The result has been a "sleepy" economy, with families and lower income social groups left to perpetuate social and regional economic processes. Chapters 5 and 6 represent the bulk of my fieldwork and focuses on the effects of present Ilonggo class structures on the lived experience of inequality for different social groups and its impact on family livelihoods and cultural lifestyles in both urban and rural settings. In the city, the wealthy, along with a number of "transitional class" families, supplement their incomes by sending members overseas for employment. The remittances sent back lead to significant transformations and augmentations in labour market participation, household work and local cultural practices. This stands in stark contrast to the groups of male "standbys" and lower income families that make their living in the large city services sector of Iloilo. In the province, I investigate farming practices and the social relations of land tenancy. This land tenure arrangement keeps the majority of farming families in a constant state of debt, with the surplus of the agricultural surplus going into the hands of landowners. The consequences of these structural conditions have been restricted labour mobility and a culture of banditry in the area. Part IV reviews the main ideas and arguments presented in the thesis, summarizes its findings and draws conclusions. I also discuss a set of policy recommendations for improving the everyday situations of households in Iloilo, while considering the usefulness of spatial decentralization policies given the prominence of local class structures. 9 CHAPTER 2

THEORIZING SECONDARY URBAN REGIONS

2.1 Introduction In this section, I review theoretical approaches to urbanization and how secondary cities and regional development in Asia have been treated in the academic literature. This review requires discussing the evolution of research on the urban geography of Southeast Asia with shifts in "development" thinking. The present work on urbanization is occurring in a post- development, post-colonial and critical geographic intellectual environment, not to mention many other perspectives. A critical post-development view suggests that the project of development is a pernicious discourse of western power relations attempting to transform the lives of people in the "Third World" to fit with the ideals in the "First World" and that geographic research in some manner should contribute to progressive social change. A post- colonial narrative supports the idea that structures established during colonial periods continue to reproduce themselves and shape present societies. In many ways, the political economy of urbanization speaks to many of these perspectives and I am aware of the biased "language" used in the work on dependency and underdevelopment and its relationship to cities.4 But as I try to understand what I saw in the rural areas of Iloilo, the use of some of those terms here is inevitable and are helpful in describing processes of urbanization in secondary urban regions. A number of topics are addressed in this chapter. To elaborate on the meaning of the term "secondary city", I will first examine world systems and dependency approaches to urbanization with a specific focus on Southeast Asia. A world systems perspective considers the role that historical integration of different nation states into the global capitalist economy plays in shaping the structure of cities. In this way, building on the world systems approach and its core-periphery structure of the global economy, dependency has been expressed in terms of uneven development perpetuated through unequal exchange that has a profound effect on urbanization. In the second section, I document the history of research on secondary cities and regional development. From thinking about growth poles to the horizontal and bottom up approaches of present regional development paradigms, the concern here is on the viability of such strategies given the dominance of core urban regions. Continuing with this argument, I review criticisms of the regional approach from the world cities and Marxist perspectives. In particular, I focus on theoretical ideas dealing with the role of class relations in shaping urban

4 Such terms include core/periphery, formal/infonnal, underdevelopment, modern/backward and so forth. 10 and rural structures. Finally, I determine how this thesis contributes to the body of work on urbanization in developing countries, while constructing a theoretical framework that deals with the interactions of scales, and draws on the most significant principles from the frameworks reviewed.

2.2 The Urban Geography of Southeast Asia: Grand Theory, Dependency and Urbanization A number of liberal social theories concerning the international political economy of development are important to consider and help in better explaining how the world systems and dependency perspectives conceptualize secondary cities. Even though I cannot go into great detail with these ideas, the theories aid in understanding the changing context of the development project in the Third World during the post World War II period, that is, from modernization strategies to an era of increasing internationalization of capital by the 1970s. The first theoretical viewpoint, structuralist thinking, calls for specific state intervention into the national economy, that primate urbanization is a result of liberal trading policies and dependent international linkages with core regions in the global economy. State intervention and the nationalization of industry is viewed as the best way to encourage balanced urban development. Such a perspective is especially important in thinking of the history of urban and industrial development and state intervention in the Philippines, something I discuss in detail in Chapter 3. Popularized during the 1950s and 60s, modernization theory is another relevant perspective and is commonly associated with the Rostowian (1960) model of stages of economic growth. The position argues that regional disparities in different world regions can be solved through implementation of technological inputs and industrialization leading to improved conditions in peripheral nations and their greater integration into the capitalist system. In this sense, specific aspects of urban growth such as the construction of infrastructure help to promote urban-based industrialization. Finally, neo-liberal approaches to urbanization assert that free market development will spatially balance urban economic growth in different regions. Such initiatives were attempted in the case of the Philippines with mixed results. The major point to consider from a glance at these theoretical frameworks is the role that external and internal factors play in shaping the structure of cities and their regional variations of spatial development. Obviously the state is emphasized in these positions, but classical Marxian concepts of class and power struggles at different spatial scales, along with the social relations of production help, a great deal in making sense of my experiences in urban and rural areas in the central Philippines and of Iloilo's relationship to the global economy. 11 Within the world systems approach, the global economy is central to its operational framework. It explains that the emergence of primate and secondary cities is a direct result of a nation's historical integration into the world economic system. Immanuel Wallerstein's seminal work, The Modern World-System (1974) introduced the world-systems perspective arguing that the so-called problems in "underdeveloped" countries can be explained in terms of the expansion of the stages of capitalism into different world regions. He suggested that the modern capitalist world economy emerged between 1450 and 1600, with core, semi-peripheral, and peripheral areas developing within a context of a specific set of economic exchanges and political relationships among actors located in different countries of the system (Timberlake, 1987: 39). Peripheral economies were typically oriented to export production as capitalists exploited cheap labour for raw materials with value added production back in core regions, while using peripheral nations as markets for manufactured goods. This relationship left a number of distinctive cultural, social, political, economic and demographic characteristics within peripheral nations. These include "slow economic growth, highly unequal distributions of income and wealth, highly repressive political regimes, underemployment and unemployment, an informal sector, high rates of urbanization, and imbalanced city systems" (Timberlake, 1987: 40). For these reasons, this approach stresses the importance of systematic shifts in the structure of the global economy leading to regional disparities along with explaining primacy and secondary city growth as an outcome of the expansion of global capitalism. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, dependency theory emerged as a response to the modernization project. It argues that western forms of modernization and development were restricted to positively affect societies in the Third World due to specific historical conditions creating a "gap" between developed capitalist economies and underdeveloped post-colonial nations (Brookfield, 1975). Dependency was used as a term to capture the "uneven" nature of capitalist development in different world regions. This perspective emphasizes that urbanization patterns are a result of external relations (of a colonial or imperial nature) with capitalist countries, specific historic modes of production, the exploitation of labour and the class relations involved in the production and accumulation of capital and the distribution of surplus wealth. In drawing from examples in Latin America, the Gunder Frank (1967) model asserted that an unequal exchange occurred through metropolitan areas (developed countries) with satellites (developing countries). Satellites supplied raw materials and labour intensive industry to metropolitan areas that in turn sent back value added goods, high technological inputs and 12 foreign aid. In this way, dependency theory encouraged thinking about the primate cities of the Third World as the giant satellite nodes of exploitation. It was also during this time that the urbanization process was conceptualized in Southeast Asia as distinctly different than historic patterns found in the west. These differences led to specific economic structures in the largest megacities along with their orientation and interaction with the global economy. McGee (1971) rejected the application of western theories of the urban transition to the countries of Southeast Asia and developed the first culturally and historically sensitive models. He saw three major characteristics of urbanization in the region that differed from the western experience (Lin, 1994). The first deals with the issue of rural to urban migration. The historic western urban transition is marked by migration from rural areas to cities. Patterns in Southeast Asia and other developing world contexts pointed to natural population increase within cities, and a relatively high growth rate in peripheral agricultural rice growing areas. The second characteristic is that increased urbanization did not correspond with growth in industrial activity. This suggests that there was no relationship between an increase in urban population with industrial and manufacturing employment as was experienced in the west. The third characteristic is the prevalence of lower income service occupations forming a significant portion of the urban economy. In the west, the typical occupational transition moves from to manufacturing to retailing, then to higher end services within the tertiary sector of the economy. In the case of Southeast Asian cities, urbanization outpaces industrialization resulting in an occupational shift from agriculture to lower end service jobs. Beginning in the 1960s, the peculiar nature of cities in the developing world led to substantial work, mostly by western trained academics, on the "dual" nature of labour structures in urban and rural economies (Brookfield, 1975; Geertz, 1963; 1963a; McGee, 1971; 1976; Armstrong and McGee, 1968; McGee and Yeung 1977; Santos, 1979). This line of thinking built on dualistic economic models of the 1950s within a modernization framework, stating that urban economies can be separated into two parts, a modern industrial and manufacturing sector with a "bazaar" or "informal" sector consisting of low paying urban service type occupations. The idea of urban "involution" is an underlying concept tied to theoretical "dualism", arguing that urban populations grow faster than the number of available jobs in the urban industrial sector leading to the growth of workers in the "informal" economy, that also acts as a pool of surplus labour typically composed of rural migrants. There are alternatives to this perspective as Bromley (1997) argues that such urban occupations can be conceptualized along a continuum serving a number of sectors within the urban economy and not solely connected to industrial 13 manufacturing work. I discuss more of these concepts in my investigation of the urban labour market processes of Cuartero in Chapter 5. I agree that the use of the term is oriental in its division of "modern" and "backward" and has been the subject of much debate (see Nurul Amin, 1996), as informal sectors exist in many countries in the world, not only in the "developing world". These general principles regarding the operational dynamics of urban economies, as will be shown later in this piece, help to characterize my observations of Iloilo's labour structure

Over the last twenty years, the composition of urban economies has also changed significantly due to the increased presence of transnational capital flows, the New International Division of Labour (NIDL), and the greater integration of countries into the global economy. These events shifted thinking away from work on dualism to the centralization of national economies on primate cities. Still couched within the world systems and dependency theoretical positions, a number of new developments through information and technology, financial markets, and changes in the industrial production process significantly affected the structure of large cities and their employment sectors (Gilbert and Gugler, 1982; Armstrong and McGee, 1985). This increasing intensity in the global movement of capital, goods, people and information led to further super concentration of growth in the mega-urban regions of Asia reinforcing patterns of urban primacy. These sprawling urban and rural landscapes have been labeled as "desakota" spaces or extended mega-urban regions (EMRs), defined as areas of intense mixtures of agricultural and non-agricultural activities found along transportation corridors connecting large city cores (McGee, 1991; 1995). Thus, this overarching discussion has mainly focused on the growth and structure of primate cities in Southeast Asia, their interaction with the global economy and how they have been treated in the academic literature. I now shift my attention now to reviewing conceptualizations of secondary city development.

2.3 The Viability of Secondary City and Regional Development It has been popular in recent years to express the growing intensity, or lack thereof, of the internationalization of capital under the catch phrase of "globalization" and how its many forms, such as direct foreign investment, information and people, flow down to different spatial scales. This has led to a renewed interest in regional development among academics and planners. The approach is viewed as an opportunity to alleviate poverty in depressed economic areas and for building up the economic strength of different regions (Edgington 2001; Tacoli, 1998). From this perspective, improving local political and regulatory mechanisms for secondary urban growth will lead to better competition for a share of the global marketplace. But how are present 14 approaches different from ones in the past and how viable and realistic are regional development plans, especially in the case of urban primacy in the Philippines? In this section, I document the genesis of regional development thinking and provide recent criticisms of spatial decentralization policy aiming to increase secondary economic growth. Regional development emerged during the 1950s and 1960s, within an intellectual milieu of western development thinking characterized by authoritative and growth centred planning structures, wherein economies could be contrived through state intervention. Within this context, strategies for the spatial decentralization of national economies originated with the idea of the growth pole concept or deliberate urbanization (Perroux, 1988; Friedmann, 1968). It suggested that concentrations of industry could be planned for peripheral cities where positive multiplier effects could "trickle down" to improve the economic situations of the urban and rural poor. In this way, targeting and concentrating specific industries within slow growing areas meant that cities could play a significant role in regional development. The growth of cities in a nation's periphery was seen as a means to balance economic development with core urban regions. From the purview of these models, spatial polarization occurred through large primate cities growing at the expense of rural areas. There has been ongoing debate with respect to the role of cities in regional development as either parasitic or generative centres that encourage or restrict processes of capital accumulation, societal change, employment opportunity and democratization (Hoselitz, 1960). The Lipton (1977) urban bias thesis raised much discussion about the nature of urban and rural interactions. He argued that through political, social and economic manipulation, the city elite inhibited the growth of rural areas to serve their own interests by exploiting and controlling the surplus wealth from agricultural production. Of course, Lipton did not account for different cultural contexts, or the idea of the poor in the city and the powerful in the countryside, as elite agrarian families shape significant aspects of rural economic and political development in many areas of the Philippines (Angeles, 1999). But the urban bias thesis did bring into focus the importance of class conflict and the nature of socio-economic relationships between rural and urban areas. During the 1970s and 1980s, thinking shifted from centralization to multi-level decentralized forms of planning with a consideration for integrated forms of urban and rural development. Integrated Rural Development (IRD) approaches came by way of the 'agropolitan' model (Friedmann and Douglass, 1978). The main idea of the model was to devise an appropriate strategy where people can best take advantage of both urban and rural type 15 functions while also playing a part in political processes. Douglass (1998: 4) succinctly describes the approach:

Seeing the rural town as a principal site for rural non-agriculture as well as political- administrative functions rather than as an industrial growth pole, the agropolitan approach suggested that in most countries the scale was the most appropriate unit of development in that it was small enough to afford frequent access to urban functions by rural households, yet large enough to expand the scope of economic growth and diversification to overcome the limitations of using the as an economic unit.

There are three "critical issues" central to the model that Douglass (1998) highlights:

(1) Access to agricultural land and water (2) Devolution of political and administrative authority to the local level (3) A shift in national development policies in support of diversified agricultural production.

In this way, the integrated approach has been widely adopted and elaborated as a way to bridge the gap of secondary regions with primate cities and between secondary regions and their rural hinterland. Network strategies encompassing the varied functions of different places in a region are seen as an alternative to the focus on cities as the economic engines of regions (Douglass, 1998). But many regional strategies are still expressed in terms of growth pole principles through promoting existing structures within regional economies. As will be discussed in Chapter 4, the development plan for Region VI of Panay island and the province of Iloilo calls for agro-industrial and development, very much building on specific sectors existing within the economy. The criticisms of these spatial decentralization approaches emerge out of arguments related to the types of interactions between primate cities and the global economy. A variant of the world systems approach, the world cities framework, argues that a network of world class primate cities are key spatial areas, also serving as concentration sites of global circuits of capital, linking economies in the Asia-Pacific region and beyond (Douglass, 2000; Friedmann, 1996; Sassen 1994; 2002; Beaverstock et al, 2000). Such major cities exist within an urban hierarchy at global, multinational, sub-national, and national levels and are the sites of headquarters of multinational corporations, foreign banks, major stock exchanges, securities firms and advanced producer services. They are also areas with the necessary infrastructure to host such activities with the international hotels, attractions, and transportation facilities. Stark social and economic polarization exists within such cities as they are also domestic and international migrant destinations where foreign labour concentrates and typically occupies 16 lower end service jobs. The major criticism of spatial decentralization from this perspective is that secondary cities that are weakly connected to such networks cannot attract global investment or receive a share of these patterns of wealth. Core urban areas, according to this line of argument, will continue to be central sites where significant decisions are made that will impact the growth of secondary regions. I argue that particular patterns of urban primacy are so entrenched within different countries in Southeast and East Asia that even with heavy state intervention the articulation of global capital will continue to be expressed through primate cities.

Even though recent forms of regional planning models have been more bottom-up and sensitive to local empowerment, forms of knowledge, culture, and spatial variations of urbanization and rural development, they are still cast within conventional development thinking emphasizing, local industrial specialization and building up existing industries, a la the growth pole approach, that will all serve to increase greater integration of secondary regions into the global economy. Furthermore, the reality of such strategies and their potential success in peripheral regions varies from country to country and are often a function of how local power relations shape political and urban processes and the organization of urban and rural societies. Let me turn to examine such issues.

2.4 Power Relations in the City and Countryside: Marxian Approaches to Secondary Urbanization

I find that power relationships and their impacts on urbanization are important in explaining my experiences in the central Philippines. Within the context of Iloilo, the social relationships involved with respect to the ownership of property, the distribution of wealth, and the allocation of work significantly shapes what types of urban development take place along with whom can experience forms of social and economic mobility. To build on the perspectives of urbanization I outlined above, I draw on Carol Smith's (1985) "class relations theory of urban primacy" in explaining secondary urbanization. It considers the role that internal class dynamics play in different cities and regional economies, and helps to dissect specific characteristics of the urban primacy process. Her perspective also addresses different types of class dominance at macro, regional and urban spatial scales.

Smith's study focused on urbanization in Guatemala and distinguishes between a globally orientated national elite and a historically embedded provincial mercantile elite and how their different economic interests play a significant role in shaping patterns of urban primacy. This 17 idea of different class elites in specific locations of the urban system helps to explain varying processes of labour competition and concentration. She identified the historic creation and continued presence of a mercantile elite controlling the structure of a secondary city called Quezaltenango. She suggests that this group have political and administrative control over the city and province, a monopoly over the region's plantation economy and significant influence over the openness of urban and rural labour markets. Smith (1985: 140) notes:

Openings have not been made available to rural migrants in most of Guatemala's cities, then, not because those cities or those hinterlands are unable to support new urban development, but rather because the dominant classes in those cities remained unchanged by agricultural-export production and by the new import-substitution industrialization and were strong enough to keep their cities closed and their commercial monopolies going.

In this way, the interests of this dominant mercantile elite result in relatively few employment opportunities in secondary cities. The tendency, then, is for migrants to concentrate in primate cities depending on how regional economies are characterized. The model explains that pre-capitalist and capitalist urban and rural economies are major factors in shaping patterns of migration. In pre-capitalist economies, rural populations are considered to be immobile and are relatively unable to make a living outside of the rural economy through traditional means of labour control such as the landlord and tenant agrarian system. The same can be said for urban populations, as provincial cities remain small in size compared to primate cities, and whose social class and economic structure consist of a landed elite, artisans and a pool of temporary urban service workers. The major difference in capitalist urban economies, at least in the way that Smith conceptualizes it, is the idea of free labour that mobilizes to the needs of capitalist production. Thus, depending on the degree of economic and political dominance, and the types of labour needed for capitalist production, elites in different regional economies significantly affect patterns of urbanization. I will revisit these ideas in relation to the spatial urban development of the Philippines in later chapters as the model applies to the super concentration of urban industrial capital flows to the mega-region of Manila and to the free and mobile labour needed for fueling its growth, in contrast to the limited urban functions of the provincial city of Iloilo, where the persistence of its sleepy agrarian economy serves as a remnant and reminder of the booming sugar industry that took place in neighbouring Negros a century earlier. 18 2.5 Understanding Theories of Urbanization I now attempt to evaluate the theoretical perspectives on urbanization I outlined above and use the most significant characteristics to build a conceptual framework for analyzing Iloilo. The grand encompassing approach of world-systems is useful in recognizing the importance of the historical integration of different nations and their regions into the capitalist economy and the resulting effects on patterns of urban growth. It is also a good framework in drawing out the hierarchy of economic and political relationships between different world regions. In a similar manner, the dependency approach considers a number of major factors that shape patterns of urbanization. It brings into focus the complex web of relationships between shifts in macro- structural processes with the role of the state, and the class relations of production at national, regional and local levels. In this way, a historical-structural analysis is central to my study in accounting for the significant historical factors responsible for dependency relations, the specific features of the regional economy, and the formation of class and social structures in the province and city of Iloilo. The shortcomings of these perspectives must also be addressed. The perspectives assume a totalizing history, class determinism, a predetermined transition to modernization and a capitalist economy. First, world systems theory does not pay enough attention to the internal dynamics occurring at regional and local level scales and I have tried to compensate this approach by building my study around Smith's class relations theory of urban primacy. It is also insensitive to local specificity and prioritizes capital as the underlying reason for the condition of different national economies and their resulting urbanization patterns. Both perspectives entail rigid and dichotomous thinking (for example, core-periphery, internal/external or formal and informal) and do not account for the role of the non-human (environment) elements and different interpretations of class categories. Even though it is beyond the scope of this thesis, I have a great deal of trouble with how knowledge and meanings are produced with respect to the treatment of different populations by these perspectives. Escobar (1995) describes the modern development project as an extension of hegemony and neo-colonialism institutionalizing discourses of power and knowledge for control of the construction of meanings and the shaping of practices in the "Third World". For example, "dependency", "the informal sector", "underdevelopment" or "peasant economies" are terms that serve to perpetuate this traditional developmental discourse. I will try to be careful in my choice of words in the remainder of this study. 19 Finally, this thesis contributes to the literature on the structure of secondary cities in developing world contexts. Markusen et al. (1999) offered a number of cases in mainly industrialized settings in different world regions using a theoretical approach adopting new industrial , firm interaction and global urban regions. I take a different perspective using a primarily agrarian region as a research setting, while stressing the importance of shifts in the global economy, the dynamics of internal politics and the concentration of state power, the material interests of elite groups, and their impacts on city growth. It is not enough to consider the idea that what happens in one city or in one country applies to all forms of urbanization in one specific world region like Southeast Asia. In fact, cities differ a great deal, even within domestic contexts. They are subject to different historical forces, and have developed on then- own trajectories. In this case, dependency and its relationship to secondary cities should not be thought of in a general sense. Instead, different countries will have different experiences of the process and its subsequent effects on cities. In this way, I will constantly question the applicability of regional development and growth pole strategies given my emphasis on class relations and its connection to the urban and regional economy of Iloilo. But before doing so, the next chapter discusses how these theoretical perspectives on mega-urban regions and secondary cities manifest themselves in the case of the Philippines along with national development and decentralization strategies on the part of the Philippine State. 20

PART H: BALANCED REGIONAL DEVELOPMENT AND THE RESPONSE OF CITIES IN THE PHILIPPINES 21 CHAPTER 3

URBAN PRIMACY, DECENTRALIZATION AND PHILIPPINE CITIES

3.1 Introduction

This chapter examines the link between political and economic change with processes of urbanization in the Philippines by specifically examining the impact of development policy and economic conditions from the post World War II period to the present. Its primary focus is on the evolution of national economic development policies aimed at the spatial decentralization of the economy and how different regions and cities in the Philippines have responded to these initiatives. My main argument is that even with dramatic shifts at the macro-structural level, that is, a changing economic climate and different state development strategies, little has changed with respect to the distinctive pattern of urban primacy in the Philippines during the post- independence era. I argue that national government policies by default or by design, together with a number of "global" and "local" forces have reinforced the urban primacy of Manila and that early attempts at the spatial decentralization of the economy through regional planning have had little effect. External factors such as the legacy of foreign occupation, mainly the Spanish and American influences on the political economy of the country, along with more local factors such as the role of the state, the interests of national and regional elites, and the dynamics of the local political process, greatly shape patterns of regional development. Over the past twenty years, with issues of livability and the management of its rapidly growing primate mega-urban region of Metro Manila, the spatial development of the country has been a growing national concern. As Jones (1991: 5) argues, in a context where approximately 50 per cent of Filipinos live in cities (almost a 20 per cent increase sine 1960) raises many growth-related concerns as public policy issues and the provision of infrastructure present challenges to officials and citizens alike. Furthermore, the Philippine population of approximately eighty million people in 2000, is projected to grow by more than forty-two million people by 2025 making the growth and change of Philippine cities an important issue, especially with the continuing focus on Manila as the national and economic urban centre. Given this pattern of growth, the most recent Philippine Medium Term Development Plan (PMTDP) 2001-2004, a national policy framework that charts the social and economic development for the country, calls for a number of decentralization strategies to balance the uneven economic and demographic development in different regions of the Philippines. 22 There are four main sections in this chapter. First, I briefly discuss how present class structures and the nature of local politics shape the dynamics of secondary regional development. In the second part, I examine the evolution of urbanization in the Philippines in the post World War II period, with an emphasis on changing economic development policy. I begin with the effect of Spanish colonialism on urban development, then move to the nature of trading relationships with the US, and to more recent national objectives for export oriented growth. In part three, I briefly discuss some of the main principles of the Philippine Medium Term Development Plan and how it relates to the growth of urban regions outside of Metro Manila. In the final two sections, I attempt to make sense of Philippine urban primacy and the recent attempts at the spatial decentralization of the economy.

3.2 Class Divisions, and the Politics of Development The historic patterns of urbanization tied to processes of Spanish colonial expansion that began during the middle of the sixteenth century did not manifest themselves uniformly over different regions of the Philippines.5 Different areas experienced these processes in various ways due to shifts in Spanish colonial interests, and in some cases, regions developed their own independent linkages to the global economy. These historical processes are relevant in discussions of urban primacy and to the present development of Philippine cities as they are main agents responsible for patterns of regional growth, the formation of class divisions, the emergence of elites at the national and provincial levels, and their relationships to the general structure of urban and regional economies. As McCoy (1982: 8) notes: The Philippines did not develop as a unitary colonial economy oriented towards a single satellite entrepot at Manila. Instead, the archipelago emerged as a series of separate societies that entered the world economic system at different times, under different terms of trade, and with different systems of production. This diversity of response was, in large part, the result of the influence of the Anglo-American merchant houses that dominated the export economy. Areas such as Bikol, , and the Western Visayas developed separate ties to global markets through local branches of Anglo-American merchant houses.

Furthermore, McCoy (1982: 8) contends that during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, "that there was not a unified nationalist elite, but a series of distinct regional elites with divergent, if not conflicting, economic interests". Such power structures have profound influence over the distribution of urban spatial development in the country and speak to a number of issues

5 Chapter 4 specifically focuses on the historic integration of Iloilo and the Western Visayas into the global economy. 23 inherent in Smith's class relations theory of urban primacy and to the local politics of development with state attempts at decentralization. Smith not only distinguishes between mercantile elites and national elites, but she addresses one of the major reasons for the lack of secondary city development, the connection between wealthy regional elites and state apparatus. She argues:

What maintains the traditional elite in Guatemala's secondary cities? This is easily understood at one level of analysis: the same people who hold traditional mercantile monopolies hold administrative office in the towns. And it is in the interests of these top powerholders to maintain the whole urban service system as a series of ascribed and monopolistic offices since competition at lower levels of the system is dangerous to all monopolies above them" (Smith, 1985: 141).

The same can be said in the Philippine context, as this line of argument clearly applies in many ways to the development of secondary urban regions during the post independence era, as the interests of economic elites become entangled with state driven initiatives. There is a wide literature on the cultural politics of development in the Philippines (see Hedman and Sidel, 2000; Hutchcroft, 1998; McAndrew, 1994; McCoy, 1994; Rivera, 1994; Roces, 2001). The role of "rent-seekers" and local "bosses" especially in the administration and implementation of development projects have often dominated the politics of development in the Philippines. Yoshihara (1988: 68) states that "rent-seekers seek opportunities to become the recipients of the rent the government can confer by disposing of its resources, offering protection, or issuing authorization for certain types of activities it regulates." "Rent" defined by Yoshihara (1988: 68) is "the difference between the market value of a government 'favour' and what the recipient pays to the government and/or privately to her benefactors in the government". Such relations are very similar to the idea of "bossism": Bossism refers to the social formation which local [but also occurs at provincial and national levels] powerborkers can - and in many instances do - achieve sustained monopolies over coercive and economic resources within geographically defined bailiwicks through the creation of local political machines and economic empires (Hedman and Sidel, 2000: 88).

As Sidel (1999) observed in the areas of Cavite and Cebu, with "bossism" comes the use of violence to achieve political and economic advantage. Alternatively, Roces (2001) distinguishes between factionalism and patron-client relations in the Philippines and argues that development is inextricably linked to a deeper motivation of "kinship politics" to explain Filipino political behaviour where state mechanisms are manipulated to work to the advantage of families and business associates. Furthermore, in the case of secondary regions, if anything is to be 24 significantly accomplished by way of social and economic change, these types of structures must be challenged and this is not always a safe endeavor to engage in on the part of groups in civil society. Although it is beyond the scope of this thesis to discuss in detail the different types of "capitalisms" existing in the country, my main point here is that it is important to consider how different cultures of politics shape urbanization, as instruments of the state are wielded by powerful local actors in different cities and provinces in the Philippines, and influence forms of investment and economic development. It has often been the case that conflicting interests emerge within elite social groups and are significant in shaping patterns of regional development. This is especially the case between Eugenio Lopez and the Lopez clan, a family of sugar hacienderos of the Western Visayas who owned significant holdings in the Philippine media industry, and the conflict that emerged with over these holdings prior to the declaration of martial law in 1972. Marcos sought to gain control over the industry in order to have greater ability to construct consent and opinion to the Filipino public. He eventually gained control of the industry but the result was ostracizing the Lopez familiy, and indeed the entire Western Visayas, from any large nationally supported development projects that eventually went to Marcos' cronies in and around the National Capital Region (NCR). Given the activities of elites, it is critical to mention that these types of "patron-client" relations and the formality or informality of political and economic networks have also been called forms of orientalism and generalizations. I agree that such relations take place in western contexts and I use the terms merely to describe the role that powerful actors have on the growth and change of secondary cities. I now turn to an examination of recent economic performance of the country and its effect on cities

3.3 The Growth of Cities in the Philippines during the post World War H Era External global forces in the form of dependency relationships established first by the Spanish colonialism and various international trading houses (1521-1896) and then American imperialism (1898-1946) shaped the early period of Philippine economic development after World War II. Until the early 1970s, the Philippine economy was used for the consumption of imported American goods and was largely based on the export of a handful of agricultural products to the US economy with some movement towards a state policy of import-substitution production. In this way, different national programmes were enacted in order to maintain the trade relations of dependency. But during the authoritarian Marcos era, the economy became 25 inefficient through political instability, corruption and the rise of a technocratic elite, as policies shifted towards export industrial production. This context and policy focus continued into the post-Marcos era as more recent government policies during the Aquino administration were designed to attract foreign investment and further promote export production, while the Ramos government introduced initiatives stressing deregulation and liberalization of the economy during the early to mid 1990s.

This specific historical colonial context, forms of dependency, along with the role of the state and regional elites as major actors influencing urbanization, helped to sustain patterns of urban development in the Philippines. There are many comprehensive accounts on the context of Philippine international economic and political relations (see Cullather, 1994; Hawes, 1987; Kelly, 1997, 2000) and studies examining issues related to urbanization (Balisacan, 1994; Pernia, 1977; Solon, 1996). The following discussion details the significant economic and urban development issues and separates the last fifty years into three distinct periods. It will take shape by first looking at the important economic policies and external economic forces within each period, followed by an examination of how these played a part, if any, in shaping the urban system. The first period (1946-1965) documents the post-independence years and the impact of lasting American imperial ties. The second period (1966-1986) examines the Marcos era where some of the first state attempts at spatial economic decentralization took place. The final period (1986-2002) looks at the post-Marcos era as balanced regional development is proposed by the state in order to alleviate some of the social and environmental problems associated with the growth of Metro Manila and its extended metropolitan region. But before examining the shifts in economic development policy over the last half century, it is important to consider how Spanish colonialism affected patterns of urbanization.

3.3.1 Cities in the Colonial Philippines The colonial experience of the Philippines and its time of integration into the global economy are a scenario that can be explained by the world systems approach and with theories of urban primacy in explaining its pattern of urban development. The urban primacy concept assumes that there is a system of cities, and "primacy is linked to the absence of regional (usually national) economic integration and balanced economic growth" (Timberlake, 1987: 49). In the Philippine case, the country was colonized by the during the sixteenth century, and port cities like Manila, Cebu and Iloilo were ideal as colonial centres of administration and export trade. Iloilo's growth, for example, was tied to the changing Spanish interests in its 26 colony during the late eighteenth century, where different regions specialized in the production of specific agricultural commodities with provinces like in Northern producing tobacco and the Western Visayas growing sugar. Iloilo became a major port for the sugar trade. But during the mid-twentieth century, the historical dominance of primate cities like Manila, have been sustained by attempts at modernization through industrialization, with industry typically located in primate urban areas with economic links back to the so-called core nations, as was found to be the case in many nations in Southeast Asia and Latin America (Armstrong and McGee, 1985). Philippine integration into the global economy resulted in different regions having different experiences of colonialism in varying historic periods. As will be shown, for a few regions like Cebu and , specific policies in the post war years, such as the export processing zone initiative in the 1970s, affected their development trajectories and shifted their regional economies away from specialized agricultural crop production to urban based industrialization. Overall however, processes of colonial expansion further entrenched patterns of urban primcay in the Philippines and the American experience did little to change it.

3.3.2 Philippine Independence and the Legacy of American Occupation (1946-1965) This period of economic development and urbanization is characterized by forms of economic and political dependency between the Philippines and the , a colonial legacy tracing back to the American takeover of the country after the Spanish-American war ended during mid 1890s (Nemeth and Smith, 1985: 195). The year 1946 marked the date of Philippine independence and this came at the end of a trading agreement between the two countries called the Tydings-McDuffe Act of 1935. The purpose of the act was to allow for specific types of trade to take place over a ten-year period. After World War II and the Japanese occupation, terms of trade were re-negotiated with the United States in the form of the 1946 Bell Trade Act that allowed free trade until 1954 and outlined the nature of trade relations between the US and the Philippines until the early 1970s. These policies served to strengthen forms of dependency. Kelly (1997: 79) captures the nature of the relationship between the two nations during this time:

The result of these conditions was to establish a postwar economy that retained its dependence on agricultural commodity export, to continue the dominance of Philippine politics by the landed oligarchy, to ensure US control over the significant areas of the economy, and, finally, to allow the US some powerful economic sanctions with which to exercise its influence as political and military 'patron'. 27 Towards the latter part of the period, protectionist trade policies were created, and import- substitution industrialization (ISI) was introduced into an economy that was oriented to the agricultural commodity export. By the beginning of the 1950s, the Philippine economy was performing well in relation to other Asian countries. According to Balisacan (1994: 103), "with the exception of Japan and Malaysia, it had the highest GNP per capita in Asia of $150 (at 1952-1954 prices). In comparison to other Asian countries, the Filipino GNP per capita was four fifths of Malaysia, about one half of Japan, but, one-and one third that of Taiwan and more than twice that of South Korea". However, in the subsequent years, the national economy took a down turn, as by the mid-1950s, import and foreign exchange controls were used to aid in implementing an import substitution industrial policy. Table 1 highlights this shift from export production to import substitution with the drop in the number of workers in the agricultural sector and the related increases in industrial and service sector employment (see Table 1). The Philippine economy fared poorly with these changes by the late 1950s, as ISI programmes yielded low rates of economic growth and led to a crisis in the balance of payments with the technological imports, such as industrial machinery and equipment, required by ISI programmes. During the early 1960s, such factors encouraged the Macapagal administration to devalue the peso and ease trade and import controls, while returning to an export oriented national development policy to boost the Philippine economy.

Table 1: National Population and Labour Force, 1960-1980 Year National population in Proportion of Labour Force in Thousands Agriculture(%) lndustry(%) Services(%) 1960 27,088 61 15 24 1970 36,684 - - - 1980 47,914 46 17 37 Source: McGee (1991).

3.3.3 The Philippine Urban System (1946-1965): An Era of Increasing Primacy At the start of independence, approximately 8 per cent of Philippine population were located in the Metro Manila area. The changes in national economic policy and patterns of foreign and domestic investment served to reinforce the pattern of urban primacy within the Philippine urban system. Since the necessary infrastructure was typically already established in urban areas, the industrial policies favored cities, especially metropolitan Manila, as 40 per cent of all industrial manufacturing was located there in 1960 (McGee, 1967: 87). In addition, Cuervo and Hin (1998: 250) suggest that during the post-war period '"Manila demonstrated various features of urban bias by providing the reputable universities, health care and medical 28 facilities, a large protected industrial base, the financial/trade services, foreign exchange and political power". The primacy of Manila can also be illustrated through the percentage of urban and rural populations and by using the primacy index. As Table 2 demonstrates, the urban population level from 1948-1960 grew by nearly 3 million people, although rates of urban growth actually decreased more than one per cent from 4.83 to 3.76 per cent, while rural population growth rates increased almost 1.5 per cent. Over the same period, the percentage of the total population defined as urban increased approximately 30 per cent.

The primacy index is defined as the ratio of the primate-city to the second largest city, and the four-city index, which is the ratio of the primate-city to the next three largest cities (Cuervo and Hin, 1998: 248). These two indices further show the dominance of Manila. Thus, Table 3 shows a 1960 primacy index of 9.81 between Metro Manila and the second largest city of Cebu and a four-city index of 3.24. From these indices it can be gathered that Metro Manila was almost ten times larger than the second largest city in 1960 and more than three times larger than the combined populations of the next three largest cities (Cebu, Davao and Iloilo). Table 4 also further stresses this pattern of primacy in the list of the 20 most populated cities in the Philippines and their changing population size rankings from 1960-1990. The significant size difference within the top-ten cities, between Metro Manila and the following nine, further illustrates patterns of urban primacy.

Table 2: Urban-Rural Distribution of Philippine Population Urban Census Total Overall Urbanization Population Urban Rural Pop. Rural Year Pop. Growth Level Level Population Level Population (millions) Rate (millions) Growth Rate (millions) Growth Rate 1903 7.6 Na 13.1% 1.0 Na 6.6 Na 1918 10.3 2.05% 12.6% 1.3 1.76% 9.0 2.09% 1939 16.0 2.12% 21.2% 3.4 4.67% 12.6 1.62% 1948 19.2 2.05% 27.0% 5.2 4.83% 14.0 1.18% 1960 21.1 2.91% 29.8% 8.1 3.76% 19.0 2.58% 1970 36.6 3.05% 32.8% 12.0 4.01% 24.6 2.62% 1975 42.0 2.79% 33.3% 14.0 3.13% 28.0 2.62% 1980 48.2 2.79% 37.3% 18.0 5.15% 30.2 1.52% 1990 60.7 2.33% 48.8% 29.6 5.10% 31.1 0.29% Source: National Statistics Office (1994); adapted from Table 1 in Calero-Cuervo and H O Kim Hin (1998). 29 Table 3: Primacy and Four-City Index, Philippines: 1960,1970,1980, and 1990 Census Year Primacy Index Four-City Index 1960 9.81 3.24 1970 10.12 3.45 1980 9.71 3.47 1990 9.33 3.50 Source: National Statistics Office (1994); adapted from Table 3 in Calero-Cuervo and H O Kim Him (1998).

Table 4: Rank - Size of Cities in the Philippines: Census Years (1960,1970,1980,1990)(in Thousands)

Rank City 1960 City 1970 City 1980 City 1990

1 Metro Manila 2462 Metro Manila 3967 Metro Manila 5926 Metro Manila 7928 2 Cebu 251 Davao 392 Davao 610 Davao 850 3 Davao 226 Cebu 347 Cebu 490 Cebu 610 4 Iloilo 151 Iloilo 210 Zamboanga 344 Zamboanga 442 5 Zamboanga 131 Zamboanga 200 262 Bacolod 364 6 San Carlos (Neg.) 125 Bacolod 187 Iloilo 245 340 7 Bacolod 119 Angeles 135 Cagayan de Oro 227 Iloilo 310 8 Cadiz 89 131 Angeles 189 250 9 83 Cagayan de Oro 128 Butuan 172 Angeles 237 10 Butuan 80 Cadiz 124 lligan 167 Butuan 228 11 78 Batangas 109 156 lligan 227 12 Angeles 76 Olongapo 108 General Santos 149 Olongapo 193 13 75 San Pablo 106 Batangas 144 Batangas 185 14 San Pablo 71 lligan 104 138 183 15 Cabanatuan 70 Cabanatuan 100 San Pablo 132 180 16 Cagayan de Oro 68 Upa 94 Cadiz 130 Cabanatuan 173 17 Upa 64 Calbayog 94 Lipa 121 San Pablo 161 18 San Carlos 64 San Carlos (Neg.) 90 Baguio 119 Lipa 160 19 toledo 64 General Santos 86 111 151 20 63 Bagulo 85 Mandaue 111 Lapu-Lapu 146

Source: National Statistics Office (1988;1990;1995;1999); adapted from Table 6 in Calero-Cuervo and HO Kim Hin (1998).

3.3.4 The Marcos Era and Reinforcing Manila's Role (1966-1986) The rise of the authoritarian Marcos administration led to a number of significant policy developments, including: (1) a push for a Philippine economy that was export-oriented rather than based on import substitution; (2) the establishing of export processing zones (EPZ), and (3) the devising of policies that further strengthened Metro Manila's role as a primate-city. In addition, a fourth development (4) involved several unsuccessful attempts by the national government to create a regional planning policy aimed at the decentralization of economic activity, an outcome related to the drive for an export oriented industrial policy. A number of factors, including a corrupt government, further reliance on world financial institutions (the World Bank and IMF), the oil crisis, and a world recession, all contributed to a severe decline in the Philippine economy by the end of Marcos's reign in 1986. Thus, a 3.1 per cent growth rate in GNP per capita from 1962-1974 was followed by a growth rate of 1 per cent over the next twelve years (Boyce, 1993: 23), while rates of poverty also increased by the end of this period. 30 When Marcos took power during the middle of the 1960s, the economy was in a weakened state with "a growing constituency of American and Filipino export producers in the Philippines looking for a more favourable business climate" (Kelly, 2000: 32). By the late 1960s, the government initiated policies that constituted an export oriented industrial (EOF) development programme. For instance, the Investment Incentives Act of 1967 (RA 5186) established the Board of Investments (BOI) and gave tax incentives to export producers and tax credits on raw materials and imported capital equipment. The Export Incentives Act of 1970 (RA 6135) allowed these benefits to last for an additional ten-year period on most materials and capital goods used in manufacturing and processing. The Foreign Business Relations Act of 1970 (RA 5455) further removed restrictions on the repatriation of profits (Kelly, 2000: 33; Ofreneo, 1995). The most significant factor that allowed the Marcos government to execute the ambitious EOI project was the declaration of martial law in 1972, orchestrated in a way that was legitimized by the US and the IMF, and that also allowed Marcos's technocratic crony elite to control key aspects of the economy. As a result, a number of export processing zones (EPZ) were created under the supervision of the Export Processing Zones Authority. These included Bataan in the southern part of , EPZ adjacent to Cebu in the in 1978, the Baguio City EPZ in Northern Luzon in 1979, and the Cavite EPZ in 1980 (Kelly, 2000: 33). After martial law was declared in 1972, the national government established a number of changes under the Integrated Reorganizational Plan that included the creation of a National Economic Development Authority, a centralized planning agency responsible for development initiatives as national and regional scales. By the mid-1970s, it also established Metro Manila as the National Capital Region (NCR). The creation of the NCR by the national government was another indication of the significant role that the Metro Manila region played as the country's political, economic and administrative centre. Mercado and Gregorio-Manasan (2001: 151) argue that the region became even more important in the eyes of the national government for two reasons: (1) the first being that having a larger governmental coordinating body would aid in managing services as the area continued to urbanize; and (2) "developing the region served to showcase the country's drive for modernization, a programme consistent with its export-oriented national development strategy". In this way, a number of cultural and entertainment related projects were constructed throughout the area. 31 3.3.5 The Philippine Urban System (1966-1986): The Growth of Secondary Cities Despite national policies that favored growth in Manila, by the beginning of the 1960s, regional planning and decentralization became an issue of the national government, and was legislated by the 1970s. Tax incentives and other financial benefits that emerged out of the Board of Investments Act, and other related policies of the EOI development programme, did little however to disperse the location of firms and industrial activity. As a result, "between 1970 and 1977, 73 per cent of firms registered under the Export Incentives Act (RA 6135) were located in Metro Manila, with a further 12 per cent in the two adjacent regions of Central Luzon and " (Kelly, 2000: 64; Reyes and Paderanga, 1983). As might be expected by the analysis given above, the export-oriented policies of the Marcos government did little to affect the overall nature of the urban system over this second twenty-year period as illustrated through the primacy index (see Table 3). After the declaration of martial law in 1972, as Table 2 shows, the growth rate of Metro Manila actually decreased three quarters of a percentage point, especially as the overall growth of the Philippine population slowed down, hovering above a 2.5 per cent annual increase during the period of 1970-1980. Metro Manila's population, however, grew by more than 3 per cent in relation to the total population, accounting for 12.32 per cent of all Filipinos by 1980 as compared to approximately 9.3 per cent during the beginning of the post-independence period in the late 1940s. Furthermore, according to Table 2, the urban population growth rate at a national level increased almost 1.5 per cent from 1960-1980 (totaling an urban population growth rate of 5.15 per cent by 1980), while urbanization levels grew by almost 10 per cent over the same period. In addition, Philippine secondary cities listed in Table 4 registered steady growth figures over this period. The top five most populated cities in the Philippines in 1980 (in descending order) were Metro Manila, , Cebu, Zamboanga, and Bacolod. Even though the primacy index remained steady at around ten (suggesting that Metro Manila is ten times larger than the second largest city), the growth of the next four cities was impressive. Thus, Metro Manila's population grew more than 140 per cent from 1960-1980, Davao grew at 170 per cent, Cebu at 95 per cent, Zamboanga at 163 per cent, and Bacolod at 120 per cent. It can be argued that Davao and Zamboanga outgrew Manila at this time because of their roles as regional urban centres on the southern Philippine island of . 32 3.3.6 The Post-Marcos Era and Economic Change (1986-2000) The first few years of the Aquino administration (1986-1992) were economically successful, as real GDP growth grew 4.48 per cent from 1986-1991, but from there on the economy did not perform as well as expected due to political instability and a slowdown in the international marketplace. Like the Marcos administration, the implementation of export production type policies continued, and further attempts were made at decentralization through regional planning policies. In this way, more powers and responsibilities were transferred to municipal governments through the Local Government Code in 1991 that also strengthened city control over land development. In a similar manner, the Ramos government (1992-1998) adopted the export production policy agenda of the Aquino administration with the goal of increasing economic liberalization. Furthermore, this government "established political stability through closer control over the military, an amnesty for rebels and negotiated peace with the New People's Army (NPA), and settlements with Muslim secessionists in Mindanao" (Kelly, 2000: 40). So, towards the end of the twentieth century, the Philippine economy shifted to a balance of both export agricultural production, with industries and services. Table 5 shows the nation's major industries, exports and imports.

Table S: Major Industries, Exports and Imports in the Philippines Major Industries

Food, petroleum and coal refining, chemical, electronics and electrical machinery.

Major Exports Electronics, garments, machinery and transport equipment, and Mineral products, coconut product, sugar, bananas, pineapple, mangoes Major Imports Materials for the manufacture of electronics/electrical equipment Source: (ASEAN, 2001).

The export production type policies developed during the Aquino period also aimed to encourage foreign investment. The Omnibus Investments Code (Executive Order 226) was introduced in 1987, and allowed for greater flexibility in the incentives given to foreign and domestic investors wishing to locate their business in the Philippines. In 1991, the Foreign Investments Act (Republic Act 7042) "allowed for more leeway towards total foreign ownership of enterprises and permitted companies not receiving incentives to sell 40 per cent of production in the domestic market" (Kelly, 2000: 39). The Ramos government introduced more ambitious policies to further deregulate and liberalize the national market. For instance, the 1994 Export Development Act (RA 7844) 33 allowed for firms to take better advantage of incentives and provided freer access to domestic markets. In addition, further tax incentive benefits were allotted to the four export processing zones through a reworking of the Philippine Economic Zones Authority mandate (RA 7916). All of these liberal policies were part of a larger project, the Medium Term Philippine Development Plan, a strategy designed to advance industrialization in the Philippines and to make the country globally competitive by the new millennium.

3.3.7 The Philippine Urban System (1986-2000): Manila Supreme Like the two previous periods, these policies did not significantly affect patterns of urban primacy. Rather, the increased performance in the two export processing zones located in Manila's extended periphery, Bataan and Cavite, further strengthened the urban region as an export manufacturing centre. Even though the growth rate of Manila decreased more than 1 per cent to a rate of 2.95 per cent from 1980-1990, as Table 6 demonstrates, the city grew by approximately 2 million people from 1980-1990 and accounted for more than 13 per cent of the total population. Table 3 shows a slight drop of almost .4 in the primacy index that stood at 9.33 by 1990.

Table 6: Population levels, National and Metro Manila: 1960,1970,1980 and 1990 Census Philippine Pop. Growth Rate Metro Manila Pop. Growth Rate Percentage Year (thousands) (thousands) of Total 1960 27,088 Na 2462 na 9.09% 1970 36,684 3.08% 3967 4.89% 10.81% 1980 48,098 2.75% 5926 4.10% 12.32% 1990 60,703 2.35% 7928 2.95% 13.06% Source: National Statistics Office (1994); adapted from Table 2 in Calero-Cuervo and H O Kim Him (1998).

Aside from Manila, rates of urbanization for the entire country increased more than 11 per cent from 1980-1990, bringing the total percentage of the urban population to almost 50 per cent, a total of 29.6 million people (see Table 2). Consequently, the rate of rural population growth dropped to .3 per cent by 1990. The rank of the top five most populated cities in Table 4 did not change during the period from 1980-1990. Davao's population grew 39 per cent, Cebu by 24.5 per cent, Zamboanga by 28.5 per cent, and Bacolod by 38.9 per cent. Overall then, with the urban primacy ratio for Manila, located in the 9 to 10 range over the last 50 years, raises issues of the "spill-over effects" of urbanization into adjacent areas of the National Capital Region. Such urbanization patterns were accelerated with the growth of the Bataan EPZ, located to the northwest of Metro Manila in the Central Luzon region, along with the Cavite EPZ, located in the Southern Tagalog region and to the south of Manila. In an attempt 34 to balance such forms of uneven development, the national government has created a number of recent strategies.

3.4 Spatial Economic Decentralization and Philippine Urbanization Spatial economic decentralization forms a major part of the most recent Philippine Medium-Term Development Plan (PMTDP) 2001-2004 under the Macapagal-Arroyo administration. The goal of the Medium-Term Development Plan is to set out a policy framework aimed at improving the social, economic, and environmental well being of the country through sustainable forms of growth. With respect to economic decentralization, the plan calls for the accelerated development of infrastructure projects, the further decentralization of economic activity to urban centres outside the of the National Capital Region of Metro Manila and for appropriate methods to secure future growth.

The shift in infrastructure investments from the highly developed mega-centres like Metro Manila, to the designated regional growth centres shall be intensified in line with the policy of national dispersion through regional concentration to stimulate development in the countryside and relieve the impact of rapid rural-to-urban migration on infrastructure services (NEDA, 2001: 82).

Furthermore, the development of smaller urban centres is also an attempt to balance the inequality in regional income levels, with the lowest rates of poverty found in the National Capital Region and with the highest rates found in Mindanao, especially the Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao (ARMM). It is the intention of such policies that through building up regional economic strength that incomes will be raised and poverty rates will fall. The spirit of the Medium-Term Development Plan is further legislated at the regional and municipal levels, and builds on ambitious national policy attempts, that began in the early 1990s, aimed at the decentralization of growth and centralized government control. The revolutionary policy that was the building block for decentralization was the Local Government Code of 1991. It was seen as helping in economic liberalization by eliminating stages of the development process. This gave local governments greater control over urban development (for a detailed summary of the policy see Timberman, 1998). It "enabled local officials to reclassify up to 15 per cent of land use from agricultural to other uses on the basis of vague conditions relating to its viability for agriculture" (Kelly, 2000: 118). The Code also improved the amount of resources available to municipal governments as "cities and provinces are given 40 per cent of internal revenue allotments, compared to only 11 per cent before 1992 and have more power to raise their own revenues and negotiate loans" (Hutchcroft, 1998a: 39). 35 In the case of Iloilo, with a provincial poverty incidence rate of 46 per cent (NSO, 1995), decentralization through the growth of local autonomy is seen as a way to reverse this trend. With greater control over urban development and service provision that increased autonomy affords, it is hoped that regions like Iloilo will become more competitive for global foreign investment. But as was mentioned at the outset, such processes are often tied to the local culture of political development and with the competing interests of powerful local actors.

3.5 Economic Decentralization and Philippine Urban Regions The examination of these historical periods provides evidence of how urbanization trends in the Philippines have persisted and the sorts of recent measures taken to alleviate megacity growth and encourage the development of smaller urban regions. Over the three periods of the post-independence era, economic development policy has done little to shift patterns of urban primacy. During the first twenty years after World War n, the Philippine economy was fairly strong in comparison to other economies in Asia. Dependency relationships in the form of the export of Philippine agricultural commodities for value-added imported goods were tied to the US. During the 1950s, the economy moved towards import substitution, changes that resulted in a negative impact on economic growth. The effect of such policies on cities was not profound as there were no initiatives or attempts at decentralization and the pattern of urban primacy on Manila persisted. The movement towards import substitution served to strengthen Manila's role as an industrial centre as a high number of manufacturing firms located in the area. The mid-1960s saw the rise of the Marcos government along with a number of policies that further reinforced Manila's position. These included the creation of the Export Oriented Industrial Development Programme and the export processing zones initiative by the late 1970s. It was also during the 1970s where decentralization and regional planning became an issue of national interest with the creation of the National Economic Development Authority. It was also through the Integrated Regional Plan where Metro Manila was declared the National Capital Region, a symbol of the nation's drive for modernity. In addition, during the second period of analysis, economic development policy had little effect on the urban system as the majority of economic activity concentrated in Manila. Rates of primacy fell slightly over the fifty-year period even though the percentage of population in Manila increased. An interesting development, however, was the growth of secondary cities. In most cases, the growth of such cities was proportional to Manila, but the growth of Davao and 36 Cebu in particular, combined with the populations of their surrounding cities increases their regional populations to well over one million people. There were a number of significant occurrences from the mid-1980s to the early 1990s. The differing administrations continued with the export oriented production policies of the Marcos government and introduced a number of incentives to attract direct foreign investment. Perhaps, the most important initiative was the introduction of the Local Government Code in 1991 that provided more autonomy to local governments. However, these policies to date have done little in terms of shaping overall regional development. One explanation is the overwhelming attractiveness of the National Capital Region as an investment site equipped with the necessary infrastructure and services needed to host international investment. Another reason can be attributed to the role of elites in secondary regions and to the highly personal nature of the Philippine political stage.

3.6 Summary The link between economic development and urban development during the post-colonial era has done little to change patterns of urban primacy in the Philippines. Such patterns are a result of both its colonial legacy and national economic development policies in the post World War II period. In addition, external forces in the form of Spanish and American occupations have played a significant role in shaping the spatial development of Philippine cities. In coming back to some of the theoretical concepts discussed in Chapter 2, from a dependency perspective, during the post War period Manila continued to fulfill its role as the satellite node of economic exchange with the global economy, as international investment fueled its growth, Manila began to envelop surround provinces. Overall then, this post independence narrative reveals that the Metro Manila urban region remains dominant as the political, economic, and cultural centre of the country. It is apparent though, given this national level examination, that there is more to rectifying uneven development than to simply alter policies at different levels of government. What I have not emphasized in this chapter is how local level processes play out, as development becomes entangled with local forces such as the interests of national and regional elites that have great influence over political processes, and as a consequence, forms of urban and regional development and the effects of spatial decentralization policies. I mentioned near the outset that the historic integration of different regions in the Philippines resulted in different patterns of growth and to the evolution of unique social class and economic structures in different provincial areas. Such processes become even more complex due to the relationship between the role of powerful actors with local political processes, and of local class relations and their relationships to pre-capitalist and capitalist elements of regional and urban economies. In scaling down to the provincial and city level, I will show how specific historical structural forces changed Iloilo's fortunes and led to its demise, and how such factors continue to hinder the area's development. 38 CHAPTER 4

LIVING IN THE SHADOW OF A QUEEN: ILOILO'S PAST IS PRESENT

4.1 Introduction Chapter 3 suggested that national government development strategies did little to benefit Philippine cities and further reinforced urban primacy during the post World War II period. The main argument of this chapter is that the historic factors that gave rise to the present characteristics of Iloilo's urban and rural social structure hinder current development plans for improving the regional economy. Iloilo's historic processes of urbanization and class formation are important to consider for two reasons. First, systems of labour control established during the mid-nineteenth century continues to restrict the mobility of significant numbers of people who struggle to make a living in the city and countryside. Second, the current land tenancy system inhibits attempts to improve the agriculturally resource based economy of rural areas as both the urban and rural based elite see no need to dramatically alter the characteristics of a regional economy that benefits them. In the first section, I examine the process of historic integration of Iloilo into the global economy. During the latter half of the nineteenth century Iloilo was the premiere port city in the Philippines, the "Queen City of the South", a result of the boom in the sugar industry on the neighbouring island of Negros, making the city similar in importance within the global economy to Manila. Coinciding with the rise and fall of the sugar industry, it was during this time where Iloilo developed the dominant economic, political, cultural and social structures that characterize its present period of decline. In the second section, I outline the major principles of current development plans for the Panay region and specifically the province of Iloilo, along with plans for the city. With the abandonment of Iloilo by the international merchant class that fostered its explosive growth during the late nineteenth century, the present urban elite is weakly linked to the global economy leaving the city and rural towns in the province continuing along a development path of economic mediocrity as reflected in the composition of urban and rural labour markets and income levels. In the final section, I comment on the viability of these development plans given the organization of class relations in the region.

4.2 Iloilo's Past: Land Tenure and the Sugar Trade Gone Sour Before telling Iloilo's story, let me first sketch a portrait of the area. The City of Iloilo is on the island of Panay in the Western Visayas of the central Philippines (see Map 1). There are six provinces that form Region VI of the present national development plan. Four of them are on the island of Panay, to the west, Alkan to the northwest, to the north and Iloilo to the southeast. The remaining two provinces are the island of and the western half of Negros, , both situated southeast of Panay. The five major rivers on Panay drain out at Iloilo City and the gentle sloping of the province makes it suitable for wet rice cultivation. Iloilo City is a natural port setting protected from rough waters by the island of Guimaras, with the Guimaras straight providing ideal conditions for shipping with its deep-sea anchorage and peaceful waters (see Map 2). The urban area of Iloilo consists of six former towns that are now districts of the city. and Molo are located northwest and west of the city proper. La Paz forms the eastern district. Arevalo is the most southwestern part of the city, with the northeastern district of Jaro (see Map 3). Presently, the city of Iloilo is still a major port destination and the provincial and regional capital for Area VI.

Iloilo has seen much during its five hundred years of documented history. Approximately two centuries before the Spanish arrived in the sixteenth century, it had a thriving society engaged in textile trading with Chinese merchants. Under the Spanish (1560s-1898), the area was an administrative and missionary centre, an era that shaped the present system of land property ownership. During the height of the weaving industry from the late eighteenth until the mid nineteenth century, Iloilo and its native Chinese entrepreneurs were connected to international trading networks that intensified the formation of urban areas. The region then experienced a period of boom and bust with the sugar trade from Negros (1850s-1930s) as the port of Iloilo was opened to international trade in 1855. Devastated by the Japanese invasion, this pattern of decline continued during the post World War II period with Iloilo slow to rebuild its infrastructure. These historic forces together with the recent developments over the last fifty years prevent significant social change from occurring in the city and in its rural towns and hinterland.

4.2.1 A History of Land Ownership in the Province The history of the land tenureship system in the Philippines is a rich and complex topic and is central to the economic conditions presently found in the rural areas of Iloilo and many other regions in the Philippines. I attempt here to draw out the major principles that will help in explaining my observations of farming dynamics in Burot. During the pre- period, land tenure was based on the barangay and system. The word "barangay" is derived from the Tagalog word for boat and community since it was by boats that people traveled to different Map 1: The Philippines 0 0

Source: Province of TloiJo (1999).

42

Map 3: Iloilo City

LEGEND:

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LA FAX) 43 islands in the country. These communities and "boatload" identities were maintained by the economic and military power of a local class of captains called dolus (Scott, 1994). Not limited to one gender, had considerable influence over local economies since communities were formed through kinship ties and local alliances. Below the chiefdom class was the timawa or freemen class that showed allegiance by paying tribute (buhis) to their datu. The oripun, were groups of slave labourers under the ownership of the datu, who were won during battle or were traded by other datus. These groups were engaged mostly in subsistence agriculture and often lived in dispersed settlements. On the whole, it was this existing social power structure and its relationship to the land that the Spanish built on. The emergence of Spanish colonialism during the middle of the sixteenth century was significant in reshaping the social organization of the Philippine and Visayan society and economy. The encomienda system was put into place where Filipino labour was implemented to extract the surplus of agricultural production to support the colonial project and to enrich the Spanish Crown and the (Ofreneo, 1980). In many respects, the system was similar to medieval feudalism in Europe and was based on the organization of large territories under the control of appointed Spanish encomenderos who collected tributes from locals. Such territories were often awarded to Spanish serving in the military, colonists and different religious orders.6 In addition, the Spanish appointed the datus as the principalia class, who were not required to provide labour or pay tribute. In a sense, the principalias became local colonial representatives with similar powers to the encomenderos. In general, they were in a better position to exploit the encomienda arrangement of private land ownership through the kasama or the sharecropping system, as the social relations of patronage and the offering of tributes were traditional features under the former datu system. Even though the encomienda system was abolished by the end of the eighteenth century, the polarized patterns of land tenure were intensified through various strategies of land grabbing by the affluent social elite during the nineteenth century - the Spanish, Spanish , the principalias, the emerging Chinese mestizo class and religious orders. Such strategies involved, the purchasing of lands by the Spanish through political and economic coercion; the usurpation of small holding farmers with land as collateral; and the abuse of knowledge of colonial land granting policies by landgrabbers over unknowing small land holding farmers. This resulted in

6 From 1571-1626, there were a series of royal land grants to a number of social elite including religious orders. In the case of the Visayas, landed estates were concentrated in the province of Cebu. There is an extensive literature on the relationship between religious orders and estate ownership (see Endriga, 1970; Cushner, 1976; Cushner and Larkin, 1978, McAndrew, 1994; Roth, 1977). 44 the ownership of lands by a few elite groups leaving the majority of Filipinos landless and in a constant state of debt. As will be shown in my case study of Burot in the province of Iloilo, many of these patterns still hold in the present.

4.2.2 A Changing City: From Chinese Textile Trading to Sugar Entrepot By the late eighteenth century, the Spanish focus on the Philippine economy shifted from a concern with the galleon trade based on the exchange of Chinese silk and imported goods to Mexico for gold and silver, to the export of agricultural production, cash cropping and crop specialization in different regions of the Philippines. For the regional economy of the Western Visayas sugar became the primary commodity leading to dramatic effects on Ilonggo society as a handful of powerful actors, mainly, the foreign trading houses, the Spanish, Chinese mestizos, and the wealthy native Ilonggo elite, benefiting the most by the time of the industry's decline. According to McCoy (1984) the growth of the city's textile industry by the early eighteenth century was the first of three major structural changes that occurred to the regional economy of Iloilo, factors that currently shape potential development trajectories.7 This first transformation was represented by the shift from an agricultural subsistence economy to the production and export of textiles. The emergence of Chinese mestizo merchant entrepreneurs who concentrated in the parian district of Molo, were engaged in the production and export of cloth to Asia, Europe and the Americas (McCoy, 1982: 302).8 Significant numbers of people migrated from the heavily populated rural areas along the Southwestern coast and concentrated in districts such as Jaro since the industry provided waged labour largely for women as weaving was a female tradition in household work within rural society. At the height of the industry's prosperity, Iloilo's urban population of 71,000 rivaled the cities of Chicago and Sydney at the time (McCoy, 1982: 9). Even before the sugar industry made its way into the city and region, Iloilo was a core area linked to the global economy with an indigenous merchant class that had vested interests in the welfare of the city. Iloilo was already in a sense "modern".9

7 For this section, I draw heavily on the work of social historian Alfred W. McCoy whose work documents Iloilo's experience with the sugar industry and the unionization of its industrial waterfront workers during the early twentieth century (see McCoy, 1984; 1982; 1982a; 1977). 8 Another characteristic of the colonial experience was the deliberate concentration of dispersed settlements characteristic under the datus into administrative and missionary centres called pueblos or bayans. The Spanish policy of reduction or the reduction of the scattered population was used to bring populations within short distances of the central Spanish colonial institutions, the church and town hall. It was during the early nineteenth century that centres of Chinese mestizos formed in the "mestizo" towns of Molo and Jaro (Wickberg, 1965: 34). 9 Wickberg (1965:6) distinguishes between three different types of economies existing in the Philippines during the pre-1750 period and before the shift in colonial economic policy to agricultural export that occurred approximately twenty-five years later. One was the "Western" economy geared to the Spanish galleon trade. Another was the 45 Corresponding with the opening of Iloilo to foreign trade in 1855, the second transformation, the shift from textiles to sugar exports (1850s-1870s), represented a change in the industrial base of the region's economy that had significant effects on the form and social structure of the city. During this era the condition of Iloilo's economy, and its role as a major port became intimately linked to the fortunes of Negros Occidental, its sugar growing neighbour, that lacked sufficient harbour facilities to transport and export sugar to the international market at the beginning of the boom. The mestizo entrepreurs' interests shifted to the more lucrative ownership of sugar plantations in Negros leaving increasing control of the Iloilo economy to British, Spanish, Swiss, and American foreign merchant trading houses or casas. This signaled the end of a native international entrepreneural Ilonggo elite, something the city has not seen since. McCoy (1984: 335) succinctly describes the reshaping of Iloilo's economy.

While Negros produced most of the region's sugar, Iloilo City provided all the industry's support services - warehouses, banks, retail shops, schools, newspapers, theatres, bakeries, and social clubs. In the transition from textiles to sugar, Iloilo City was transformed from a proto-industrial centre controlled by an indigenous elite into an alien entrepot, a regional break-and-bulk port at the lowest rung in a hierarchy of port cities - bulking up sugar for export to Europe and America, and breaking up cargoes of finished imports for local distribution. In the process, Iloilo City's population dropped from 71,000 in 1856 to 43,000 by 1878, and the male stevedores superseded the woman weaver as the basis of the urban labour force.

By the 1880s, it was apparent that the weaving industry could not compete with the English manufactures in Manchester and the rise of the sugar trade on Negros. Weaving production slowed considerably with significant numbers of out-migration from the province finding work on the sugar plantations in Negros. The final transformation was the gradual replacing of small-scale steam and animal powered sugar mills with sixteen industrial mills called centrals on Negros Occidental (1912- 1922) resulting in an exponential increase in sugar production and dramatic changes in industrial work relations. The exploitation of waged labour was taking place on many fronts, between planters and millers over sharing prices, and at the Iloilo waterfront where stevedores endured poor working conditions and low wages with fluctuations in the international price of sugar. The

"native" economy oriented to local subsistence agricultural production. The final category, relevant to my discussion here, is the Chinese economy. He argues that potential trading centres emerged for the Chinese mestizos wherever there were Spanish settlements since they were sites of economic opportunity. It is important to differentiate between Chinese and mestizo groupings. Mestizos were in Iloilo at the time by way of a series of expulsion and discriminatory policies that did not allow the free movement of the Chinese to other areas of the Philippines except for the parian in Manila Chinese mestizos were a distinct social grouping in the eyes of the colonial regime and were thus granted certain privileges, with mobility to other provinces being one of them. 46 formation of a regional labour union, the Federacion Obrera de Filipinas (FOF), headed by Jose Nava, resulted in two strikes occurring on the Iloilo port in 1921 and 1930 with another major strike on Negros in 1931. The growing power of the union, combined with the concessions it won from the labour disputes, and Jose Nava's growing influence over Iloilo's urban labour force, indicated to the casas that they were losing profits and control over the production process in Iloilo. The casas devised two strategies to evade the FOF by the 1930s. The first was already deployed to deal with the previous strikes in hiring scabs from another company union of waterfront workers called the Visayan Stevedore Transportation Company (Vistranco), a company under their control. The second plan, direct offshore loading from the centrals at Negros, essentially meant the end of the Iloilo boom, and crippled the powers of the FOF union in the city. The practice eliminated stages in the transportation process of sugar, mainly the use of Iloilo's port, thereby drastically reducing overall transport costs. Instead of using lighters to ship sugar from Negros to the warehouses of Iloilo, the casas found deep-sea anchorage sites off the western coast of Negros and directly loaded sugar from Vistranco lighters to large freighters. The logistical importance of Iloilo's facilities was lessened considerably. The patterns of decline tied to the logistical separation of the port of Iloilo from the regional economy continued under the American administration beginning by the turn of the twentieth century and were further intensified with the events and aftermath of World War II. The Japanese invasion of the Philippines had catastrophic effects on the city and region. Many of the centrals on Iloilo and Negros along with many of the warehouses and industrial facilities on the waterfront were destroyed by the bombings. The significant drop in economic activity, mainly the handling of the sugar and fertilizer trade at the waterfront, resulted in labour disputes between the two unions competing for the remaining work available, the FOF and the renamed Vistranco company union called the Consolidated Labour Union of the Philippines (CLUP). With falling wages for Iloilo's industrial waterfront workers, and with few viable investment prospects for the elite, the exodus began of the working and wealthy Ilonggos to other major urban areas in the Philippines, Bacolod, Cebu and Manila. The regional economy would see no other significant transformations take place after the war with relatively stable urban population growth levels over the next fifty years (see Table 7). It is within this context where contemporary development initiatives take place. 47 Table 7: City of Iloilo Population Growth (1948-2000) Year Population Increase p.a. 1948 110,122 -0.6 1960 151,266 2.7 1970 209,738 3.3 1980 244,827 1.5 1990 309,505 2.4 2000 365,820 1.9 Source: NSCB (2001).

4.3 Contemporary Regional Development in Iloilo National development objectives promoted through the recent Philippine Medium Term Development Plan (2001-2004) (PMTDP) suggest that specific sectors of regional economies should be targeted for growth. In this way, the current plans for Region VI and the province of Iloilo are based on growth pole strategies focusing on agricultural development, as the area is the second major agricultural producing region in the country, while industrialization is trumpeted by city officials as the their main development objective. The Region VI plan (1999-2004) calls for "the sustainable diversification of agricultural products, promotion of agricultural based industry, tourism and the enhancement of small and medium size enterprises" (NED A, 2000). Furthermore, the plan also calls for the increased centralization of activity and investment in nineteen regional and district growth centres, areas selected for the production and processing of agricultural products by large and small to medium size enterprises. The regional agri-industrial growth centre for Panay is in the city of Pavia located north of the city of Iloilo, while the city of Iloilo also serves as a major processing area and as the region's political and administrative centre. As will be shown, there is little evidence pointing to progress in these areas as significant portions of the population barely manage to earn enough income to get through the year. My main argument here is that the viability of such plans must consider the role of actors with the power and control to shape local labour market dynamics and the distribution of wealth in both urban and rural contexts.

4.3.1 Economy and Labour in the Province Table 8 provides some of the main socio-economic characteristics for the province. Iloilo accounts for one quarter of the land area of the Western Visayas, a region that represents 6.7 percent of the land area of the Philippines. Stagnation best describes the agricultural resource based economy and the conditions of poverty in which many Ilonggos live. As Table 9 shows, the province mainly produces rice for local consumption with very little diversification in agricultural production. Sugar production, concentrated in the northern part of the province, 48 together with the aquacultural industry; provide the major goods exported to international markets (see Table 10).

Table 8: Selected Socio-economic Characteristics for Iloilo Socio-economic Characteristic 2000 Total Population* 1,559,182 Average Population Growth p.a. (%) 1.54 Number of Households 298,593 Average Household Size 5.1

1997 Urban Population (%) 24.9 Rural Population (%) 75.1 Poverty Incidence— Province (%) Per Capita** 46.5 Urban 37.8 Rural 52.2 Source: NSCB (2001) and Province of Iloilo (1999). * The figures for 2000 do not include the City of Iloilo in the total numbers. ** The per capita poverty threshold (2000) is defined for the province at approximately p 12,500 or $350 Canadian per year.

Table 9: Crop Production, Province of Iloilo, 1998 and 2000 Crop Area Harvested (Hectares) Production (MT) Yield Rice (2000) Irrigated 58,837 249,361 4.24 MT/Ha Non-irrigated 65,595 229,966 3.51 MT/Ha Com (1998) Yellow 3,975 8,270 2.1 MT/Ha White 39.5 79 2.0 MT/Ha Legumes Mongo 1,459 691 .47 MT/Ha Peanut 388 555 1.4 MT/Ha Mango 240 8,783 36.6 MT/Ha Source: RDC (2001); Province of Iloilo (1999). 49 Table 10: Export Performance, Province of Iloilo, 1998 Product Line Value in US$ Million FOB Non-Traditional Products (Processed Food) Marine Products Frozen 2.729 Other Marine Products 8.486 Fruits and Vegetables Banana Chips 3.779 Banana Brittle 0.020 Total Processed Food 15.014

Gifts, Toys, and Housewares 0.067 Furniture and Furnishings 0.109 Garments, Textiles/Yams 0.031 Total Non-Traditional Products 15.221

Traditional Products Muscovado Sugar 0.132 Molasses 5.190 Lime Products 0.038 Total Traditional Products 5.360 Grand Total Exports 20.581 Source: Province of Iloilo (1999).

With respect to local labour markets and income levels, there have been no significant changes to the economic structure of the region, further evidence of the lack of improved spatial decentralization of the economy within the last ten years. Instead, the majority of people are tied to the traditional practice of rice farming and to its seasonal fluctuations in the availability of labour, with people moving into other work sectors at different times of the year. Table 11 illustrates these seasonal shifts in agricultural work availability and the resulting transfer of people into different labour sectors of the economy. The first quarter is typically the dry season (January and February) where the second harvest takes place usually in March. Harvest yields are smaller then the main harvest in the fall requiring less labour which helps to explain the large numbers that are unemployed. There is, however, a rise in the number of industrial workers that are involved in the warehousing, milling, and transporting of the previous year's harvest. In the remaining quarters, the availability of agricultural work rises as farmers prepare the land for the main harvest that takes place toward the end of the third quarter and the beginning of the fourth quarter in September and October. There is also a steady 50 Table 11: Employment Status for Population 15 Years Old and Over, Province of Iloilo, By

Employment Status/Sector First Second Third Fourth Average Total Population (15 Years & Older) 995 1,001 1,007 1,103 1,027 In the Labour Force (%) 688 (69.1) 642 (64.1) 677 (67.2) 668 (60.6) 669 (65.1) Not in the Labour Force (%) 307 (30.9) 358 (35.9) 329 (32.8) 345(39.4) 335 (34.9) Agriculture (%) 28.9 48.4 51.7 47.8 44.2 Industry (%) 13.7 9.0 7.5 8.4 9.7 Services (%) 32.1 33.5 32.8 35.0 33.4 Unemployed (%) 25.1 8.9 8.0 8.8 12.7 Total 100 100 100 100 100 Source: Province of Iloilo (1999). population involved in the services sector with lower income workers employed primarily in transportation, small-scale trading, and food vending occupations. The nature of regional labour market processes are also reflective in the income, spending and savings levels for Ilonggos living in the province (see Table 12). More than two thirds of the total number of families are able to save money for the year with a lion's share of savings going to wealthier groups. It should also be noted that families in rural areas are typically larger than the ones in the city, since most households are engaged in traditional and not industrial rice producing methods. The combinations of lower incomes and savings, and having to provide for a larger family, serve to perpetuate the restrictions for socio-economic mobility in rural settings. Tenant farmers especially, are in a constant state of economic uncertainty, not knowing if they will have enough money to pay for the necessary inputs to produce a good harvest, and often rely on the landowner for financial assistance. These issues will be expounded in detail in Chapter 6 that deals with my observations of the social relations of farming and the economic conditions of households in Burot.

Table 12: # of Families, Avg. Incomes, Expenditures and Savings, Province of Iloilo 1997 Income Category Total Number Average Average Average (% Total) Of Families Income Expenditure Savings Under p 10,000 (.67) 1,948 7,453 10,530 -3,077 10,000-19,999 (4.4) 12,849 16,234 21,127 -4,893 20,000-29,999 (11.8)34,258 25,278 32,309 -7,031 30,000 - 39,999 (16.3)47,192 34,497 40,414 -5,917 40,000 - 49,999 (11.5)33,440 44,969 47,220 -2,251 50,000 - 59,999 (9.1) 26,342 55,048 55,721 -673 60,000 - 79,999 (13.7) 39,717 69,130 68,106 1,024 80,000 - 99,999 (7.3)21,252 88,944 80,088 8,856 100,000-149,999 (12.7) 37,018 122,061 107,706 14,355 150,000 - 249,999 (7.3)21,234 195,036 156,893 38,143 250,000 - 499,999 (4.9) 14,371 335,712 214,461 121,251 500,000 and Over (.29) 860 612,299 404,325 207,974 Total (100) 290,481 83,715 74,043 96,672 Source: NSCB (2001). 51

4.3.2 Economy and Labour in the Iloilo Urban Region Economic conditions are relatively better in the city where incomes are generally higher. Of the forty-three municipalities in the province, the towns of Oton, Pavia, Leganes, San Miguel, Santa Barbara, and are of specific interest since they are rural areas on the urban periphery of the city of Iloilo. In 2000, these towns together with the city formed a population of more than half a million people (see Table 13). It is important to account for the interaction between the city and its adjacent towns to better capture the range of agricultural and non- agricultural activities that form the economy of the urban region and the patterns of migration that are a part of the everyday life for many Ilonggos. For example, a farmer growing vegetables on a small plot of land in Santa Barbara may sell their goods at the Jaro tiendahan (marketplace), a district within Iloilo City. Or farmers during slow times of the season may go into the city for temporary employment in construction. It is unfortunate, however, that urban Ilonggos like their provincial counterparts, face many of the same labour prospects, as there has been little structural change to the urban economy.

Table 13: Population Size of the Iloilo Urban Region Pop. Increase Municipality 2000 p.a. (2000) Iloilo City 365,820 1.93 Oton 65,374 Pavia 32,824 Leganes 23,475 San Miguel 20,754 Santa Barbara 46,076 New Lucena 19,490 Total 573,813 Source: NSO (2001).

Iloilo City is centred on its role as the political and administrative centre for the province and Region VI and not solely on its role as a major port as in the past. The city's present labour force is composed of significant numbers of government employees, and is structured around its wholesaling, retailing, and financial and personal services industries. More than half of the urban workforce is made up of "informal" work, and "unskilled" general labourers indicative of the "standby culture" and the transient types of employment available in the city such as construction, sikad driving, and odd jobs like plumbing and carpentry (see Table 14). Presently, the port serves as a site for the export of Iloilo's sugar and processed aquacultural goods, while the major imports are wheat products, and agricultural fertilizers and chemicals used as inputs 52 for rice farming. In terms of new business establishments, Table 15 shows the movement of new firms into the city with industrial manufacturing accounting for a small percentage of the overall composition of the city's economy (also see Table 16). It is also interesting to note that a very large majority of these firms (92.3 per cent) are micro cottage industries as Table 17 demonstrates. My point here is that this figure is indicative of the type of ownership of small- scale business firms (typically merchants and food vendors) that are usually privately owned and are operated by family households. On the whole, the static nature of the urban economy is reflective of Iloilo's function as a local economic centre serving its surrounding hinterland.

Table 14: Employed Persons by Class of Worker, Gender, and Primary Occupation,

Major Occupation Group Total Female (%) Male (%) (%) Total 14,215 6,049 (42.6) 8166 (57.4) Officials of Government and Special, Interest Organizations, Corp. Execs., Managers, Managing Proprietors and Supervisors 14.2 18.1 (54.4) 11.3(45.6) Professionals 6.7 10.3 (65.6) 4.0 (34.4) Technicians and Associate Professionals 3.8 4.2 (46.4) 3.6 (53.6) Clerks 6.9 10.8 (66.7) 4.0 (33.3) Service Workers and Shop and Market Sales Workers 12.2 14.8(51.5) 10.3(48.5) Farmers, Workers and Fisherman 8.2 2.8 (14.8) 12.2 (85.2) Traders and Related Workers 13.0 7.9 (25.9) 16.8 (74.1) Plant and Machine Operators and Assemblers 10.0 2.3 (9.6) 15.8(90.4) Labourers and Unskilled Workers 24.3 28.6 (49.9) 21.2 (50.1) Special Occupations 0.5 0.1 (12.5) 0.9 (87.5) Total 100 100 100 Source: CPDO (2002). 53 Table 15: New Business Establishments by Major Classification/Industry,

Classification/Industry Number % Agriculture, Fishery, Forestry - - Mining and Quarrying - - Manufacturing 53 2.84 Electricity, Gas and Water - - Construction 28 1.50 Wholesale and Retail 937 50.16 Transport, Communication & Storage 61 3.27 Financing, Insurance, Real Estate and Business Services 216 11.56 Community, Social and Personal Services 573 30.67 Total 1,868 100 Source: CPDO (2002).

Table 16: Registered Business Names in the City of Iloilo, 2001 Sector/Classification (% of Total No. of No. of Investment % Total Firms) Firms Workers Pesos $Mill. Investment 1. Agriculture (0.1%) 2 14 950,000 II Industry (12.3 %) A. Construction 67 459 35,827,127.84 2.43 B. Manufacturing Bakery/Food Processing 96 534 40,656,823.98 2.76 Ceramics/CHB/Concrete Products 10 73 1,626,500.00 0.11 Furniture (/Rattan/Wood) 28 161 6,083,551.73 0.41 Garments 25 109 12,679,919.06 0.86 Gifts, Toys & Housewares 6 17 1,528,512.63 0.10 Metalcraft 14 83 2,085,000.00 0.14 III Services (87.6 %) A Real Estate Dwelling 61 359 274,286,969.45 18.61 B. Financing 47 139 27,192,000.00 1.84 C. Private Services 669 3,160 506,913,548.61 34.39 D. Trading (Retail/Wholesale) 949 3,614 545,861,706.00 37.03 E. Transport/Storage/ Communication 33 139 18,527,724.46 1.26 Total (100%) 2,007 8,861 1,474,219,383.76* 100% Source: CPDO (2002). * Total investment for the number of registered firms is approximately $41 million (Cdn.)

Table 17: Classification of Industry by Size, City of Iloilo, 2001 Number of Firms/ % Total Classification/Size of Industry* Establishments Firms Micro Cottage (below P100,000 - P1M) 1,576 92.33 SMALL (Greater than P1M - P10M) 92 5.39 MEDIUM (P10M-P40M) 20 1.17 LARGE (Over P40M) 19 1.11 TOTAL 1,707 100 Source: CPDO (2002). * For comparative purposes, the range for the micro cottage industry category is defined as approximately below $2,800 - $28,000 in Canadian dollars. 54 With respect to the economic conditions of the citizens, Ilonggos are better off in the cities than in the provinces as higher percentages of the population are working, earn higher incomes and savings. Table 18 shows the employment status of the urban population that is concentrated in the services sector with a steady number experiencing unemployment. Table 19 shows the distribution of families and their income and savings levels. There are more families in higher income categories in comparison to families living in the province. Even though people in the city are better off, more than a quarter of the families living in the cities of Region VI live below the poverty line (about $1,730 dollars Canadian per year). These forms of economic inequality help to explain what I saw in the city and heard from the people with respect to youth criminality, unemployment and the culture of standby on the streets.

Table 18: Employment Status by Gender for Population 15 years Old and Over, City of

Both Sexes Female Male Total Population (15 years and Older) 242 135 107 Employed (%) 135(55.8) 67 (49.6) 67 (62.6) Unemployed (%) 27 (11.2) 11 (8.1) 16(15.0) Total Population not in the Labour Force 80 (33.1) 56(41.5) 24 (22.4)

Employment by Sector 135 (100) Agriculture (%) 9(6.7) Industry (%) 19(14.1) Services (%) 107 (79.3) Source: CPDO (2002); Labour Force Survey, NSO, Region VL Iloilo City.

Table 19: Total Number of Families, Average Family Incomes, Expenditures, and Savings,

Total Number Average Average Average Income Category* Of Families Income Expenditure Savings Under p 10,000 - - - - 10,000-19,999 (.38) 241 15,730 16,371 -641 20,000-29,999 (.69) 442 23,663 26,278 -2,615 30,000 - 39,999 (1.8) 1,125 35,285 40,579 -5,294 40,000 - 49,999 (4.6) 2,932 45,392 47,094 -1,702 50,000 - 59,999 (10.0) 6,345 53,948 53,350 598 60,000 - 79,999 (14.8)9,418 71,596 69,609 1,987 80,000 - 99,999 (11.9)7,591 91,210 84,164 7,046 100,000-149,999 (18.5) 11,787 126,155 104,303 21,852 150,000-249,999 (18.8) 11,988 193,446 166,120 27,326 250,000 - 499,999 (13.9)8,855 337,296 290,909 46,387 500,000 and Over (4.5) 2,892 673,895 502,693 171,202 Total (100) 63,614 167,222 147,782 24,440 Source: NSCB (2001). * The poverty threshold for families (2000) is defined by the per capita income multiplied by the average family size for the area (approximately p 12,500 x 5.2), p 62,400 or $1,730 Canadian. 55 4.4 Iloilo in the 21st Century: Hope for the Future or Trapped by the Past In summary, very little has occurred by way of new direct foreign investment or industrial value added manufacturing work moving into the region Current regional development plans for Region VI and Iloilo are still expressed in terms of growth pole principles calling for growth in specific sectors, mainly agro-industrial development and industrialization. But for many reasons, much of the labour market processes in the province are still linked to the traditional agricultural production of rice with the majority of people making just enough to feed themselves throughout the year. With little evidence of government intervention to raise income levels and improve labour security, according to the national census, almost half of the province's rural population currently lives in poverty. In the case of the City of Iloilo, considering that major development plans call for increased industrialization, the apparent lack of value added manufacturing work along with the structure of urban labour markets is reflective of the lack of dynamic new economic developments occurring in the city. The low rate of urban (25 per cent) to rural population (75 per cent) as compared to the approximate 50/50 urban to rural population ratio for the country is further evidence of restricted labour mobility in the province and extreme involution in the city that continues to leave many with few opportunities for profitable work in the area, a large pool of unskilled general labourers and many families living in a state of poverty both in the city and province. These present conditions are greatly influenced by their historic origins. The Ilonggo experience of Spanish colonialism built on existing class and power structures that continued to polarize economic and political power within the hands of a few elite groups. The Spanish encomienda system of private land ownership laid down the framework for the exploitation of the everyday Ilonggo farmer. The sharecropping system, the idea of "tribute", and the dependency of tenants upon the landowner for economic stability are patterns that still exist in the present day. In a number of ways, Iloilo's structural transformation from the Chinese economic system during the early eighteenth century, to one of dependency under foreign control for the sugar trade, an industry that declined by the turn of the twentieth century, is perhaps one of the greatest reason for the "sleepiness" of the regional economy. First, the shift in Spanish colonial policy to regional specialization in cash cropping by the late eighteenth century meant the loss of Iloilo's internationally orientated Chinese mestizo elite who sought greater opportunities on the sugar plantations on Negros. The shifting of control over the economy from locally orientated textile producers to the international merchant trading houses that eventually abandoned Iloilo, were critical turning points in the region's development. Although the city 56 was under the Spanish for two centuries prior to the rise of the textile industry of the early 1800s, local entrepreneurs were independent producers, controlling the production and transportation of goods. Under the rule of the casas, the welfare of Iloilo became dependent on powerful foreign actors who used the port city solely for one purpose, to profit from the exchange of sugar. Second, the structural transformation of the regional economy served to intensify the existing class and power structures that earlier Spanish colonialism initiated, as only a few groups profited from the sugar trade. Aside from the international trading houses responsible for laying down the impressive physical and social infrastructure of Iloilo, the principalia Ilonggos, and the Spanish and Chinese mestizos were in a position to take control of the political and economic dimensions of the province and city. These are the current power players in contemporary Ilonggo society but are weakly oriented to international trading networks. To paraphrase McCoy (1984: 333): "the so-called middle stratum Filipinos - doctors, lawyers, crop brokers, journalists and petty politicians identify with the city but lack the economic power or the international contacts to influence its fortunes".

By the turn of twentieth century, Iloilo was called the "Queen City of the South", the evidence I have shown a century later demonstrates that present day Ilonggos continue to live in the shadows of this past urban brilliance. What has been missing from this discussion is how "living in the shadows" plays out for Ilonggos in their everyday lives with the types of economic activities and work strategies they invent to find a way to make a living. In scaling down further to the local barangay level, the next two chapters illustrate the human scale of social and economic life in peripheral urban and rural spaces in the global economy. PART HI: WORKING IN PERIPHERAL ECONOMIC SPACES 58 CHAPTER 5

THE URBAN LABOUR MARKET IN BARANGAY CUARTERO: REMITTANCES AND QUASI-INVOLUTION IN THE CITY

5.1 Introduction This chapter examines the structural dynamics of Iloilo's urban labour market by focusing on one particular barangay called Cuartero, a locality in the Jaro district of the city. With little foreign investment and few developments by way of spatial economic decentralization as explained in Chapters 3 and 4, many families continue to work in the traditional jobs typically found in a secondary city of the Philippines. In Cuartero, and for the city as a whole, the socio• economic mobility experienced by the smaller groups of wealthy professionals pales in comparison to the structural restrictions imposed on the majority of people whose lives make up the vibrant social and economic fabric of the city, that is, the many food vendors, trisikad and tricycle drivers of Iloilo's service economy. Investigating these aspects of the city labour market not only granted me the privilege of seeing how Ilonggos from all walks of life earn a living, but it allowed me to see how Iloilo's present social structure is centred on the rule of a landed mercantile elite and their influence over local labour markets and the everyday Ilonggo worker. My focus here, however, is on how different families make sense of these present economic conditions and the different strategies they adopt to earn a living in day-to-day life. This includes how families participate in both local forms of work by incorporating cultural practices such as "standby", with a growing involvement in the international labour market of overseas work, especially among young people, as families attempt to find ways to increase their household incomes and socio-economic status given the few opportunities available in Iloilo. The chapter is divided into five sections. The next section deals with a number of theoretical perspectives that explain the class and occupational structure of Southeast Asian cities. Parts three, four and five deal with a number of topics related to the organization of Cuartero's urban labour market. This includes some background on the barangay, its physical geography and demographic features along with an examination of the types of work found in the area. This section also examines the details of my household surveys and interviews with both local and overseas households. The interviews cover a range of issues related to employment improvements and opportunities in the city, the cultural meanings of working in Iloilo and abroad, and the role of remittances in overseas households. In part six I explore youth perspectives on working in the city and overseas. Finally, I attempt in the last section to make 59 sense of these different family labour strategies in light of economic decentralization, while considering both patterns of economic development in the city and out migration.

5.2 The Social Class Structure of a Philippine Secondary City The decline of the sugar industry had serious consequences for the social class structure of Iloilo, and for the present condition of the urban labour market, as the absence of an internationally oriented group of capitalists allowed for a group of landed elite to take control over the local economy. In borrowing from de Janvry's (1981: 42) social class structure of a dualistic economy, Iloilo's urban structure, and indeed its entire regional economy, is characterized by elements of both a feudalistic and capitalist nature. At the top of the Ilonggo power structure are landed elites who use their economic surplus to maintain economic and political control over the local economy. With some degree of industrialization in the city, de Janvry terms the next group with the most influence as the national bourgeoisie, the highest- ranking traders in a pre-capitalist society. These can be considered the families that run the port facilities and department stores in Iloilo. Below this group are the agrarian bourgeoisie who are smaller scale landed elites and are more profit oriented. These are followed by a professional class (petty bourgeoisie), a government class (administrative bourgeoisie), a group of merchants and artisans (semi-proletariat) and a pool of workers formed of general labourers and rural migrants (proletariat). Essentially, over the last two hundred years, Iloilo has shifted back and forth from a "core" capitalist society based on textiles run by Chinese entrepreneurs to a pre• capitalist economy with the decline of the sugar industry marked by a low degree of specialization of urban functions. This type of social class structure exists in the case of Iloilo, as belonging to different social class groupings is generally indicative of which individuals can out-migrate and experience free market labour mobility to sites of capitalist production. As will be demonstrated, most overseas workers come from higher-ranking social class groups with smaller numbers from semi-proletariat and proletariat categories.

With little evidence of alliances forming among the aforementioned groups to overthrow the landed elite, at least within recent years, examining Cuartero's labour market dynamics also provides evidence of the firm grasp of power that elites have over local economic processes and their role of hindering the development of this specific region of the Philippine economic periphery. The concentration of high population numbers in specific labour sectors provides stark testimony of their influence and of their main objective to maintain existing economic conditions in order to further their interests. 60

5.2.1 Investigating the Arrangements of Work: Dealing with the Problem of Dualism A conceptual issue within theoretical models of economic dualism, is the sharp division of the urban labour market into modern and formal with 'backward' and informal sectors. Most discussions of'informal' sector work prioritize the growth of the so-called modern industrial sector as an optimum urban outcome with all other labour sectors somehow subservient to it. To negotiate this conceptual divide I wish to combine a class fundamentalist view of labour market organization with theoretical ideas concerning specific work arrangements at local city scales. In returning to the ideas of Carol Smith (1985) that were discussed in Chapter 2, she argues that the prevalence of non-capitalist social structures, and to use de Janvry's terminology, the absence of international and dependent capitalists who determine how foreign interests and investment affect the national economy (Venida, 2000: 496), allow urban and regional economies to be largely shaped by the interests of powerful local actors, the landed mercantile elite. In other words, labour structures are a function of power relationships where, more or less, the provincial elite regulates the types of industries and businesses allowed in secondary city regions, since it is usual that they too have significant control over local and regional political structures. In the case of Iloilo, this has resulted in a number of important characteristics for its urban and regional economy as it is organized around mainly non-capitalist social class structures. In serving elite interests, these include the existence of specific industries required for local agricultural production, the use of the port facilities for the importation of goods and agricultural inputs, and the small number required to offer government, professional and financial services. As the urban population meets the needs of these necessary occupations required for the operation of the urban economy, the remaining workers are left to struggle with a limited availability of stable waged work leaving them to concentrate in lower paying, small scale service and transportation type occupations. The interests of elites have resulted in the moderate urban population size of the City of Iloilo, growing largely by natural population increase. In this sense, with relatively little industrial work, "informal" sector occupations are not subservient to a modern industrial sector but are more of an outcome of the social class structure of the region in question.

A variant of the dualistic approach has been the idea that forms of work exist along a continuum rather than a formal/informal divide. Bromley (1997) suggests that a range of different employment circumstances exists with career waged work and career self-employment 61 forming two ends of an employment continuum with stability and autonomy acting as two other important variables. The two relevant categories for my examination of Cuartero deal with the idea of short-term waged work and precarious self- employment and the extent and degree to which dependency type relationships with other social class groups in the area, shape employment outcomes. Stable and career oriented forms of work, whether waged or self- employed, are mostly the domains of the professionals, government workers and wealthier local merchants, with precarious and lower paying occupations found in the sectors that local elites do not prioritize but require a surplus labour in order to operate their businesses and industries. This includes seasonal agricultural work like sacking and milling, temporary stevedores needed at the port for the unloading of containers and construction workers needed for local projects. In a general sense then, as will be shown, the nature of different work arrangements is linked to the different class groups identified above, as Bromley's conceptual framework is useful in assessing the fixity of incomes for many of the different kinds of families found in Cuartero.

5.3 Street Work and Street Life: From Sikads to Standby In many ways, Cuartero represents an urban locality with the characteristics that define the typical labour structure of a Southeast Asian secondary city with many lower paying jobs in the urban services and transportation sectors. The majority of families earn a living in the city's service economy or what many call the "informal sector" (McGee, 1996; Venida, 2000). With the temporary and seasonal nature of service work in the city and agricultural employment in the province, families and individuals invent a number of strategies to supplement their incomes. Some take part in the standby culture or become involved in street criminality, activities that are part of the everyday life of many urban Ilonggos. Those that make standby are mostly young people that are unable to find good paying work and pass the time playing games and bandying about in the streets. Yet, there are other Ilonggo youths that are well educated, have high material expectations and hope to improve the material conditions of themselves and their families. Unfortunately, it is likely the case that many youths will continue to work in the same types of jobs as previous generations. If service type work characterizes the way that most Cuartero households participate in the local labour market, then overseas households represent the minority. With generally higher incomes and better financial resources available in the city in comparison to the province, there are a number of households with out-migrants as these families are better equipped to finance trips to Manila and overseas. For these reasons, the remittance economy links Cuartero to 62 domestic and international labour markets as dozens of residents are working in Manila or abroad.

5.3.1 Barangay Cuartero and Jaro after World War II By the beginning of the twentieth century, Iloilo consisted of the districts of Mandurriao and Molo, located northwest and west of the city proper. As a chartered city in 1937, three adjacent towns were included to Iloilo's urban area: La Paz became the eastern district, Arevalo formed the most southwestern part of the city, and Jaro was added as the northeastern district (see Map 3 in Chapter 4). During the textile era and prior to the rise of the sugar trade by the mid-1850s, "Jaro and Molo were proto-industrial towns adequately provisioned by the rice farms of the Iloilo plain" (McCoy, 1982: 310). But as the sugar trade took hold of the city, the two towns declined as centres of the textile industry. Roughly one hundred years later, Jaro's present labour structure has changed significantly. The district has the second highest number of business establishments in the city, second only to the city proper. They are composed mostly of retail trade firms, transportation services, hotels, restaurants and rental real estate services (Province of Iloilo, 1999a). In the southwestern area of Jaro lies Barangay Cuartero. Benigno Aquino Jr. and Diversion Road form its eastern border, Cuartero Street to the west, the Cuartero cemetery to the north, with Libertad Street to the south (see Map 4). By the beginning of the 1950s, Cuartero consisted of farmland and rice fields. During this decade, Cuartero Street was a dirt road lined with eight houses located a fair distance from one another, with the cemetery still serving as the northwestern boundary of the area. Purchased by my grandparents in 1953, my mother's family home was one of these houses. With the population growth experienced by Iloilo over the next forty years, Cuartero has grown to include a population of approximately three thousand people. Buildings in the area are limited to three storeys in height, and this includes restrictions on the height of trees, mostly of the coconut variety, to the same length. These limitations were imposed by the city and the airport authority due to the proximity of Jaro and its barangays to the domestic airport located to the west in neighbouring Mandurriao. Prohibited to build up vertically, every bit of living space has been extracted out of the barangay, including homes made above the sets of graves forming the southern cemetery wall. Many empty properties are also being "squatted" on within the area. During the early 1990s, there was a significant increase in the number of vehicles in the city leading in 1994 to the widening of roads in Cuartero to allow better traffic access to

64 Diversion Road, a major transportation corridor in the city. But this also had secondary effects to the local economy, as the rise in the number of vehicles and pedestrians into Cuartero has been accompanied by a proliferation of a number of services. These include barbers, bakeries, food stands, an internet cafe, auto body repair shops, small restaurants, peddlers and street hawkers. This is not to overlook the many trisikads, tricycles, and the taxis and jeepneys that roam the area as many make a living as drivers.10 It is within this context, given the low amount of industrial work in the region, in which I attempted to understand the different sorts of labour market processes taking place here. At the same time I had to consider my biased western upbringing and the sorts of vocabulary I am suppose to use to describe this place, that the people here are "poor", and that somehow this place is "underdeveloped".

5.3.2 Cuartero's Labour Structure A combination of factors contributes to the different labour sectors present in Iloilo City and the barangay in addition to the class related ones mentioned earlier. With the city serving as a regional economic centre and as the seat of provincial and local government, about 20 per cent of its workforce consist of government workers, financial managers, skilled professionals and related support services such as technicians and office workers. In addition, there is also a group of medium to large-scale merchants acting as go-betweens for wholesalers that break up imported goods for retail and local consumption. The remaining two-thirds earn a living in the city services sector or informal sector, composed mainly of street retailers and transportation operators, that also acts as a pool of unskilled general labourers. In this way, much can be gleaned from the local employment statistics regarding the roles of social class and the types of households that are able to experience upward social and labour mobility. In terms of its demographic structure, according to the 2000 census there are 3,122 people (1,495 females and 1,627 males) living in 596 households in Cuartero (NSO, 2001). As Figure 1 suggests, there is a high proportion of twenty-year-olds, with young men aged 25-29 representing the largest age group in the barangay. The presence of a young population group during their prime reproductive years also applies to the city and province as a whole. This demographic pattern is indicative of a high natural population increase for the region and is the main factor responsible for the city's growth.

10 There are major differences between these forms of transportation Trisikads are bicycles with sidecars attached to them. Tricycles are motorcycles with sidecars. Jeepneys are distinctly Filipino. Originally converted from American jeeps leftover from the occupation, they are elaborate and colorful and serve as a major form of mass transportation in the country. 65

Figure 1: Age and Sex Structure of Barangay Cuartero, 2001

250 n

200

I? 150 -I • Female • Male J 100 50 ill w-t • V© Age

Source: Barangay Cuartero Census Data (2001).

With no "specific" employment data available for the barangay, I conducted a household labour survey to build a representation of the occupational structure of Cuartero.11 In no way was the purpose of the survey to be statistically significant or serve as a representative sample of the city's labour force. Rather, it was used to give a basic idea of the labour structure of one particular locality of Iloilo's urban area. Surprisingly however, the results of the survey were remarkably similar to the city's actual labour structure (see Table 14 in Chapter 4) and pointed to a number of distinct occupational sectors that allowed for the estimation of a number of important characteristics relevant to household economic conditions. These include income levels and expenses, family sources of financial credit, work strategies and patterns of out- migration.

My household survey was successfully administered to 483 of the 596 households in Cuartero (81.1 per cent of the total number of households) covering 2,730 people (1,378 females and 1,352 males). The number of residents counted may seem proportionally high in comparison to the total barangay population of 3,122. This is due to the counting of out-migrants working overseas and in other regions of the country. The survey asked ten questions regarding family size, primary and secondary sources of income, the division of household work, out-migration,

11 My wannest thanks go to Dr. Philip F. Kelly, a geographer at York University in Toronto. Professor Kelly allowed me to use and modify a household survey he developed in his excellent study of two barangays, Bunga and Mulawin, in the province of Cavite, located in the extended metropolitan region of Manila. More specifically, part of Kelly's earlier works examine globalized development in Manila's urban periphery and the intersection between an existing agricultural labour market with processes of urban-based industrial expansion and its resulting spatial ramifications (see Kelly 2000; 1999; 1999a; 1998 and 1997a). In many respects, this research is modeled and structured after his study. 66 family members working overseas and remittance amounts (see Appendix A). The administering of the survey began in September and ended in December 2002 and I was very fortunate to receive official approval from the barangay council to conduct the survey. This gave it an aura of legitimacy and I believe residents felt more comfortable in providing personal family details such as cash remittance amounts and actual occupational status. The success of the survey was also a result of the flotilla of people who were instrumental in assisting me with this massive undertaking. Administering the survey would have been impossible without the local barangay social worker, Mrs. Ellen G. Dayhon. She had knowledge of every household since similar poverty and child welfare surveys were conducted by the barangay in earlier years. Mary Ann Barde, a beautician, manicurist, next door neighbour of my grandma and my guide in Cuartero, also handed out surveys door-to-door. Finally, Myrna Mana- ay, my guide in the farming area of Burot, also helped in administering the surveys and in translating it into Ilonggo. It was apparent after my first batch of 100 surveys (50 in English and 50 in Ilonggo), that many of the households felt more comfortable completing it in Pilipino. Well-educated households specifically requested the survey in English. In the end, of the total 600 surveys, one third were printed in English and the remaining two thirds in Ilonggo. It is also evident that approximately one hundred households from the area are missing from the survey. These include a couple of dozen well-to-do families living in the northeastern part of the barangay who suspected that my research assistants and I were part of a crime syndicate specifically taking stock of wealthier households for robbery. I surmise that these missing households bring down the actual number of out-migrants and overseas workers since it is usually wealthier families that have the resources to send family members away. Tables 20 and 21 show the primary sources of household income for the barangay. As indicated in Table 21, there is a slightly higher number of primary sources (504) than surveyed households in Cuartero (483) as many families listed down two main sources of income. This was always a combination of some form of urban service or street retailing work with remittances from overseas employment. From the list of primary sources, the nine categories given below do correspond to the typical social class structure of a dualistic economy. However, the presence of remittance capital helps to support my argument that overseas linkages lead to significant class transformations and changes in family labour market participation and divisions of household work. In other words, there is some flexibility to these categorical definitions.

121 also thank acting Barangay Captain and bakery owner Eduardo L. Jucaban who kindly allowed me to administer the survey to the neighbourhood and for supplying our house with fresh pandisal (bread roles) every morning. 67 Even for non-overseas households, incomes within specific occupational categories can vary a great deal. For example, some families earning a living in construction may actually be small contracting firms that employ transient workers and do not necessarily engage in the hard labour themselves. Although such cases represent a small percentage within each group, the categories provide a general sense of how families make a living in Cuartero. Merchants and Street Retailers. Mostly the domain of women, the category of traders and merchants is an interesting one. These families deal in commodities such as glassware, gasoline, textiles and imported consumer goods. They are in a much better economic situation than the smaller scale negosyantes or local entrepreneurs such as street vendors or sari-sari storekeepers. Many overseas families supplement their incomes by investing in this area for self-employment. The sari-sari store especially is a popular choice, as it also acts as a credit granting institution to the local area.13 Urban Services/Construction and Transportation Operators. My definition of the urban services category does not simply clump together all forms of tertiary work as I have tried to group together both self employed occupations and jobs that are precarious, lower paying and transient. This sector includes a wide range of jobs from the tailors (gapanabas) and dressmakers (nagapanahi) to the larger numbers of domestic helpers, sales clerks and laundry washers. It too is a sector where women do the majority of work. Conversely, the construction and transportation sector is dominated by men and is the largest group of primary earners in Cuartero (39.5 per cent). These are the families making a living as drivers (especially trisikad), construction workers and general labourers. Together with urban services employment, the two sectors make up 46.8 per cent of primary incomes. For both categories, many of the jobs are transient leading individuals to take up many different types of jobs when the need arises. The next five sectors represent smaller areas (under 10 per cent each) of Cuartero's labour market and with the exception of Professionals, males are the primary income earners. The Agricultural and Animal Husbandry (agrarian bourgeoisie) group, is typically made up households, like my own, that are absentee landowners living in the city or are owners of capital goods (such as industrial farming machinery) that are required in agricultural production. A smaller handful deals in raising livestock for local consumption. The group of local Professionals and the Managerial Sector are what de Janvry (1981) call the petty bourgeoisie. These are the doctors, lawyers and college professors along with the managers and executives

I suspect that many families are engaged in the very popular practice of money lending in the barangay but would never admit it on a semi-official household survey. 68 that work in financial services. The group of tertiary workers in Sales, Consumer Services and Clerical Work help in serving the professional and managerial sectors and are often involved in positions within advanced producer services that are lower paying and require less qualifications. Government Workers and Administrators (the administrative bourgeoisie) are those employed by the state. These include state bureaucrats, the military, and law enforcers. The ninth category, Out-Migration, primarily deals with overseas workers and migrants to other locations in the Philippines. As Table 21 illustrates, financial remittances are very significant to household economic conditions and labour market participation in Cuartero as 15.5 per cent of families rely on foreign capital as a primary source of income. This is evidence that a wide variety of households in Iloilo are choosing work abroad as an employment option. To a lesser degree, there are fewer families (1 per cent) that rely on remittances from Manila. This suggests that working overseas is a more lucrative option than venturing to the Manila urban region for work. Tables 22 and 23 list all sources of household income and the total occupational structure of the barangay. Urban services, construction and transportation jobs still form the majority (52.2 per cent) of total occupations. But there are some important differences between primary and total sources of income in relation to the gender divisions of certain labour sectors. The overall percentage of the urban services sector is significantly higher, rising from 7.3 per cent as a primary source to 20.8 per cent as a total source with women doing most of the work compared to men (37.8 per cent female in the primary category and 80 per cent female total). In addition, the feminization of a number of sectors also increases. These include a higher proportion of female merchants and street retailers (58.3 per cent primary and 69.6 per cent total) as many are employed in food vending and in the operation of sari-sari stores; female professionals (53.6 per cent primary and 63.6 per cent total); and tertiary workers, largely made of secretaries and sales clerks (22.2 per cent primary and 53.1 per cent total). There were also a couple of sectors where overall percentages decreased. These include the construction and transportation category (39.5 per cent primary to 31.4 per cent total) and overseas work (15.5 per cent primary to 10.3 per cent total). All of these figures are indicative of two key points. First, men are often the main income earners (381 of 504 primary sources or 75.6 per cent of surveyed households) that are overly concentrated in construction and transportation work. Second, livelihood diversity and reliance on many sources of income is critical to the survival of lower income households, an issue discussed in detail in the section dealing with family income generating strategies. This is 69 especially the case for women as they often take on a range of jobs and do the bulk of household work with men forming the majority of the standby population.

5.3.3 Household Divisions of Labour and the Non-Working Population The second part of Table 23 shows the number of homemakers and characteristics of the non-working population in Cuartero. The presence of a younger population plays a vital part in the division of household work as 43.7 per cent of the non-working population and 25.2 per cent of the total local population are dependent children (under the age of four years old) or are of elementary school age. This helps to explain the high number of female homemakers (208), housekeepers (59) and live-in domestic helpers (51) (together forming 12.2 per cent of the total surveyed population) in Cuartero that do household chores and are involved in caring for children. From my interviews and surveys, the familial composition of households also plays a vital part in the division of household work. The majority of families are multigenerational, made up grandparents and extended family members that often share in the household chores. Household work transformations and the presence of live-in domestic helpers are also indicative of wealthier families, issues discussed in a later section dealing with the local impact of overseas work. Table 20: Primary Source of Household Income by Gender, Cuartero, 2002

Sector/Occupation Female Males Merchants and Street Retailers Baker 1 7 Food Vendor (Carendaria) 10 4 Cigarette Vendor 1 1 Fish Vendor 1 5 Junk Trader 0 1 Sari-Sari Storekeeper 16 0 Lodger (for Boarders) 2 1 Merchant 10 7 Furniture Trader 1 4 Urban Services Beautician/Manicurist 4 0 Butcher 0 1 Domestic Helper/Housekeeper 2 0 Dressmaker/Tailor 2 1 Hairdresser/Barber 0 1 Hotel Worker 0 1 Laundry Washer 4 0 Masseuse 1 0 Messenger 0 1 Musician 0 1 Restaurant Worker/Cook 0 3 Sales Clerk 1 3 School Referee 0 1 Security Guard 0 6 Undertaker 0 1 Watch Repair 0 3 Construction and Transportation Operators Carpenter 0 14 Construction Worker 0 11 Driver () 0 15 Driver (Industrial) 0 3 Driver (Private) 0 3 Driver (Taxi) 0 12 Driver (Tricycle) 0 16 Driver (Trisikad) 0 54 Electrician/Technician 0 6 Factory Worker 0 4 General Labourer 1 22 Mechanic/Welder 0 32 Painter 0 5 Warehouse Worker 0 1 Agricultural and Animal Husbandry Farmer 0 11 Fisherman 0 1 Grain Miller 0 1 Swine/Beef Trader 0 3 Professionals Accountant 1 2 Architect 0 1 Broadcaster 0 1 Engineer 1 5 Lawyer 0 1 Medical Doctor 2 0 Nurse 1 0 Pastor 0 1 Teacher 9 1 College Teacher 1 1 Managerial and Executive Bank Employee 0 4 Insurance Executive 0 2 Manager 1 3 Government Workers and Administrators Government Employee 2 3 Military 0 4 Municipal Government Employee 4 14 Philippine National Police 0 5 Sales, Consumer Services and Clerical Office Clerk 2 9 Optician 1 1 Sales Agent 1 11 Secretary 2 0 Domestic Workers - Manila Horse Carriage Service 0 1 Machine Operator 0 1 Mechanic 0 1 Seaman 0 1 () - Military 0 1 Current Overseas Worker Care Giver 1 0 Computer Operator 1 0 Construction Worker 0 1 Cook 1 1 Domestic Helper 23 0 Engineer 0 6 Factory Worker 0 1 Medical Technician 1 0 Nurse 9 0 Office Worker 2 0 Radio Operator 0 2 Seaman 0 26 Returned Overseas Workers Seaman 0 3 Total 123 381 Source: Household Surveys, Cuartero (2002). 72 Table 21: Primary Source of Household Income by Sector and Gender,

Centrally located for educational training, students make up another key group of the non-working population in Cuartero (33 per cent). Toward the southeastern part of the barangay, and on the way to Jaro Plaza, lies Jaro Elementary School where my grandma taught for more than thirty years. To the northeast of the barangay is the campus of the Central Philippine University (CPU) where my aunt lectures at its recently opened medical school and is about a ten-minute trisikad ride from the corner of Cuartero and Fajardo Streets. Since students form such a large part of the demographic, they are essential to the dynamics of the local economy (as in any other city) purchasing snacks from vendors and riding sikads around the area.14

14 One of my interviews was with a couple of young socially conscious entrepreneurs that recently opened a very popular Internet Cafe for young people (featuring the video games "Half-Life" and "Counterstrike") along with providing computer repair services. To my amusement, they enforced a height restriction for elementary school students during class hours. This was to discourage them from skipping school and to prevent the young owners from falling into trouble with local school authorities. Table 22: All Household Occupations by Gender, Cuartero, 2002

Sector/Occupation Females Males Merchants and Street Retailers Baker 3 12 Food Vendor (Carendaria) 40 8 Charcoal Vendor 2 0 Cigarette Vendor 1 1 Fish Vendor 3 7 Flower Vendor 1 0 Fruit Vendor 4 0 Junk Trader 0 1 Pawnshop Owner 1 0 Sari-Sari Storekeeper 39 7 Lodger (for Boarders) 4 1 Merchant 18 8 Furniture Trader 1 6 Urban Services Beautician/Manicurist 12 0 Butcher 0 1 Domestic Helper/Housekeeper 59 2 Domestic Helper (Live in) 51 3 Dressmaker/Tailor 9 1 Hairdresser/Barber 0 1 Hotel Worker 0 2 Laundry Washer 18 0 Masseuse 1 0 Messenger 0 2 Mid-Wife 1 0 Musician 0 3 Restaurant Worker/Cook 4 5 Sales Clerk 29 10 School Referee 0 1 Security Guard 0 7 Shoe Maker 0 1 Undertaker 0 1 Watch Repair 0 6 Construction and Transportation Operators Carpenter 0 22 Construction Worker 0 17 Driver (Jeepney) 0 18 Driver (Industrial) 0 3 Driver (Private) 0 3 Driver (Taxi) 0 15 Driver (Tricycle) 0 29 Driver (Trisikad) 0 113 Electrician/Technician 1 8 Factory Worker 0 6 General Labourer 7 49 Mechanic/Welder 0 44 Painter 0 8 Stevedore 0 1 Warehouse Worker 0 3 Agriculture and Animal Husbandry Farmer 3 14 Fisherman 0 2 Grain Miller 0 1 Swine/Beef Trader 2 3 Professionals Accountant 1 2 Architect 0 2 Artist 0 1 Broadcaster 0 1 Chemist 1 0 Computer Programmer 1 3 Engineer 1 7 Lawyer 1 0 Medical Doctor 4 1 Dentist 1 1 Nurse 7 0 Pharmacist 1 0 Pastor 0 2 PhotographerA/ideographer 0 1 Social Worker - Family Planner 2 0 Teacher 20 2 College Teacher 2 1 Managerial and Executive Bank Employee 0 4 Insurance Executive 1 3 Manager 1 4 Government Workers and Administrators Barangay Councilor 1 2 Government Employee 13 7 Municipal Government Employee 13 15 Military 0 4 Philippine National Police 1 5 Sales, Consumer Services and Clerical Insurance Agent 0 1 Medical Technician 1 1 Office Clerk 23 18 Optician 1 1 Real Estate Agent 1 0 Sales Agent 7 16 Secretary 10 1 Total 429 562 Source: Household Surveys, Cuartero (2002). 75 Table 23: Total Occupational Structure by Gender and Sector, Cuartero, 2002 %of Sector Female Male Total Working Population Merchants and Street Retailers 117 51 168 15.2 Urban Services 184 46 230 20.8 Construction and Transportation Operators 8 339 347 31.4 Agriculture and Animal Husbandry 5 20 25 2.3 Professionals 42 24 66 6.0 Managerial and Executive 2 11 13 1.2 Government and Administrators 28 33 61 5.5 Sales, Consumer Services and Clerical 43 38 81 7.3 Current Overseas Workers 60 54 114 10.3 Total Working Population 489 616 1105 100.0

% of Homemaker Homemakers and Non-Working Pop. Female Male Total and Non- Working Pop. Homemakers 208 14 222 14.8 Pensioners 9 14 23 1.5 Dependent (elderly) 27 12 39 2.6 Dependent (children aged 0-4 years) 108 88 196 13.0 Unemployed 75 87 162 10.8 Students College/University 83 68 151 10.0 High-school 116 134 250 16.6 Elementary 204 257 461 30.7 Total Pop. (Homemakers and Non-Working) 830 674 1504 100.0 Total Population 1319 1290 2609 Source: Household Surveys, Cuartero (2002).

5.3.4 Household Economic Conditions and Income Generating Strategies The economic conditions of households are dependent on the stability of occupations that they engage in. Many households in the area, like working families everywhere in the world, simply find a way to get by and draw on a variety of income generating strategies to do so. Other fortunate families that are employed in stable types of work are better suited to send family members away to regional, national or international destinations. The common migration preference is overseas, as this is often viewed as a Filipino cultural ideal. Therefore, in order to gain a greater understanding of work and income generating strategies in Cuartero, I conducted 35 household interviews and asked specific sets of questions that essentially meant translating the more complex theoretical and empirical discussions regarding spatial decentralization, class and secondary urbanization into a non-academic everyday language.

"Can you find a job in Iloilo?" is often how I began interviews and I was surprised by the different reactions that I received. Their perspectives gave me a better sense of Iloilo's city life 76 and allowed me to paint a more vivid picture of the experiences of a wide range of families engaged in different livelihoods. I asked households about how they see working in the city and the obstacles towards improving labour availability and higher pay in Iloilo; the sorts of strategies they use to make money when little work is available; the difficulties they experience with major expenses and their sources of financial credit; and about the meaning of the standby culture for local residents and for the young people in Cuartero. In addition to this set of questions, I asked overseas families about the impact of economic remittances on the operation of their households; how the absence of family members influences the perspectives of work and consumption for other family members; changes in the divisions of household work and issues of household power relations. To gauge youth perspectives, I asked young people about their expectations of working in Iloilo and abroad and the types of jobs they see themselves doing in the future. For the parents of these young people, I asked their opinions on present opportunities in the city for their children and about working abroad. The voices of the people of Cuartero provided the greatest insights regarding working in Iloilo and of its city life.

Before examining the details of my resident interviews, there were a number of factors that shaped my sample of household respondents and the rapport I enjoyed with interviewees. The combination of my family's position in the barangay and the role of my guide Mary-Ann were critical for the creation of the snowball sample and for the excellent interview dynamics. 23 of the 35 households I spoke with had family members overseas. This was due in large part to the nature of the social network that I employed to start the snowball sample. As was mentioned in Chapter 1, my aunt is a medical doctor and lecturer, one of only a small handful in the area, and many of those interviewed were friends and former patients and were typically of highly educated and higher income households.

Besides the patronage of both my aunt and grandma, Mary-Ann was a very influential gatekeeper. She introduced me to her network of people who knew of my family but were not as close to them as my aunt's friends. I sensed that her familiarity with these people made them more comfortable with my presence in their homes, where the interviews took place, usually in their salas or living rooms. I usually spoke with the mother or father of the house, or with one of the younger adult children.15 Thus, the combination of these different social networks allowed me to speak with many different families of varying social and economic strata.

15 Children also followed me around the barangay and greeted me saying, "hello Padre, hello Padre" and one child even offered me his forehead for a blessing. To my astonishment, they mistook me for a priest training in the local seminary! 77 Local Families One day, amongst the cries of the balut and tahu vendors walking the streets of Cuartero,161 was given permission by my patrons (my aunt and grandma) to leave my family's army of guard dogs and the high barbed wired walls of my ancestral house. I was taken by Mary-Ann into the more "restricted" places, the mysterious alleyways and other spaces that only insiders were permitted to enter. Here, I was able to see the other side of urban life in Iloilo and receive the point of view of the "regular" people. 12 of my 35 household interviews were with local families whose primary incomes covered the range of occupations in Cuartero, from the drivers, general labourers and street retailers to the professionals and government workers.

The range of work within these different households fit with Bromley's (1997) conceptualization of labour in distinguishing between forms of "casual" and "career" work and between short-term wage earning and unstable self-employment, arrangements that help in understanding the nature of household economic conditions in the barangay. In terms of primary occupations, families engaged in more transient types of lower paying work or whose jobs are dependent on others for inputs, capital goods and equipment, are more likely to take part in a diversity of different jobs to raise the overall incomes of their households. In contrast, families engaged in more secure types of paying work, are self-employed and own their means of production are less likely to take part in other jobs to generate income. But to reiterate, Bromley argues that a range of combinations exists for such relationships. For example, a family may own its equipment to operate their carendaria (small eatery), but must pay for rental space from their landlord or pay fees to food distributors for their supplies. In another case, tricycles are often rented out and the hired drivers must pay a portion of their daily earnings to the owners for their use. For these reasons, the structure of work arrangements bears much on the diversity of family livelihood strategies and shapes their income earning potential and the overall economic condition of their household.

Given the structure of labour in the city, the low availability of paid work is the central issue faced by households from all walks of life, and for family members of different age groups.

16 Balut is a Filipino delicacy that is boiled chicken or goose eggs that are about to reach term. Basically, it means eating unhatched chicken fetus. I've never tried it but it is recommended that you eat it in the dark so that you do not frighten yourself. Tahu is a ginger based tea often used for helping with cold and flu ailments. It also aids in soothing stomach aches and digestion pains. I've come to know the drink well during my time there. Its potency depends on how it is prepared. In addition, the cries of these vendors are very distinctive almost similar to howling in the way they pronounce the item they are selling. Many children in the street often imitate these vendors because they are so amused by the use of this specific sales gimmick 78 Even for households earning a female professional primary income, husbands are often left unemployed. One Female immigrant returnee stated:

I don't think things will improve in the city. So many people want to go, that is what I heard. If it is only easy for them to go out, I think they are very much willing to go out. They prefer to work outside, really, even the professionals. You see, when I work there at the US, at that facility house, you know what? Mostly are professionals. Yeah! Mostly are professionals, and there we are like something just a little bit higher than housemaids. And they are not exactly poor here in the Philippines, there are many well- off people there working. But still they work because of the money value I think. Even me! I work there! And I experienced it!

Said one female school teacher:

There is no work here! That's why people here, both younger and older ones, indulge themselves in some other sources which is illegal such as drugs trafficking, the selling of drugs like marijuana and shabu. Shabu is the so-called crack cocaine. Usually, that's what they call poor man's cocaine. Asides from that there is stealing!

Besides these types of behavior adopted by those who cannot find work, many complained about the methods used to find jobs. One long time male resident stated:

Of course they (young people) would like also to work in the city, but you see work now in the city is very scarce and they could hardly find work. So what you have to do is if you are well-to-do or educated it's fine and you could find work in the city. Because mostly when you are working in the city, the employment is asking your qualification. If you have no qualification you cannot acquire the work in the office. So what you have to do is look for outside work so that you could afford to live. In the city, if you have no connection or don't know anyone then you cannot find work. That's the way it is.

Another twenty-three year old man added:

In our barangay you can see many people roaming around looking for jobs. The only solution to solve the problem of unemployment is to industrialize the city.

This lack of stable waged work and its historical structural origins have contributed to a lifestyle known in the province as "standby". I deal with these practices in detail in a later section, but it is this lack of stable good paying work that influences the types of income strategies that family's and individuals employ in their daily lives. As was indicated in Table 23, the street retailing and services sector, along with the general labourers and transportation sector make up more than two thirds of Cuartero's labour structure. According to my survey and interviews, a typical family consists of a female member working as a food vendor, sari-sari store operator or domestic helper, with a male member 79 working as a trisikad driver and general labourer. Female and male members usually work within these gendered occupational groups and often adopt other moneymaking schemes. As an example, Pedo, a local sikad driver well known to my relatives, along with his family, represents the norm for the types of "casual" work strategies and migration patterns found in a Cuartero household. Excluding the monsoon season, a good day for a sikad driver is about 20-25 rides totaling 80-100 pesos a day ($3.25 in Canadian dollars). To supplement his family's income, Pedo works as a general labourer whenever projects are available and often brings his roosters to the cock-fighting arena in Jaro. His wife contributes by working as a domestic helper and does most of the household work. His children are in their twenties. Two of them work in the Iloilo area while another is working in Manila where incomes are higher and where there are more opportunities to find work. Formerly, Pedo worked as a city road worker and as a security guard. In this way, the kinds of work found in Pedo's family, temporary and lower paying, encourage the need for other work strategies used to raise overall incomes.

Another important means for income generation is the popular practice of gambling. Residents often used slow work periods during the day, especially after the siesta (nap or relaxation period) time shortly after the lunch hour, to take part in gambling sessions. As one resident put it "the first priority is sud-an (food), then mahjong." Mahjong and card playing are the more common games found in the barangay. I first took notice of the importance of these practices one afternoon when Mary-Ann took me into a quiet narrow alley to visit an interviewee's residence. Thirty paces in, I was surprised to see two dozen people sitting at five mahjong tables crammed into the lower floor of a home. Apparently, the family was using remittances to build a new house but ran out of money to complete the second floor. Cleverly, the owner of the unfinished home converted the lower floor into a temporary gambling house, charging tong, a fee to play in one of the games and a share of the winning jackpot from each

17 table. The money was then to be used to finish the construction of the second floor. Repeatedly seeing this in my jaunts through Cuartero, in a way, gambling sessions serve as positive sites of community social interaction as it is customary in the Ilonggo culture to pass the time in this manner. Almost every other social engagement is festivalized (fiesta or turned into a party) as gambling is commonplace at births, baptisms, birthdays, funerals, wakes, weddings and holidays. It is used as a fund raising strategy where the surplus money generated typically goes 17 During the writing of this thesis in Canada and in my conversations with other Filipinos, many considered tong as a form of lagay (bribe). In Chen's (1997: 90) study on the sari-sari store in Metro Manila, tong is defined as the "grace money store owners pay for the protection of their operation." This money is usually given to their "patron" 80 to the house of the celebrant. Such activities are not only outcomes of structural inequality, but are also local cultural practices. Besides gambling, a significant facet of daily life for families is how they deal with major expenses incurred throughout the year and the customary sources of financial credit they draw upon. The families I spoke with in the city were not in same pressing situation and did not have the same sorts of financial debts as the families I spoke with in the province. But in both spatial settings, families mentioned that food and education were their primary expenses. This is especially the case in Cuartero, given the presence of a younger population, families with many school aged children, and extended family members all living under the same roof.

You need much much much for your own needs here (laughter). You cannot stay here if you are just an ordinary employee. You can never stay! Hand to mouth. You cannot even send your children to school, if you have many children. You cannot even give them good food. That's why. And then Filipinos are also fond of having so many children when they know that they cannot afford to give them a better life. See (Middle Aged Mother).

Again, the types of credit granting institutions families drawn upon are a function of how they earn an income. A combination of choices also exists for sources of financial credit and is not simply divided between "formal" or "underground" and "informal" channels. Given these options, many residents rely on the "5-6 operation" (lending five pesos with a payment back of six) that is based on the palabra de honor (word of honor) with moneylenders that requires no collateral or documentation (Chen, 1997: 90). Both kinds of moneylenders (legal and "illegal") typically give out 3000 to 5000 peso loans with daily interest charges. Loans are often used to start businesses like sari-saris. In the neighbourhood, most of the moneylenders are locally based although many indicated that besides the Chinese Filipinos, foreign Indian and Korean lenders can be found elsewhere in the city.18 In addition to money lending, most households rely on the ubiquitous sari-sari stores in the barangay as a source of credit for dry goods and non-perishable food items. Most customers have a listahan, or a ledger of credited items, and payment of credit is usually based on the palabra de honor code or on the nature of the relationship between shop owner and customer

or a rugh-ranking member of the community that lends start-up capital and patronage for the enterprise. Here, it is used in a similar spirit as players pay a fee to the owner of the house. 18 In recent years, many Korean families have moved into the City of Iloilo. One major reason given by Cuartero residents is that Iloilo is a relatively inexpensive place for their children to learn English. that can result in different deadlines for payments (Chen, 1997: 90). Based on my observations, the sari-sari store is really an economic coping mechanism able to service many families, but is ideally suited for the needs of lower income households participating in Iloilo's labour market system that helps to shed light on their ubiquity, as they not only offer varying incomes for store operators and their families, but also lend credit on food, and in some instances cash itself. This coincides with the nature of transient work in the city where individual incomes are often generated on an intermittent basis. In these ways, sari-saris are beneficial to the welfare of many households in the neighbourhood.

On the whole then, occupational arrangements greatly shape the strategies households use to earn additional income, the sources of credit they drawn upon, and their overall ability to experience upward socio-economic and occupational mobility. This was not the case for the overseas households I interviewed as they were connected to international circuits of capital that, in most cases, served to greatly improve the lives of their family members.

5.4 Overseas Households and Out Migration: Structural Transformations and the Return to the Siesta and Fiesta Lifestyle

Most overseas households have undergone significant changes with respect to their social and household divisions of work, and general labour market participation. During the course of my fieldwork, I came across a number of different kinds of overseas households. Most had a family member abroad, working either as a foreign worker who more or less is residing in another country without acquiring citizenship, or as a contract worker who is employed for several months of the year and returns back to Iloilo. In addition, there were also a smaller number of elite families with members who have immigrated to another country. These survey findings are summarized in Table 24. Of the 483 total households surveyed, 25.9 per cent (125 households) have had a family member overseas. Tables 25 and 26 show the types of overseas occupations and the international linkages to the locality as these workers are employed in over 21 countries around the world. In addition, occupations tend to concentrate in specific groups and locations. These include female domestic helpers (what they call locally as the 'DHs') working in Hong Kong and , female nurses working in North America and the large number of seaman that work in various locations. The absence of these workers and their

19 My observations of my grandma's daily behavior gave me the greatest insights into this material exchange. She has patronized the same sari-sari store for the past fifty years! I am quite certain that some of the items from her listahan must have been forgotten over the decades. That said, payment for credit from my house often comes in forms other than cash, either in sackos of rice or in baskets of mangos from the farm in Burot. 82 sending of cash remittances have a profound effect both socially and economically on their families in Iloilo.

Table 24: Number of Overseas Workers, Immigrants and Returnees by Household, Cuartero, 2002 Worker Type Number of Workers/ Number of Returnees Households Overseas Worker 102 87 Returnee 35 29 Immigrant 12 9 Total 149 125 Source: Household Surveys, Cuartero (2002).

Table 25: Current Overseas Workers from Cuartero, 2002 Occupation Female Male Total Care Giver 3 0 3 Casino Worker 2 2 4 Computer Operator 1 1 2 Construction Worker 0 2 2 Cook 1 1 2 Domestic Helper 32 0 32 Driver 0 1 1 Engineer 0 7 7 Entertainer 1 0 1 Factory Worker 0 1 1 Flight Attendant 1 0 1 Nurse 14 0 14 Office Worker 3 1 4 Radio Operator 0 2 2 Seaman 0 35 35 Not Known 2 1 3 Total 60 54 114 Source: Household Surveys, Cuartero (2002).

Before getting into the details regarding the impact of remittances, let me first distinguish between remittances being sent from overseas workers and immigrants living abroad. As Table 27 demonstrates, 67 of the 96 current overseas households provided data for my survey and 4 of these were immigrant households.20 From my interviews with this small handful of Cuartero immigrant families and from the experience of my own family with first-degree members in Canada and the United States, the amount and impact of remittances are dependent on the length

Inquiring about the amounts of cash remittances was perhaps the most uncomfortable question asked to residents. Many declined the survey because it asked for specific amounts. Local officials told me later that they suspected me of "casing" their homes. 83 Table 26: Location of Overseas Work Location of Work Female Male Total Australia 3 0 3 Brazil 0 1 1 Brunei 1 0 1 Canada 2 3 5 England 2 0 2 Guam 1 1 2 Hong Kong 16 0 17 India 0 1 1 Ireland 1 0 1 Israel 2 0 2 Japan 1 5 6 Korea 0 1 1 Kuwait 1 0 1 Lebanon 2 0 2 Qatar 1 0 1 Saudi Arabia 2 7 9 Singapore 11 2 14 2 0 1 Taiwan 1 0 1 Turkey 0 1 1 United States 9 7 15 Various 0 24 24 Not Known 2 1 3 Total 60 54 114 Source: Households Surveys, Cuartero (2002).

of residency of a family member away, their labour market participation in a destination country, and the economic state of their family back home. These families suggested that there was not really a need to send money since their families were already in strong financial shape. Within this context, the remittances sent did not serve an economic purpose but were more of a good will gesture. For returnees this was part of the custom of , the practice of giving gifts from abroad to family and friends when one returns. Therefore, the lack of remittances being sent from immigrant overseas members is an indication of the good economic conditions of their families in the Philippines. On closer inspection of the overall occupations of households, that is, by examining the educational and occupational attainments of other adult family members, most overseas workers do come from wealthier families, but this was not true of at least half of the families within the construction and transportation sector, a few merchant or retailing families, and of families where remittances were a primary source of income (see Table 28). Within the construction and transportation sector, there was great variability with respect to the educational levels and the types of jobs found within these households. These were not all well-to-do families but simply 84 had hard working family members that were able to finish their education and find a placement abroad. These are the sites where the most significant class identity and material transformations are taking place. Households where overseas remittances are the primary source of income are a bit more difficult to speculate about. Many of these families also had varying educational and occupational levels usually with other adult family members having lower educational qualifications. I can only guess that similar class and material changes are occurring here.

Table 27: Remittances Per Month in Overseas and Immigrant Households, Cuartero, 2002 Household # of Households Average Remittances No Remittances Total Number Type* Receiving Remittances Received Per Month Received of Households Overseas Worker 60 14,841.67 pesos 3 63 Immigrant 2 10,000 2 4 Total 62 14,685.48 5 67 * These figures do not include returnees as they are momentarily not working abroad. Source: Household Surveys, Cuartero (2002).

Table 28: Overall Type of Household COccupation , Cuartero, 2002 Occupational Sector Overseas HHs Immigrant HHs Total HHs Merchants/Street Retailers 13 1 14 Urban Services 1 1 2 Construction and Transportation Operators 18 0 18 Agricultural and Animal Husbandry 3 1 4 Professionals 12 3 15 Managerial and Executive 5 0 5 Government Workers and Administrators 3 0 3 Sales, Consumer Services and Clerical 8 3 11 Overseas Work as Primary Income* 24 0 24 Total 87 9 96 * This category is different in comparison to the category given in Table. Here, I account for the educational and occupational attainments of all adult family members. Source: Household Surveys, Cuartero (2002).

With an average of approximately 14,500p sent per month to 62 total households (see Table 27), the economic effect of remittances and their local impact is staggering, especially when juxtaposed with the average yearly household incomes for the City of Iloilo and for rural areas in the province. According to Table 29, urban incomes roughly double rural incomes while average income earning households in the city double their incomes when they have a family member overseas. Furthermore, it is likely that a significant number of these households have invented or invested in capital goods that improve their participation in the local labour market. Table 30 provides a range of activities taking place within these households. Most activities are concentrated in merchant and street retailing and in transportation operation. At the household level, more than one third of current overseas households have hired a domestic helper that in 85 some cases greatly alters the distribution of household labour. It is fairly obvious that remittances are having a significant impact on both the structure of the local economy and on household divisions of work.

Table 29: Average Rural and Urban Household Incomes, Average Cuartero Overseas Remittance Per Year Provincial Average HH Income Location Per Year (Pesos) Rural* 83,715 City of Iloilo 167,222 Cuartero Overseas Remittances 176,225.76 Avg. Urban Income + Remittances 343,447.76 * Rural and urban average incomes are taken from 1997 figures. Sources: NSCB (2001); Household Surveys, Cuartero (2002).

Table 30: Current Labour Practices within Overseas Households, Cuartero, 2002 Labour Practice Overseas HHs Immigrant HHs Total Construction Work 2 0 2 Farming Inputs 3 1 4 Food Vendor 2 1 3 Internet Cafe 2 0 2 Mechanic Shop 4 0 4 Merchant 8 0 8 Sari-sari 8 1 9 Jeepney/Taxi 5 0 5 Tricycle 6 0 6 Trisikad 5 0 5 Total 45 3 48 Live-In Domestic Helper 23 6 29 Temporary Domestic Helper 3 2 5 Total 26 8 34 Source: Household Surveys, Cuartero (2002).

The Voices of Overseas Families To confirm my survey findings and to add more depth and meaning to the social and material transformations taking place, I interviewed 23 overseas families. I found that a number of similar characteristics help to define these respondent households. First, most come from a variety of stable higher-paying local primary occupations: wealthy merchants (3), absentee landowners living in the city (5), professionals or managers (6), government workers (4), and a former overseas worker (1). Four "transitional" families are the exception as they were formerly of lower income occupations. Second, all of the overseas workers were university or college educated something that is usually a requirement to qualify for overseas work and the same can be said of most adult members of their households. Third, three families within this group (4 in 86 total for the entire survey) had members working overseas and members that have immigrated to another country, as permanently moving to another country is often the ultimate migration goal. This provided evidence of another type of migration transition taking place in Cuartero, from overseas worker to landed immigrant. Similar to the survey, within these interviewed households the same changes to family labour practices were taking place with respect to the impact of remittances.

According to residents, remittances have had a mix of both positive and negative effects on households. Many households believe that using cash remittances is a way to better the lives of their family, especially for younger members, in allowing them the chance to go abroad. While other families and returnees further intensified their "standby" and siesta type practices. One mother of college aged children noted:

Of course, of course, yes the money helps a lot. That is, usually, the children who lives outside, who work outside, send money in here, while the family in here buys those luxuries such as appliances and everything, and sometimes they bought jeep, bicycles, tricycles and all other sorts of things. But the money is sent here by my sister from abroad. Whatever she earns, she sends here, I have to have improvements, or another additional project. Maybe a business ...

Purchasing various household appliances such as refrigerators, washing machines, stereos, computers and televisions was also common among the households. For farmers, remittances meant buying additional inputs and securing more land titles, while other families supplemented their labour market practices by opening sari-saris or carendarias or by buying jeepneys, taxis or tricycles. Perhaps remittances had the most impact in the so-called "transitional" households in Cuartero that are experiencing upward socio-economic mobility. In addition to enhanced labour market participation external to the household, internally, these families stressed how the money greatly aids in paying for higher education of other family members with another chief priority to secure a lot to build a house. For households in general, having a live-in domestic helper is a good indication of wealth and status in the community. Given this, the interviewed transitional households, together with families within the 29-returnee households (see Table 24) and arguably the other two dozen or so transitional households from the surveyed current overseas families, have hired their own live-in domestic helpers. In essence, a foreign worker hires their own foreign (outside the family) worker and in some cases an international domestic helper hires their own local domestic helper. This significantly changes the division of household labour. 87 Alternatively, I found that in some overseas households that the unemployed young people and extended family members share in the household duties instead of spending for hired help. Processes of chain migration and permanent migration were another use of economic remittances. As Pertierra et al. (1992: 27) suggest, chain migration involves the movement of one relative overseas followed by another to increase the amount of income sent back and to strengthen the social networks at destination labour sites. As Table 24 illustrates there are more Cuartero residents overseas than there are households.21 The typical practice involves one family member providing the resources necessary for another to work abroad. An aunt watching over the children of her sister working overseas commented:

She is sending for their studies, and for our food and other things needed at home. The eldest had already finished nursing. The second one, hotel and restaurant management, and the third one, the youngest, nautical. And I am very much grateful to the children that they have earned a course so they can go abroad. That's what I am praying for then, to finish their studies.

There were also a small handful of families that have saved money from overseas work to pay for the fees and incidental costs for immigration usually to the United States or Canada. Yes, it was very expensive to go abroad to immigrate for my children. They could not save money. So that's why she (her youngest daughter) required to apply in Singapore. She has worked there for four years. It's very nice there. It's very clean. During the time when she applied to immigrate, she thought it was just very unlucky for her because the embassy was closed. They cannot go abroad yet but she has applied in US.

Immigrating to another country was not only limited to overseas households as many wealthy local families also sought higher incomes and a better quality of life.

The real reason for me to immigrate is for my children. I want them to go to college there and experience there. Because here, they are only interested in excitement and playing, they have it easy here. They can ask the helpers for things even if it is very close by (picking up gesture). I want them to experience when there are no helpers and to work hard (Young Mother).

In contrast to the more beneficial effects of remittances, many commented on the extravagant way families and returnees spend their overseas savings. For many workers, the return home to Iloilo City is a return to the siesta way of life. It is common that returned overseas workers "lay back" and refrain from working locally for several months along with not

21 In analyzing hundreds of surveys and literally thousands of entries, it was fairly easy to notice the few family records where 3 to 4 members, usually sisters, were working as DHs in Hong Kong or Singapore. 88 renewing their work contracts until their money runs out. One long time female Cuartero resident explained:

The sickness of the Filipino people is the fiesta. They borrow (money) even to have a fiesta! They borrow to have a fiesta! Their hospitality is given and then they're bankrupt later on, look for another to feed them after the fiesta. That is not wise, is it not? The usual practice of a Filipino people is they like to relax. When they receive money, they keep on spending it in good time, in mahjong, and other things like this. They thought, that money is still came from overseas, they think lots of money is still coming back . . . I don't think this is wise. Because usually other workers who work abroad came back in here just as the same as they are before . . . just the same as they are before, except they have more money. Because of lots of spending money and luxuries and in good time ... no, some they do not mind about working here.

Another female resident added:

You know, when somebody sends the children outside of the country to work, of course there is lots of money because they are paying more for their lives. Now, the family that lives in here, they are just expecting to have money and they keep on living luxuriously. They did not mind whether the children are working hard on the other place, all they wanted is just to have money, lots, and spend it.

Two enthusiastic female respondents remarked:

They do not work because they have much money already! You see, they earn $1,000 dollars (US) there, is already 53,000 pesos here. So why work? They build up business. Anything they like . .. You know Filipinos love R and R. You know we are gamblers, we are fond of good time, you see? Like the overseas workers, they bring much money here, only after one month ... no more then they go back. They go to the club every night and then spend much, they gamble . . . chicka-chicka (watching the girls) (hard laughter).

Question: What do the overseas workers do when come back? Answer: Ah, standby eh? Standby is staying at home, and then the money they earn abroad they spend it at the mall, they are happy go lucky people. Not all Filipinos are lazy but if they have money, if they have more money, they like to spend it.

Even though overseas work is still largely the domain of higher income families, more and more medium and lower income households, at least within the city, are making the transition from local to overseas work. Given this trend, economic remittances serve to enhance and transform the labour market practices of the families of overseas workers and returnees. The hope of many families is to engage in the process of chain migration thus allowing the further accumulation of remittance capital and to the strengthening of overseas networks. Remittances have also led to transformations in the distribution of household work as many returnees often spend to hire domestic help during their stopovers as they return to their siesta lifestyles. 89 5.5 Standby and Street Criminality as a Way of Life According to Cuartero residents, the standby culture encompasses a range of both positive and negative connotations. To engage in standby means to hang about on the kalye (street), sometimes to participate in socially delinquent activities, but the term also involves forms of social interaction like casual conversations and leisure activities (such as gambling) with neighbours. It is very common in other regions in the Philippines and is not uniquely Ilonggo. In terms of its pejorative meanings, locals attribute this type of behavior to "unemployment", something very relevant in the case of Iloilo City, as many adult males cannot find adequate amounts of stable waged work. Residents noted:

Many many don't have work and they make standby outside. Standby is people going around, waiting outside and making chismis (gossip). They are watching people going by. It means no work. They just keep on walking and walking without any destination. They just go around. (Female Manicurist).

Bit of a problem with these young people, they don't have job so they drink and roam around (Long Standing Male Resident).

So many standbys, those are out of school youth, those who are jobless, nothing doing but drink, get drunk and then make trouble. That's it! (Female High School Teacher).

The other side to the standby culture is that it builds "community" and familiarity with other people in the area. I am specifically referring to the everyday events that characterize standby, that is, the gambling, the fiestas and chismis. In the western context, it is similar to how Jacobs (1961) explains the importance of street spaces as contact sites of interaction and for the need of many eyes on the street for general safety. In fact the people making standby made my fieldwork and interviews less difficult. News spread in the neighbourhood that a brown quasi- foreigner was doing research in the barangay and residents became curious and eager to find out what. It was my experience that to be an outsider to Cuartero instantly brought caution and suspicion from the people. Standby is especially important to the identity of Cuartero youths, mostly males, who call the practice "guarding the street and doing chicka-chicka". These groups are known locally as kanto (corner) boys that congregate at the local sari-sari, similar to what youths would do at any 7-Eleven in a North American city.

Kanto boys are guys who live and hangs out at the street corner, usually has no work, and meets up with his friends at the corner to play games and drink and generally have a good time (Female Resident). 90

They are jobless boys, they make troublesome, that is these standby boys, because they always stand and by (laughter). They don't work. It is good now because there are tricycles now and they are having drivers. If one of them earns then they are forcing him to pay for the drinking of others in the night (Long Standing Female Resident).

These groups are also likely to be involved in the culture of street criminality. A street corner several houses southeast of my grandma's, and on the way to Fajardo, is particularly notorious. Many gang fights take place there, and a few years back, it was the site where a couple of people were murdered. These stories I heard from residents were confirmed after one interview I conducted where two family members were covered in bandages after a physical dispute that happened the previous night with a group of rivals from a neighbouring barangay. One had a bandage covering one eye and his entire head. The other had his wrist wrapped and I was not certain but it appeared that his hand had been severed. Standby is not only a structural outcome of the industrial period that ended in Iloilo almost a century ago, but has grown to become customary in Ilonggo life. As was shown with overseas households, such behaviors do not simply disappear with improved material wealth but are supplemented. As long as Iloilo's urban economy remains in its current state, many youths will continue to manage a range of jobs while experiencing periods of standby.

5.6 Youth Perspectives on Local and Overseas Work: Greater Expectations In contrast to the behavior involving standby, there are some groups of young people ranging in ages from their late teens to mid twenties that are frustrated by the structural limitations of the province's regional economy in terms of the availability of better paying jobs and career work. Some are employed locally while others are university educated and cannot find work in the city. Similar to the experience of many young people in North America, having a college or university education does not guarantee a good job. Many end up working as salesclerks at the local SM Shoe Mart or at fast food restaurants like Jolibee's.22 Within the 35 households interviewed, I was able to speak with 12 young people (7 females and 5 males) from 9 households, 5 of them with family members overseas. Most have the ambition to go abroad and identified higher paying work as the chief reason for wanting to out-migrate, a reason that justifies paying the high incidental costs required for a placement. In addition to greater

These are the Philippine equivalent to the Hudson Bay Company department stores in Canada and the fast food chain McDonalds. 91 earnings, prestige and status for their families are also attached to the journey of making it overseas. Said one twenty-three year old unemployed male:

Some young people, they prefer going abroad rather than staying here. Their common answer is that when they work abroad that they earn more money. No one wants to work here they want greenbacks!

A Female High school Teacher added:

Actually, that's their goal. . . that's their ambition. Usually they want to work as a DH or something. If they cannot afford to pay for the college education in college, if they cannot afford that, if the parents cannot afford that, that will be the last recourse for them, to work abroad as a DH or apply for work in Singapore or in Hong Kong or in Japan as an entertainer.

One father of a college graduate commented:

At this time the work in the city is very scarce, so for our son we are suggesting that he go to abroad because he studied nautical and he is suppose to take that opportunity to go out abroad so he can earn much more than here.

According to my interviews, out-migration is greatly dependent on family resources but unlike households in the province who face greater difficulty in financing trips, urban families in general, and especially overseas families, are in a better position to pay for the related expenses as they possess much higher incomes. Friends, family networks, and borrowing from moneylenders are some of the more common sources households draw upon to pay for overseas trips. I deal with these issues in detail in Chapter 6. With respect to the 5 overseas households (3 females and 3 males), it is likely that chain migration will occur as remittances can be used to aid in the process. But "social remittances" are also transmitted to the area and serve to influence the ambitions of young people in Cuartero as they are not limited specifically to overseas households. Social remittances involve the transferring of different perceptions, ideas, attitudes and various types of expectations from one place to another. For interviewees, out migration was a means of attaining both personal goals and social prestige that working in Iloilo could not offer. Some complained of working in occupations that did not fit their educational qualifications. One aspiring seaman said:

It's not really easy to find a job here. There are so many graduates who are not able to find job. So since they cannot find work they drive tricycles, trisikad or work as a salesman. People would go abroad if given the chance. Some of our friends are going abroad. Some are factory workers, some are drivers. Look at me, I am a graduate of nautical. I am a seaman by nature and I have not left for the seas yet (laughter). 92

A sibling of a seaman remarked:

Question: What about young people like us, do they want to stay in Iloilo or do you and your friends want to leave and go overseas? Answer: Maybe yes. There are so many applying abroad. DH, baby-sitter. If we have chance, so we go, if not then I will just try here in the Philippines. There is work, trisikad, tricycle. But I think that it depends on the people. For example, like me, I am graduating so if you graduate that you have work here. For work in Cuartero, most people are trisikad driver, sometimes salesgirl in mall. Also, there are factories but they are small. And unlike in Manila there are so many factories, unlike here. But mostly here, many people here working in the mall like SM City, Gaisano, Robinson's (local department stores). I like to go abroad because my course is x-ray technician. So lots of money if I apply abroad in the hospital as x-ray technician. Despite as of now, we don't have money so we just stay here (Twenty-three year old Female Salesclerk)

If the qualified and ambitious young people of medium to lower income households cannot find a way to break the financial limitations of their family incomes, it is likely that most will continue to work in the occupations that characterize the city's services based economy. As will be made clearer in Chapter 6, the major difference between youths in the city and youths in the province is that even with their better material status, it is still a question of wanting more for urban youths, while fewer numbers of young people in the province will complete a university education or ever get the chance to go abroad.

5.7 Conclusions The limited number of stable, better paying and career oriented occupations in the industrial and retailing sectors in the urban economy are indicative of two key points. First, the limited occupational specialization in the city is reflective of a "closed" labour market resulting in a high number of "informal sector" type occupations. Second, given that Iloilo City is a regional and provincial capital, even with tertiary forms of higher and lower paying professional and government sector jobs making up for the absence of urban-based industrial work, this case of extreme "quasi-involution" in the city means that the restricted number of stable waged occupations has led to high population numbers increasingly being absorbed in a ballooned city services sector, so much so that the process is essentially squeezing out ambitious individual agents that gravitate to sites of capitalist production, these are the primate cities of East and Southeast Asia, Hong Kong, Singapore, Tokyo and workers that become employed in related sectors such as servicemen on luxury cruise ships sailing from major city to major city. These processes occurring in the city combined with restricted labour mobility in the province due to 93 the social arrangement of land tenure (as will be shown in Chapter 6) result in the moderate urban size of the city. Given these economic and restricted migration patterns, a class-based analysis reveals not only that elites have control over the local economy but that they are also the social groups able to experience domestic and international labour mobility, as most overseas households are both highly educated and more well to do. Even though there was evidence of a group of approximately 40 households experiencing significant social and material transformations, they are only occurring within a small percentage of the urban population which raises another important point. As the next chapter will help to further illustrate, overseas work is distinctly an urban phenomenon. The percentages of overseas workers decrease considerably in provincial areas and for Region VI as a whole. I agree that social class identity and material transformations are indeed taking place, but that they are only occurring within a small minority of mostly urban based households. The corollary of overseas migration is the extent to which economic remittances significantly change the social behavior and general labour market practices of local households. If anything, families augment their involvement in the large city services sector of the urban economy. Alternatively, cash remittances are sometimes used to hire domestic help and to intensify existing forms of the standby culture, practices that act as a reminder and legacy of the stevedores and industrial port workers that were displaced generations earlier. Standby as an economic outcome has evolved into an Ilonggo cultural norm. I have tried in this chapter to illustrate the human scale of how families live and work in peripheral urban spaces of the Philippine economic periphery. Most families struggle to get by as they engage in transient, low paying urban service type occupations while other families experience professional stable waged employment and the luxury of being connected to cash remittance flows. I have also shown concern for the next generation of Ilonggo workers, some with the resources, qualifications and ambition who will be able to "make it out" of Iloilo, while others are left to make sense of the limited opportunities made to them in the urban economy. And this is the way it has been in Iloilo for the last century, as families continue to work and live under the rule of elites and oligarchs. In the next chapter, I shift my attention to the human scale of rural and working life in a rice farming barangay called Burot. 94 CHAPTER 6

WORKING IN BARANGAY BUROT: RESTRICTED LABOUR MOBILITY IN A RURAL PLACE

6.1 Introduction Chapter 5 described how families dealt with the conditions found in the City of Iloilo. This chapter explores how rural households in the barangay of Burot make sense of the economic conditions found in the province through the types of activities and work strategies they invent. Burot typifies the social and economic characteristics found in many rural localities in the province of Iloilo. It is located in a predominantly rice producing area with the majority of households working as small land holding tenants and landless labourers. An investigation of its local labour market is important in revealing how class and power relations play out in the everyday lives for residents of Burot. It is within this context that many families face financial uncertainty and a chronic state of debt preventing them from pursuing more profitable employment strategies such as migration overseas or to the core city of Metro Manila. In addition, a deeper examination of the practice of rice cultivation brings into focus how culturally embedded systems of labour control continue to restrict the social and economic mobility of a significant number of families in the province. The chapter is divided into four sections. In the first section, I discuss issues of land tenancy, the economics of rice farming, and how these relate to the economic and social divisions of labour. Second, I examine the local labour market and specifically focus on how structural economic inequality affects different income earning families and they use a variety of work strategies to pay for major expenses throughout the year, mainly farming, the education of family members, and acquiring sufficient amounts of food. It is also within this section where I address the issue of out migration, the impacts of remittances on households, and the different strategies families use to finance both domestic and overseas migration. Following this section, I investigate the roles of the "standby" culture and banditry, other practices resulting from inequality. The third section deals with youth perspectives on farming in Burot as many have developed higher material expectations and see leaving the farms as the best option for their families. Finally, I attempt to make sense of family labour strategies within a context of spatial decentralization, the regional economy and class relations. Throughout the chapter, I present the experiences and voices of the farmers themselves and how they see improvements to the regional economy, changes to farming practices, and their perspectives on dealing with major expenses faced during the year. 95

6.2 The Social and Economic Dynamics of Rice Farming in Burot

6.2.1 The Social Relations of Land Tenancy Central to the economic well being of rural households in the province is the issue of land tenancy. As was discussed in chapter 4, due to the samacan contract or kasama arrangement practiced widely in Iloilo, a significant proportion of the population in the province does not own substantial amounts of land.23 Under this share cropping system, landowners lend to tenants the capital to pay for the essential inputs of rice cultivation such as seed, fertilizer and food to last through the season, with repayment coming in the form of harvest shares (Larkin, 1993: 31). Shares from the harvest are usually divided on a 50/50 basis by a measurement called the bolto in Ilonggo or the cavan in Tagalog or English which is the equivalent of one sack of milled rice weighing approximately 50 kilos.24 It is customary under this arrangement that the owner pays the expenses (gasto) such as seeds and fertilizers, but alternative harvest share divisions are not unusual such as one-third for landowners to two-thirds for tenants, where tenants are responsible for paying the gasto for the farm (oma) themselves. Aside from incomes and the parceling out of land to work, the social relations of the landlord and tenant relationship extend beyond the area of the farm. The social relations of land tenancy are characterized by 'patron-client' type interactions that have existed between landowner and tenant families for generations and it is something that I have a unique perspective on given my positionality to this research. Burot is the area where my grandfather was born into and its rice farms were the source of security for my family during times of war, and mobility during times of prosperity, allowing for university education and movement abroad for first-degree family members on my mother's side. As the only absentee landowner living in the city, my family still has significant land holdings in Burot and I saw first hand how patron-client relations play out for both the landowning and tenant families alike. As mentioned in chapter 1, my aunt is a medical doctor, an obstetrician and gynecologist practicing both in the city and in the neighbouring town of Santa Barbara. In this way, lending favours and financial support not only involved farming activities but also ranged from the writing of medical

23 Ofreneo (1980) suggests that by the time of export crop production by the 19th century, land holdings were concentrated within the hands of a few groups and religious corporations that resulted in two other distinct patterns of land tenure besides the kasama system. (1) Within the Plantation or system, workers were paid on a daily or contract basis. This was a widespread practice during the sugar boom on the island of Negros during the 19th century. (2) The other arrangement was called the Inquilinato system that involved a middle group (inquilino or lessee) lending out land based on sharecropping. 24 The language spoken in Burot is a mixture of the main dialect of the Western Visayas called Ilonggo, and the local vernacular called Kinaray-a. The terms used in this chapter arc a mixture of both dialects. 96 prescriptions, to money needed for educational tuition, funerals, trips to Manila, and for placement and travel fees required for overseas work. My research position not only put me in an awkward position at times as I felt in some way that I was abusing my aunt's authority, but it revealed to me the potential for great abuses by landowners under the kasama system and how abuses could extend to other aspects of everyday social life for rural households. In other words, a disharmony between landowner and tenant relations on the farm could mean restrictions to the types of help that patrons lend. A couple of tenant farmers told me of their experiences of working the land in a neighbouring barangay, where the owner expected long working days and did not provide the customary everyday meals typical during busy times of the season. The workers refused the extra work and said that this hurt them financially, as they could not acquire extra money to pay for other household expenses. Conversely, abuses are also made on the part of tenants, often asking for extra money for tractor fuel, fertilizer or seeds, not to use on the landowner's property but for the benefit of their own plots of land. This unique perspective also showed me the precariousness of the economic conditions of rural households and how with one misfortune, such as a family member becoming ill, could mean disaster. Like the generational and familial nature of the social relations of land tenancy, the ownership of land is also passed on from generation to generation. Table 31 gives a basic idea of patterns of land tenure in the barangay. Of the 73 hectares in Burot that are suitable for agricultural production, 4 families own the lion's share with an additional 10 households owning smaller plots of land (significantly less than one hectare), an amount inadequate to substantially change their financial fortunes. Almost three-quarters (48 of 64 households) of Burot families live as tenants or labourers. However, this table does not accurately reflect the status of a handful of small land holding families and tenants (18 of the 29 households interviewed). This is due to the fact that familial relations often extend to neighbouring barangays, with family members from Burot marrying into other families in other barangays such as Cagban to the northeast or Cabugao to the north and vice versa. These different marital arrangements lead to the changing and dividing of family land titles. As a result, the total holdings of smaller-scale landowners are not entirely concentrated in Burot, but are scattered in adjacent areas. The same applies to a handful of people that are tenants in Burot but own small plots of land outside. The small number of amortizing owners and arkila within the next two categories of the table indicate that there is very little transition occurring from tenancy to land ownership. According to my interviews, 18 of the 29 small land holding farmers suggest that this is 97 occurring for two main reasons. First, many suggested that the process of acquiring more land through certified land transfers under Agrarian Reform is a long and tedious process requiring more payments to the Rural Land Bank. Second, in cases of emergency, tenants often give up what land titles they have in exchange for money to pay for hospital costs or mounting debts. Although it is beyond the scope of this thesis to get into great detail with respect to these issues, it is sufficient to say that historic patterns of land tenure inequality continue to play a part of the daily lives of many Ilonggo farmers.

Table 31: Farm Ownership and Tenancy in Burot, 2002 Owner/ Cultivator 14 Households Amortizing Owner 2 Arkila (lessee)* 3 Tenants 22 Labourers/W orkers 23 Total 64 Source: Barangay Burot Census Data (September 2002); Household and Fanning Surveys, Burot (2002). * The Barangay Council defines arkila as temporary tenants that typically work on a seasonal basis or whenever labour is needed This is a somewhat different than what is conventionally known as the lessee or inquilino, the middlemen that enacted a sharecropping system on the behalf of religious orders and friar-owned lands during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

6.2.2 A View from Below: The Social and Economic Production of Rice Cultivation With the majority of households in Burot earning a living as small landowning cultivators and landless tenants, their economic situations are made worse by the unprofitable nature of producing rice in the region. In this case, they simply spend more than they make from their farms.25 As Table 32 demonstrates, based on the 18 land owning families in Burot, there is a significant difference between the cost of inputs for their farms with the actual cash value of their yields.26 These costs include money for fertilizers, pesticides, seeds, fuel and transport, and the payment of boltos for labour in the form of scything, blowing and threshing during harvest times. In addition, depending on the different types of arrangements under the kasama contract between landowner and tenant, farmers must pay rent to the landowner, totaling about 50 per cent of the total number of boltos from the harvest. After these expenses, farmers on average had 14.5

25 This does not apply to the households having other occupations as their primary sources of income. 26 Again, I am indebted to York University geographer Dr. Philip F. Kelly who allowed me to use his farming surveys as templates for my own. But due to the significantly different nature of farming in the Province of Iloilo, I ended up asking farmers far fewer questions. The final survey was made up of elements from the Cuartero household survey with another set of questions regarding sources of financial aid, boltos left after the harvests and their selling prices (see Appendix B). In addition, conducting research in Burot was made less difficult because of the excellent records kept by Barangay Captain Evelinda Castellano. I also thank the council for allowing me to conduct my research and for speaking with the residents. 98 boltos (about p5,000) at the end of the rainy season. The remaining lower income tenant households in Burot had substantially less and supplemented their incomes with other forms of work. This number does not include the amount of rice kept for consumption and food security, something that is often viewed by farmers as more important than selling their rice off at the local market. After taking into account the value of these boltos and the cost of inputs, farmers are left owing approximately p4,000 per harvest. These figures suggest that families are constantly accumulating debts. Said one farmer;

If you are only depending on your farm, you have a lot of debts when running it. And then the products you have are only few and it can't afford to pay your debts or your expenses for the farm (Male Burot Farmer, 2002).

The trading of rice during both the rainy and dry seasons are also a time when small landowning tenant farmers lose money. Wealthier households are able to wait out the year for high demand periods, usually during the dry season, when rice supplies are lower and when prices are highest. It is often the case that poorer households must sell their rice (palqy) immediately after the harvests because they are in urgent need of money to cover expenses and to pay for accumulating debts.

Table 32: The Cost of Rice Farming - Amount of Boltos, Selling Prices and Inputs Savings/Selling Prices/Cost of Inputs Rainy Dry (# of Boltos after Expenses) 14.5 Varies* Selling Price (pesos/kg) 7.25 8.46 Price Per Bolto 362.50 423.00 Total Value of Boltos (14.5 x Bolto Price) P5256.25 p6,133.5 Total Cost of Inputs** pi 0,000 p< 10,000 Difference of Surplus - p4,743.75 - p3866.50 Source: Household and Farming Surveys, Burot (2002). * Dry season yields are substantially less due to varying environmental factors such as rainfall. ** The cost of inputs during both the rainy and dry season is estimated at pl0,000. This average is based on the official Barangay Burot Livelihood and Income Survey administered to all households in September 2002 and on my interviews with farmers. The actual cost of inputs for the dry season is significantly less since this harvest produces lower yields requiring less labour and maintenance. The figure of pi0,000 is used here to provide a basic idea of the general unprofitability of rice production.

There are number of factors affecting the amount of yields during harvest times. First, the barangay depends on (ulari) to water the fields and not on a centralized irrigation system such as those found in the southern Tagalog or the Central Luzon regions of the Philippines. Depending on environmental conditions, dry season harvests can vary greatly, from yields similar to the rainy season to 1/3 or 2/3 less. Farmers complained of the erratic patterns of 99 rainfall during the last couple of years. During 2000, the dry season harvest was relatively good yielding about 1/3 less than the rainy season. The 2001 dry season harvest was disastrous with yields about 2/3 less. Thus, depending on the farmer, the costs for inputs can be substantially higher if they decide to spend more for better yields, or they may spend much less knowing that on average that dry season produces lower yields. Given the financial situations of these households, many choose to spend less on inputs as small land holding tenant farmers lack the necessary capital to purchase expensive higher yielding seed varieties and fertilizers. One Barangay Councilor explained:

Money is always a problem. People want to improve their farms and get more yields, but there is no money to buy any new machinery. Most of the people here are poor people, and just make enough to eat and nothing more. Others spend more for the year than they make, so they sell their livestock or borrow money. They cannot afford to buy newer machines or higher yielding seeds.

Another major factor contributing to lower rice yields in Burot is the widespread use of the sabog method of planting. The process of planting is an interesting one as many other regions of the Philippines practice the tanum or sabod method. According to this technique, rice is planted in a box shape bordered by uhot or piles of threshed rice shafts. The uhot acts as a natural fertlizer as it decomposes thus nourishing the plants within. 15 days to a month later, the plants are removed and clumped into bundles of approximately 100 plants called gabot. The gabot are then separated by the farmers and directly planted 2 to 3 at a time. Payment for this method comes piecemeal by the number of direct plantings or by daily wages. In Iloilo, the tanum method was popular during the post World War II period during the 1940s and 50s. But into the 1960s, sabog became the more common practice in the province for a number of reasons that are still relevant in the present. First, tanum planting requires better irrigation systems since rice plants are planted deeper into the soil, where sabog planting require seeds to stick at the surface with excess water drained in order for growth to occur. This draining of excess water also leads to the washing away of a significant amount of seed resulting in much lower yields. Burot lacks a central irrigation system to water their farms and thus greater yields would not be produced during the rainy season with the tanum method. However, tanum is sometimes used during the dry season as rainwater can be left in the paddies to nourish the root system and need not be drained. A second reason why tanum is not widespread in the province is that it is a labour and capital intensive process requiring teams of planters and weeders to achieve higher 100 yields. With the common practice of sabog and the majority of people working as small land holding tenant farmers in Burot, they are not required to hire teams of workers. To briefly summarize, this examination of the economics of rice production further illustrates the inequalities found in farming practices. The majority of surplus wealth is collected by the handful of large landowning families in Burot, while tenant farmers are in a chronic state of debt, struggling to pay the costs for their farms, the required harvest rent for landowners, and the money owed for loans. During interviews, I consistently asked farmers why they continue to farm rice when it is not profitable. One farmer responded, "Because this is all we know. If we do this, we know we can eat and we know we can get something in the end after the harvest." And this is how farming has been practiced for many generations in the province, something that is socially and culturally embedded, often leaving families restricted to rural spaces.

6.2.3 The Social Divisions of Labour on the Farm and within the Household Given the nature of land tenure arrangements and the economics of rice farming in Burot, it is evident that class categories become central in explaining the economic situations of different families and of the social divisions of labour on the farm and within households. Before explaining these different sites of work, it is important to briefly address conceptual definitions of class. Smith's (1985) theoretical framework on mobility restrictions and secondary city growth argues that elite social groups are defined by the control and influence they have over the local political apparatus and the regional economy through property and commercial ownership. In the case of the Philippines, some have argued that rural society is organized into distinct social groups such as landowners, money lenders and rural capitalists (in the form of rural bankers, warehousers, millers, rice merchants, input and machinery traders) on the one hand, with owner-cultivators, kasamas (tenants), lessees, sub-lessees, and landless farmers on the other (Ofreneo, 1980: 55; Kerkvliet, 1977). From my interviews, surveys and personal observations, such social conceptualizations hold true in the case of Iloilo, but there is some flexibility to these categories, especially with the few overseas households that experience significant material transformations and higher social status. Overall then, as Kelly (2000) notes, those families that can assume the role of creditors, and not renters over capital goods, are in the best position to experience socio-economic mobility and capital accumulation. With respect to Burot, the agricultural division of labour is based on age, gender, marriage, familial ties and socio-economic status. The wealthiest households are the most economically secure. Most are creditors of farming inputs and machinery and have a family 101 member overseas sending back financial remittances that aid in improving their conditions. These families are in a position to hire agricultural labour since many of the younger family members have the means to migrate out of the area for work and education. In this way, this group has the necessary amounts of money needed to survive a bad harvest, pay for major expenses, and is most likely to experience a better material standard of living.

The majority of farms in Burot are run by small landowning cultivators and tenants formed of families and extended family members working the land often involving "informal" types of exchanges regarding payment and the use of farming machinery (usually in boltos). This social group often borrows money for inputs to get through the season, and rents capital goods such as machinery from creditors. Although only a handful of households own heavy machinery like hand tractors and threshers, many farmers borrow them from family members living in neighbouring barangays. These families invent a number of work strategies, from temporary migration to Iloilo City for work, to doing the odd jobs of wealthier families in the area. The 23 households working as landless labourers are in the most economically unstable position. Most work whenever or wherever work is available either in the barangay, in the city or in a neighbouring town. These households depend on the work opportunities provided to them by their relatives and friends, such as joining threshing teams or helping to move sacks of rice (sakos) fromth e lowland areas of Burot. As an outcome of inequality and labour availability, many young men in the area participate in the culture of banditry, but such practices are not limited to this specific social grouping alone. The divisions of agricultural labour and the availability of work centres on the March/April dry season harvest and the main rainy season harvest in September/October. During May and , fields are prepared for the fall harvest as adult males use water buffaloes () to till and plough the land (arado). Alternatively, although only few families own them, many households rent and use hand tractors with payment coming in the form of a few boltos or owed labour during the harvest. Shortly after tilling the soil, certified seeds (binhi) are directly sown by hand using the sabog technique onto individual paddies (kahuns) by adult farmers of either gender.

Following the process of planting, the application of fertilizers and pesticides is typically done by men, with weeding, watering and the draining of terraces done by both genders. Women and adolescent age children aid in cooking and in bringing food to the fields. It is also the duty of teenagers, young children and older family members to tend to livestock and to weed. 102 It is during the time of the harvests, especially for the rainy season, where families call in all their labour resources. The harvest begins with teams of people engaged in garab, which is the scything of the palay (rice) stalks. The adolescents and teenagers of Burot are often called away from their studies in the neighbouring towns or from the City of Iloilo to aid their families with garab. Piles of garab are then organized into circular donut shape piles called tumpi. Bundles of tumpi are processed in a machine called a rice thresher that separates rice grains from the shafts and is operated by a team of 6 to 7 adult males. The separated rice grains are then collected and placed into sacks (sako) which are then piled. The remaining mounds of threshed shafts are natural fertilizers called uhot. They are often left in the fields to fertilize the earth or are burned for the same purpose. Sacks are then moved and stored usually to the farmers' residence where they are laid to dry in the sun (bulad or lay-ang) on bamboo matting {amakan). After the resacking of the dried grains a team of men place them into a machine called a rice blower that separates the empty grains (uron-uron or inutod) fromth e full ones. Transports from neighbouring areas or local Burot families that own jeepneys or tricycles are hired to take the sakos into town (usually to Santa Barbara or Pavia) for milling, storage and trade. Like on the farm, work within the household also fits traditional gender roles. Women and children do tasks such as cooking, washing clothes, cleaning, and going to market. Older family members and adolescents are often charged with caring for children. Interestingly, finding a baby-sitter among a community of relatives and extended family rarely poses a problem for parents.27 Another labourious task that many young people object to is the collection of water as 3A of the households rely on deep wells, some extremely deep! The six water pumps in Burot, located within the properties of different families, are communally shared, roughly serving 50 families, providing further evidence of the nature of the closely knit community social relations in the area as water collection requires spending a significant amount of time at the home of another. Men usually do the heavier odd jobs around the house such as home repair. Similar to families in Cuartero, the ten higher income families and overseas households in Burot are the exception. Labour is sometimes hired for household work, although extended family networks are drawn upon for duties such as cooking, cleaning and childcare. The characteristics of overseas households will be discussed in more detail in a later section.

I conducted an interview with one female resident where a dozen children under the age of 3 were present in the house! 103 6.3 The Rural Labour Market and Household Economic Conditions An examination of Buret's labour market provides greater insight into the economic conditions of households and into how class relations restrict migration and mobility. This was demonstrated above with respect to the economics of rice production. Here I examine the diversity of family work strategies implemented by different income groups in Burot and how these strategies intermingle with patron client relationships. After providing some background on the barangay, I describe its demographic and occupational structure and briefly discuss banditry and the standby culture in the area along with youth perspectives on farming.

6.3.1 Background on Burot Burot is located within the municipality of New Lucena and borders the adjacent town of Santa Barbara to the southwest. It is approximately 28 kilometres from the heart of Iloilo City and about forty-five minutes from the city by car. Burot can be reached by traveling the main highway that runs northeast from Santa Barbara to New Lucena followed by driving ten minutes north on the bumpy dirt access roads that wind through a couple of neighbouring barangays. Within Burot, short stretches of idle land between rice paddies mark the boundaries of the barangay to the east and west, while to the north, the Bongol and Jelicuon Creeks serve as natural borders of the area (see Map 5). The two gently sloping valleys within Burot form highlands (takas or hints) and lowlands (ubos) that are ideal for rain fed irrigation. The total area of Burot is approximately 100 hectares with a significant amount defined as hilly thus making 75 per cent of the land available for agricultural production even though a much smaller percentage of the land is actually cultivated (see Table 33). Table 33: Burot's Physical Geography, 2002 Characteristic Agricultural Land (rain fed) 45 Forest 10 Fruits and Vegetables 5 Residential 25 Hilly/Pastoral 15 Total 100 Source: Barangay Burot Census Data (September 2002). 104

< * * V - J ^3KB v 3 & Si ul *" o «*» ;? *- * * -a! "* rif* Ill uJ 5 > a ' ? 4 § & 3 2 X « u. O oo OQ y w 0 i >a cp'iii'i 105 As mentioned in Chapter 1, my grandfather was born in the area of Burot, and my family history can be traced back here about 150 years. My family was not always the largest landowner in the barangay. Through a combination of circumstances, risk, hard work, luck, and a little ingenuity on the part of my grandfather, he was able to consolidate properties that were under amortization ownership during the 1930s and 40s and pay the difference with harvest profits and his salary as an employee of the Board of Internal Revenue (BIR) in Iloilo. Shortly after the Japanese occupation, he decided to clear the forests and pastoral land for the major dirt roads that link the highland and lowland areas in the northeastern part of Burot. The majority of the houses are located in the highlands and scattered along these roads although there are a few located in the lowlands (see Map 5).

6.3.2 Labour Structure and Work Strategies Agricultural production is central to the local labour market, but due to the control of the agricultural surplus and its consequent unequal distribution on the part of landed elites, different families invent different work strategies to supplement their incomes. Given the structural socio• economic limitations experienced by the majority of households involved in rice production, some families engage in a diversity of livelihoods, other individuals do manana or put off work, while others engage in dangerous "criminal" practices that are morally objectionable. My main point here is that embedded processes of structural inequality, in the form of landowner and tenant relations, and the consequent expenses for the farms and everyday household operation paid by tenants, combine to limit labour mobility and are mainly responsible for other practices such as standby and banditry.

In terms of the demographic structure of Burot, there are 64 households and 311 people (136 females and 175 males) with children and young people ranging in age from 0-29 representing the largest age groups. There are also a significant number of young adult males ranging from their late teens to their early 30s and a high number of young females in their late teens that are about to enter their main childbearing years (see Figure 2). 106 Figure 2: Age and Sex Structure of Burot, 2002

• Female • Male

Source: Barangay Burot Census Data (September 2002).

With respect to income levels and the structure of the local labour market, it is unfortunate that the province wide trends of poverty and structural inequality are also apparent in the case of Burot. Approximately three-quarters of the households live below the poverty line earning approximately p60,000 or between one to two thousand dollars Canadian per year (see Table 34). Barangay officials define 54 of the 64 households as earning below p60,000. All but two households are tied to farming as a source of income (see Table 35). The exceptions are two families tied to the barangay by way of kin relations that depend on a teacher's salary as a primary source, three other families rely on it as a secondary source. Because of patterns of ownership and land tenure described above, farming is not the primary source of income for all the households in Burot. Acting as a pool of surplus labour, 21 families (almost one-third of households) are defined as general workers and are the most marginal groups in the community (see Table 31). Generally, they rely on farming for income but are not solely dependent on it as they balance other forms of work to earn a living.

Table 34: Average Monthly and Yearly Household Incomes in Burot, 2002

Income* Average Income Per Average Income Per Year # of Households Category Month (Pesos) (Pesos) (% Total) Low Income (1,000-3,000) (12,000 - 36,000) 39 (61%) Below Average (3,001 - 5,000) (36,001 - 60,000) 15 (23%) Average (5,001 -10,000+) (60,001 -120,000) 10 (16%) Total - - 64 (100) Source: Barangay Burot Census Data (September 2002); Interviews, Household and Farming Surveys, Burot (2002). * These figures are based on an official barangay surveying assessing incomes and livelihoods in the area. Categories are defined by the barangay according to the frequency of household incomes within certain income ranges. 107 Table 35: Primary and Secondary Sources of Household Income, 2002 Occupation Farm worker or Labourer 41 Carpenter 11 Dressmaker 9 Drivers (Jeepney, Tricycle) 12 Small business (Sari-sari) 5 Teacher 5 Overseas Remittances 10 Total 93 Source: Barangay Burot Census Data (September 2002); Household and Farming Surveys, Burot (2002).

With little to no savings from rice farming, the 39 low-income families made up of general labourers and a handful of tenants face the greatest difficulties in finding ways to earn and save money. Of my 29 interviews, 13 of them belong to this income group. For all of my Burot interviews, I usually spoke with the mother and father of the family simultaneously or with one of the curious young people in the house eager to practice their English or interested to find out what I was doing. The interviews took place in their homes with a few conducted during rest times of the working day.28 Similar to my questions to the households in Cuartero, I asked how they see working in the province and city and the obstacles towards improving agricultural work and incomes; the sorts of strategies they use to make money when little work is available; the difficulties they experience with major expenses and their sources of financial credit; and about the meaning of the standby culture for local residents and for the young people in Burot. Low-income families get by on a combination of agricultural labour with payment in boltos and a variety of activities. Adult male family members earn secondary sources of incomes through carpentry, construction and taxi driving, while women work as dressmakers, operate variety convenience stores (sari-sari), and sell vegetables at the local markets. Aside from running sari-sari stores from house fronts, these occupations require migrating to other locations in the urban region and to the local marketplaces in Iloilo City and Santa Barbara. Table 36 gives an idea of the constant state of debt that these families endure owing on average pi,505 per month or pi8,000 per year.29 Besides rice farming practices, a number of factors contribute to this inequality. First, according to my surveys and interviews, these

28 In addition to my grandmother and aunt, the roles of Myrna Mana-ay and Jenelyn "Pakha" Suizo in my research cannot be understated. Both grew up in Burot. As gatekeepers, they introduced me to the families in the barangay, many of whom are relatives, and to the young people in the area, most being friends since childhood. In a sense, I learned much about rural life over our casual conversations during my 5-month stay (July to November) in Iloilo during 2002. 29 These figures only include amounts owed to the local barangay and not accumulated amounts owed to other family or friends. 108 families are usually the largest, with many children and young people, leading to higher expenses per family member for food, clothing and education. Many household members drop out of school at a young age (before or during high school) to help the family make extra money or because they lack the funds to pay for tuition. Thus, many young people face an initial set back in using education as a social capital resource in later finding better paying jobs in the city. Second, shelter and medical costs are two other major expenses that serve to bring down incomes. House maintenance is a necessary expense for families after the monsoons. Many of the homes get damaged by the floods and rainfall and are in need of repair. On average, the cheaper the material used for a house (for example the difference between the quality of local woods with heavy concrete), the more often it has to be replaced. Table 37 shows that more than half the homes in Burot are built of light materials while 52 of the 65 houses built of light or medium materials.

Table 36: Low Income Households and Expenses, 2002 Incomes and Expenses Totals Low Income (pi,000 - 3,000) 39 Households Average Income Per Month p2,341.03 Average Expenses Per Month p3,846.15 Total Difference - pl,505.12 Source: Barangay Burot Livelihood and Income Survey (September 2002). These figuresar e based on averages taken through an official barangay survey assessing incomes and livelihoods in the area. Major expenses for this group includes (1) Food; (2) Clothing; (3) Shelter, (4) Farming Inputs; and (5) Education. Medical care was not included into the average by the barangay, simply because many lower income households cannot afford it.

Table 37: Housing Material Composition Material Type* Number of Households Light material (bamboo) 39 Medium material (mixed cement and bamboo) 13 Heavy material (concrete) 13 Total 65 Source: Barangay Burot Census Data (September 2002). * 60 families live in a house while 4 families share a house.

The cost for medical care is perhaps the most burdensome for all households in the barangay not just the low income ones. This is also something that I experienced first hand in Burot as a 30 year old local farmer was expecting his first child. The different medical fee payments, the p200 taxi rides to the major hospitals in Iloilo City from Burot, the prescription drugs needed for mother and child, and a place to stay for the father, all combine to wipe out any savings that these families may have. It is a similar process for any required medical treatment at 109 a local hospital. This is not to suggest that such expenses do not occur for families in the western context, but generally, there are less sources of recourse for Ilonggo farming families when members are in need of hospital care. Below average income households are in a better financial state than their lower income counterparts but face many of the same prospects in terms of everyday expenses and the structural restrictions imposed by rice farming. I interviewed 8 of the 15 households from this group. These families engage in much of the same occupational activities and have greater income and food security since many are small landholders that are able to produce enough food for their own consumption.30 Some of these families are in a creditor position, running small sari-saris or owning sufficient amounts of livestock for food or trade, and this is reflected in their overall family incomes. As Table 38 shows, incomes are higher but so too are expenses mainly because medical treatments are factored into these figures since these families can better afford them. These families are also in a constant state of debt, owing p2,134.7 per month or p25,616.4 per year. In terms of major expenses, many children within these families tend to stay in school longer as they have the necessary amounts of money and capital to pay for local college or university education in the city. Is often believed by these families that education for younger family members will increase opportunities for out migration in the future:

The ones who are left are the one who have not yet graduated from a course or are the one who not yet have profession. They will be the one who will be in charge for the farm (Male Burot Farmer, 2002).

In addition, these households spend less on home repair since their homes are built of materials of medium durability such as wood and mixed concrete.

Table 38: Below Average Income Households and Expenses, 2002 Incomes and Expenses Totals Below Average Income (p3,001 - 5,000) 15 Households Average Income Per Month p4,533 Average Expenses Per Month p6,667.7 Total Difference - p2,134.7 Source: Barangay Burot Livelihood and Income Survey (September 2002). These figures are based on averages taken through an official barangay survey assessing incomes and livelihoods in the area. Major expenses for this group includes (1) Food; (2) Clothing; (3) Shelter, (4) Farming Inputs; (5) Education and (6) Medical care.

The average family size for the province is 5.1 people requiring approximately 12 boltos or sacks of milled rice to feed them for the year. 110

The figures for this income category group are a bit misleading. In many cases, incomes are subject to drastic changes, especially when other means are used to supplement incomes. For example, depending on the size, condition and age of a , one can fetch upwards of pi5,000 or $500 dollars Canadian. Given their value, livestock are often sold to pay for major expenses such as tuition fees, funerals, weddings and medical costs. Wealthier families own the more expensive livestock such as carabaos, cows and pigs while many households have chickens and ducks (see Table 39). Table 39: Number and Type of Livestock in Burot, 2002 Type of Totals Livestock Carabaos 42 Cows 28 Pigs 42 Goats 26 Chickens 86 Ducks 50 Ganea* 15 Total 289 Source: Barangay Burot Census Data (August 2002). * A ganea is a type of fowl closely resembling the common North American turkey and is more expensive than the local costs of chickens (manok) or ducks (pato).

Besides selling livestock, there are other avenues of recourse where families may turn to for extra money. According to my interviews (21 of 29 families), it is common practice to ask landowners for loans since tenants generally make very little off the harvests and usually owe money to them for farming expenses incurred from the previous seasons. Again, this situation puts farmers in a delicate position since creditors (even relatives!) charge exorbitant rates of interest on loans serving to further worsen their financial situations. From my observations, people would rather go to the patron in the area then to a formal credit granting institution for help since such relations have been built up over generations. Alternatively, families may ask other relatives for money or the farming co-operative that lends out both agricultural and livelihood loans. The farming co-operative in the area is based in Burot and consists of 138 families from other neighbouring barangays. Beginning in the early 1990s, co-op members contribute a fee (usually pi00 per year) to a capital-sharing fund where loans have been drawn from since 1998. Over the last four years, 48 families have applied for agricultural loans of p2,000 per hectare of farmland they own. In addition, over the last year, 5 households have applied for livelihood Ill loans totaling pi0,000 each. Barangay officials complained that many families have trouble paying back the loans and questioned how the money was being used. Although many of the families hailed the loaning programme as a success, it provided hardly enough capital to break the cycle of economic restrictions imposed by farming for the majority households.

6.3.3 A verage Income Households and Out Migration In comparison to the other income groups, the average income-earning households are in the best economic position. They control the surplus of agricultural production, hold positions as local barangay councilors, have enough money to lend credit and to pay for major expenses during the season, while also having family members engaged in domestic or overseas work. I interviewed 8 of the 10 families from this group. In terms of families with overseas workers, I conducted interviews with all 10 households, 6 of them are in the average income category. Outside of my immediate family, there was not one resident of Burot who has immigrated to another country. In addition to better educational attainment and holding professional jobs like teaching, wealthier households benefit the most from cash remittance flows. Within a familial context, economic remittances significantly shape non-agricultural and agricultural labour market participation, income levels, the handling of expenses, and the divisions of household work. Table 40 provides the types of occupations that average income families engage in. As was mentioned earlier, 2 of the 3 teacher households in this category are primary sources of income, the third is a secondary source. With the exception of one wealthy farmer, the remaining six are overseas households. Cash remittances are used to supplement family incomes, and to better diversify work and income generating strategies through the purchasing of tricycles (3 families), opening sari-sari stores (2 families) and buying more livestock (all 6 overseas families). This not only provides work for family members during slack times of the season, but people outside of the family are also hired into the various strategies such as tricycle taxi driving into Santa Barbara. On their farms, all families use economic remittances to acquire more land and buy additional inputs and machinery. Additional labour may also be hired during busy harvest periods. 112 Table 40: Average Income Household Occupational Structure and Sources of Income, 2002 Occupation/Sources of Income Total Location of Work Number Teacher 3 New Lucena and Santa Barbara Wealthy Farmer with no family 1 Burot Overseas Workers Seamen (4 Males) 4 Japan, Brazil, Singapore, Africa Domestic Helper (DH) (1 Female) 1 Hong Kong Nurse (1 Male) 1 Ireland Total 10 - Source: Interviews, Household and Farming Surveys, Burot (2002).

Average income households accumulate the surplus of both local and transnational capital. Table 41 illustrates that these households break even with respect to incomes and expenses. These figures give an idea of the household economic conditions for average income families, but like the figures for the below average income group, they are a bit misleading. During interviews, families were very hesitant to provide monthly and yearly amounts of cash remittances. I suspect that this is due to the intimacy of social relations within Burot, as they do not want neighbours and relatives to know about their savings for fear of envy or robbery. In a sense, local elites were safeguarding their interests, as many members of the average income families are also local politicians.31 However, one family said that they receive approximately p20,000 per month in remittances or around $550 dollars Canadian. This figure provides some bearing as to the impact of remittances on overseas average income households. It is a substantial amount where one month of remittances is equivalent to more than half of a low- income household earning p36,000 per year.

Table 41: Average Income Households, Expenses and Value of Remittances Incomes and Expenses Totals Below Average Income (p5,001 - 10,000 +) 10 Households Average Income Per Month pl3,400 Average Expenses Per Month pl3,400 Total Difference Even Source: Barangay Burot Livelihood and Income Survey (September 2002). These figuresar e based on averages taken through an official barangay survey assessing incomes and livelihoods in the area. Major expenses for this group includes (1) Food; (2) Clothing; (3) Shelter, (4) Farming Inputs; (5) Education and (6) Medical care.

I believe some of the households submitted more modest income amounts for the Burot Livelihood Survey for the same reason 113 In terms of household expenses, the remittance money has a variety of uses especially for food (sudari) and education. Attending college or university is viewed by these households as essential for securing a better future for family members and for being more qualified to work in and out of the country. In this way, these families further accumulate social capital resources through education. In addition, like families in Cuartero, another primary use is to secure a house and lot and to improve the physical structure of their homes by building them with heavier materials like concrete.

Having family members overseas also affects household power structures and divisions of work. For the two families with female members working abroad as domestic helpers, extended family members, usually the grandmother (lold), aid the temporary single fathers with everyday chores such as cooking, cleaning, and childcare. Similarly, for the male members away at sea, fatherly roles are fulfilled by older children of the family, an uncle (tito) or grandfather (lold). In addition, the purchasing of major appliances with remittances such as refrigerators and gas stoves also eases everyday household work. With the majority of homes not owning refrigerators, having one is viewed as a luxury. While most homes use wood and charcoal (oling) for cooking food and to boil water, a gas stove greatly reduces the time involved for these types of activities. It is my hope that by looking closely at the details of the everyday economic life of these different social groups, that the challenges to out migration become more clear. All the income groups are able to make ends meet and are very far from starving and being destitute. This is not the essentialized picture of rural life that I want to present. Instead, my goal is to show how they create different forms of work with the resources available, how this interacts with existing power structures, and the different means of recourse they turn to when they need extra money. My main point is that the labour practices of these different social strata have specific spatialities and are capable of different forms of migration, as wealthier groups, the minority of the Ilonggo population, become transnational, while lower income groups, the majority of the Ilonggo population, are grounded in their migration patterns and are limited to moving around the Iloilo urban region. But regardless of economic categories, planning to migrate out of Burot is very a expensive endeavor.

6.3.4 Everyday Expenses and Strategies to Finance Domestic and Overseas Trips In addition to the six average income households with overseas workers, the remaining four families (2 in the below average income group and another 2 in the low-income bracket), all 114 faced difficulty in trying to finance their trips either to Manila or overseas (see Table 42). On the whole, wealthier families are in a much better position, but still had to marshal a variety of resources to pay for the required fees and incidental costs. For the four households in the lower income groups, paying for the trip posed an even greater challenge, as they are required to pay off their family debts first and consequently could not benefit as much from economic remittances compared to wealthier families. Table 42: Total Overseas Workers from Burot Occupation Total # Gender Location of Work Domestic Helper 5 All Female Hong Kong, Singapore (3), Malaysia Nurse 1 Male Ireland Seaman 4 All Male Japan, Brazil, Singapore, Africa Total 9 - - Source: Interviews, Household and Fanning Surveys, Burot (2002).

There are both economic and social obstacles for out-migration. Economically, as the patterns of land tenure and household incomes suggest, the sheer cost of attempting an overseas, or even a domestic trip, is very prohibitive for the majority of families in Burot. In terms of incidental costs, the process begins by making trips into the city of Iloilo or to other major Philippine urban centres (Cebu or Manila) where overseas work offices are located. Costs increase significantly if it is required to fly to Manila for an overseas work office (a flight is around $300 dollars Canadian), with additional money needed for local transport, food and lodging. According to my interviews and depending on the location of employment, the placement fee to work as a domestic helper in Southeast Asia can range anywhere from p65,000 to p75,000 (about $1,800 to $2,100 dollars Canadian). The placement fees include the required medical exams, training, and processing of documents, passports and visas. From a financial perspective, for the 54 households making below p60,000 per year (84 per cent of total families in Burot), following through on such a proposition is discouraging and highly unlikely. My second obstacle relates to the nature of social networks and contacts, or lack of them, in finding work in Manila or overseas. Drawing on familial networks can greatly reduce the amount of incidental costs while also serving as a source of credit to pay for placement fees. One returned female domestic helper from Singapore commented on the costs and motivations for going overseas: 115 Because farming is a very hard work, right, so of course they have to find another or better job compared to farming. But since they don't have money, because going abroad or going overseas you have to spend a lot of money. So it's very hard also to find money for to spend. For example, transportation, for foods, because if you are going overseas, if you are going and applying for a job, you cannot find work immediately, sometimes you have to stay six months or sometimes almost one year to find a job. You have no assurance also. Going anywhere, like going to Manila, you have no assurance to work immediately. You have to wait and pay for everything.

The main reason for going abroad is to make more money. In this sense, foreign income is exponentially more valuable in the local Philippine context both in terms of economic welfare and in terms of local social prestige. The four families and individuals in the lower income groups believed that financing the trips was worth the risks but had a harder time marshaling together their resources than the wealthier groups. Overseas families devised a number of ways to pay for work abroad. The families interviewed used a combination of selling livestock, turning their land titles over to the bank, or borrowing money from friends, family or usurers. A family's ability to benefit from the subsequent remittance flows is dependent on a number of factors. First, if fees and costs are paid from savings, the effect of cash remittances on household incomes are almost immediate, as is the case with most average income families. The four lower income overseas families used salary reductions (lasting six to eight months) to pay for the initial placement fees, with the remaining remittance money devoted to the paying of family debts (utang), some of which have been mounting for years. In this case, the impact of remittances is not immediate. Second, the nature of the labour market experience of the family member overseas can result in little to no money being sent back. Some family members had to wait several months to get a placement while both costs of living away from home and interest on loans and debts for the farm continued to mount. In the end, lower-income overseas households face an uphill climb in improving their socio-economic mobility as they struggle to pay off their debts. Wealthier families, on the other hand, face better prospects as remittance capital fiirther accumulates allowing for other family members to prosper within or outside Burot. In this sense, economic remittances serve to further widen the social and economic gap between the rich and poor in rural areas.

6.3.5 Standby and Banditry as a Way of Life Not limited to any specific socio-economic group in Burot, the structural inequality of rice production and the seasonal cycles of labour availability have led to the common practices 116 of "standby" and banditry in the area. Like Cuartero in the city, the standby culture literally means to standby on the roadside and pass the time. It is common during the day that farming work slows to a halt from 1 lam to 2pm. This is not only the lunch period and a time to take naps (siesta), but it allows workers the chance to get out of the blazing midday sun. As many told me, to work under it during this time is actually unproductive for working later in the afternoon. These periods of standby are further intensified during slow work stretches in-between seasonal harvests, where many cannot find extra work, leading to both positive and negative aspects of the standby practice. On the one hand, slow periods allow for activities of social cohesion and community building such as playing games, chatting and gossiping (chismis). They also allow more opportunity for gambling, a favorite Filipino pastime, which I was invited to join on numerous occasions.

Conversely, banditry, highway robbery and cattle rustling are a way of life for many teenagers and young men in the area. When asked of the behavior of youths and the availability of jobs in the city and neighbouring towns, one young mother commented:

There is no available job here of course! It is because that if there is a job here so some of the people here or the teenagers here will not make somethings that are bad, just like cattle rustling, hold ups . .. anything like that. Some people here are scary especially when they are drunk. It is because to, there are many notorious people here.

Like the drug traders and thieves in Jaro and Cuartero, for many, a life of criminality is more profitable, and more dangerous, than working on the farm. As one farmer remarked, "if you don't have money, you don't have food." Stealing cattle and carabaos is the most profitable criminal activity as an average water buffalo can fetch $300 to $400 dollars Canadian. I gathered from my interviews that the neighbouring barangay called Jelicuon is often labeled as the place where robbers originate from and also as the location where stolen cattle can be reclaimed for ransom. A less common practice is to steal the tumpi or unthreshed palay shafts during harvest periods. Under cover of night, robbers use a traditional harvest method called Unas that involves stepping in a rhythmic pattern in order to separate the palay grains from the shafts. The grains are sacked and then carried away. The constant warnings of the locals, along with my family, that "you shouldn't travel at night" or that "you shouldn't go to other barangays because these are places of cattle rustlers and robbers", only made sense after I returned to Vancouver. It was then that I learned that one of my interviewees was shot and killed. This instance erased any thoughts I had about exaggerations of the stories I heard from the people of Burot. Their situations were very real, 117 both in the way they made a living and of the dangerous events that characterized their everyday lives.

6.4 Youth Perspectives on Work and the Fate of the Farms Unlike the older generations, most young people in Burot do not want to live and work as farmers. For them, the ideal is to migrate to Manila to earn higher salaries or go overseas to acquire foreign capital and then translate it into local wealth so that "they can make their poor families to rise up," as one 19-year-old female college student said. Over the last 5 years, there have been about a dozen young people that have left Burot, 3 of them going to Manila, the rest to Iloilo City with a few more scattered in other small towns on Panay. Different from families in Cuartero, few Burot households have family members in other major urban areas in the Philippines and this greatly reduces processes of chain migration. In addition to the 29 families interviewed, I was able to speak with 14 young people (4 females and 10 males) within these households ranging in age from their late teens to mid-twenties. Included into this number is a young couple who headed their own household. These people are hard working and highly motivated, and similar to the youths interviewed in Cuartero, are frustrated with being unable to find work in the region, the lack of good paying salaries in Iloilo, and had higher material expectations than farming livelihoods can provide. Ultimately their goal is to improve the living conditions of their families.

According to my interviews, the ability to out-migrate is dependent on individual motivation, educational qualifications and the amount of family resources available. Regarding individual motivation, one 24-year-old female resident commented:

Because if you are ambitious or whatever, if you want to reach high and want to be a successful, you have to find a job right? So it depends on the person also if they want to go abroad and if they want to climb. But sometimes they are contented for what they're given for now. Just if they eat three times a day they don't care, they don't mind already the future.

Of this group of young interviewees, most excel in the academic setting, some hold small scholarships to study at the technical college in New Lucena while others are admitted to schools in the city such as Western Visayas State University and the prestigious private Central Philippine University. "There is no family decision on who goes. Those who are qualified are the ones that can go abroad," one young father noted. Education is viewed as the best way to leave Burot. 118 In terms of family resources, 4 of the 14 interviewees (all males) are siblings of family members working overseas but only one came from an average income-earning household. This speaks again to the issue of a family's availability to save enough money to send other members away to work. Chain migration is unlikely to occur for lower income earning households, as they simply cannot afford to send two members away at one time. Of this group of 4, one of them wanted to work abroad when he finished his schooling and the remaining three opted to remain in Burot to take care of older family members and to act as stewards of their farms. "You don't also want to stay there for all your life for a long time and serve as a driver or domestic helper," said one 24 year old resident.

It is evident, then, that the remaining group of 10 are influenced by the material and cultural transformations experienced by overseas households and the "social remittances" that are transmitted into the area. All suggested that they would work elsewhere if given the opportunity to acquire foreign capital:

Well, you know many of the younger people want to go to greener pastures. Some have already left for Manila, others are overseas, and some are in Iloilo. Most, of course, don't want to be farmers. The work is very hard (Mother of Overseas Worker, 2002).

You know I'm here doing nothing. I feel bored. Sometimes you staying here and you have no money, you want to go somewhere, you want to buy things, but you don't know how to get them. But if you find job, so whatever you want you can get sometimes. So if I have money, the necessary things I do need then I can buy also (Returned Domestic Helper, 2002).

Like many residents in Cuartero pointed out, lack of job opportunities in Iloilo drive many to seek higher incomes in Manila. One resident said:

It is hard to find a job in Iloilo ... I want to work as a bank employee. I would like to work preferably in US, Singapore or anywhere because of course the salary is higher compared here in Iloilo. Because there is no more companies here . . . those companies that are internationally established like San Miguel, of course there is branches here, but they don't operate like in other big cities, only in Manila and international operation. For example, bank employees here earns not like in other cities or in outside countries because they are just only earning salary of 6,000 (pesos) a month and I think it is not enough for if you have a family of your own to support them (20 year old Male College Student).

For job opportunities, I think not (regarding finding them in Iloilo). Because the minimum salary is very low compared to the other provinces . . . They don't follow the minimum salary, unlike Cebu, if compared to Cebu. Because Cebu is a progressing city, they have a lot of job opportunities there, like factories, so here in Iloilo ... no, not too much, only malls and department stores (24 year old Female Resident). 119

This last quote speaks to the influx of value added urban industrial work that has been brought to the Cebu area through the Mactan export processing zone initiated in the late 1970s. Of course, this type of economic decentralization has not made its way into the Iloilo region. Others still complained about the nature of hiring systems through social networks even though they are highly qualified but lack the necessary contacts to land a job. One university graduate argued:

Here in our place, here in Iloilo, especially in New Lucena, they are more for what we call politics. If you have connection with the politics or if you have what we call or are related to a politician, or if you have relatives there, so it is easy for you to find job. But if not... sorry, if you have not yet been strongly recommended, so you will wait for the time and the right place. Even in this barangay, if you don't have the connections to the politicians, it is difficult for you to find job, even if you are qualified.

These themes are very similar to the perspectives found with young Ilonggo urbanites. In their view, there are not many good paying jobs in the Iloilo area. Those that have the motivation and training often find their way to the primate city of Manila or overseas. Others are left with continuing in the same lines of work as the previous generations. Although the perception among young people of Burot is to seek "greener pastures" elsewhere, the reality is that many will remain tied to the agrarian economy unless family resources and the nature of social networks change in the future to allow out migration. Given this discussion, Burot is not in jeopardy of losing its young farmers. As one mother of an overseas family stated, even the goal of workers abroad is to return.

There will always be farmers. Those that are "left" here are the ones attending the farms, and other members of the family that have the chance to be working abroad are just working for capital. So that when they stop, they have the capital to spend to the farm or start whatever business they wanted to put up.

6.5 Labour Control in a Rural Setting This chapter attempted to illustrate how Burot families of varying socio-economic standing participate in the labour market of the agrarian economy of Iloilo. Inevitably, forms of labour participation become entangled in class power relationships leading to a number of factors that serve to perpetuate the economic and social structures of inequality that prevent the upward social and economic mobility of many below average and lower income earning farming households in Burot. The uneven patterns of land tenure and their historical origins are central in 120 explaining the economic conditions for the majority of working households. The small number of landed elite, the so-called average income households, are the most economically stable and secure, occupying the roles of creditors and accumulating the surplus of agricultural production and remittance capital being sent from family members overseas. Such families have the means to make it through difficult times during the season, can afford to send their children to school, pay for proper health care, and are better capable to cover the costs for family members to go work overseas.

These structural forms of inequality also lead to a number of activities and expectations that are experienced by the young people of the area. Seeing very little by way of high paying work in Iloilo, many of the young people have dreams of migrating out of the barangay but are limited by their families' social and economic resources. Other youths are exposed to the very real and sometimes very dangerous practice of banditry that is commonly found in the province. But the reality of the situation is that many of these young people in Burot will face the same prospects for work as previous generations and will continue to work as rice farmers. With the unprofitable nature of rice production and capturing little of its surplus, the majority of households face a constant state of debt, supplement their incomes by engaging in other forms of work, and often rely on their long standing relationships with their landowners for favors and extra money. It was shown that from the position of these social groups, producing rice is generally an unprofitable practice where farmers lose control of the surplus to the landed elite due to specific arrangements under the kasama contract, while they spend more for inputs than they earn from their farms. This also puts tenants in a position to occupy the role of renter, paying for the use of capital goods, and continuously borrowing money for both farming and household expenses, that all combine to further reduce their overall incomes. Even with its monetary unprofitability, rice farming continues to be a way of life and survival for the farmers in Iloilo. It is a deeply embedded cultural practice that will continue to be passed on from generation to generation.

My final point here is that inherent to the economic conditions of most of the households in Burot is restricted labour mobility, a significant reason for explaining the lack of secondary- city growth in Iloilo. Not too poor to be driven into conflict and not too wealthy in having the resources for out-migration, structural conditions are mainly responsible for keeping lower income farming families grounded. In other words, the rich not only become richer by connecting themselves to international networks of remittance capital, but they become more 121 mobile, while within the context of the limitations imposed by Iloilo's agrarian economy, the rest of the farmers remain tied to the countryside. PART IV: RESULTS AND CONCLUSIONS 123 CHAPTER 7

MAKING SENSE OF THE URBAN AND RURAL ECONOMY OF ILOILO

At the outset of this thesis, I began with the key argument that local social class structures and the activities of local actors do indeed play central roles in explaining the present economic conditions of Iloilo at the provincial, city, and household levels, and that the lack of effectiveness of national state decentralization policies is not a sufficient enough answer in describing the development story of Iloilo. I will now attempt to show how the preceding chapters contribute to answering my central research question. How do local social class structures shape the organization of the regional and urban economy of Iloilo and what are its implications for the human scale of work, household economic conditions and labour mobilityfor Ilonggos in the city and in the countryside? In Chapter 2,1 attempted to negotiate between theoretical perspectives on the international political economy of urbanization (grand theory and dependency), with regional development paradigms (growth pole thinking and secondary cities as regional economic generators), with Marxian and class based approaches to secondary urbanization (the role of landed mercantile elites), in trying to make sense of Iloilo's economy. In the Philippine context, all have some relevance, but Smith's (1985) class based approach provides the clearest explanation of what is indeed taking place in the case of Iloilo. To borrow again from the terminology of de Janvry (1981), the absence of an international or dependent capitalist class oriented to international investment and foreign interests is not represented in Iloilo. Instead, landed elites, national level capitalists, and the rest of the upper echelon of the class strata exert their significant influence over the economy. This has important implications for state driven policies of economic decentralization and for the lives and work of 'regular' people living in peripheral regions.

The role of the state, the continuing patterns of urban primacy and their historical origins, was the main focus of Chapter 3. In this section I also addressed how the Philippines underwent a non-uniform spatial integration into the global economy that led to different regional experiences of Spanish colonial expansion and resulted in the organization of different class groups at different spatial scales. One of the outcomes, perhaps not as pronounced in other national contexts, is the relationship between local elites and state apparatuses. This is a main issue to consider since state attempts at spatial economic decentralization will most likely be interpreted, guided or rejected by local power players depending on if such initiatives serve their 124 material interests in the region. So the focus then shifted to how this class based theoretical perspective and specific spatial decentralization policies materialized in the Province of Iloilo itself. In Chapter 4,1 explained the details of Iloilo's historical involvement in Spanish colonialism and the regional economy's shift to the agricultural export production of sugar and how these are the main reasons for the present social class structure and for the current state of the provincial and urban economy. The evolution of Iloilo's integration into the global economy under Spanish colonial expansion is a very complex process that, as McCoy (1982) notes, led to three sets of structural transformations from the middle of the eighteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth century. The first involved the shift from an agricultural economy to a "Chinese economy" of textile production and trading. The second involved the movement from textiles to an economy of sugar, coinciding with the dictates of changing Spanish colonial interests in the region. This shift built on existing pre-colonial power structures with economic power, both in the city and in the countryside, becoming increasingly concentrated within the hands of a group of ethnically distinct social elites. It was also during this period that Iloilo became a warehousing and port centre as neighbouring Negros lacked a sufficient port facility. The final shift, that represented the main factor responsible for Iloilo's present economic lethargy, was the switching of animal powered sugar mills to industrial steamed power mills. This led to an exponential production of sugar that required more labour in the production, storage and transportation process. As a consequence, labour disputes arose at the port of Iloilo and in the sugar mills of Negros. The international capitalists, the merchant trading casas, devised a way to logistically eliminate Iloilo from the production and transportation equation by directly loading sugar in deep-sea anchorage sites from light ships to large freighters off the coast of Negros. To paraphrase McCoy (1982), this was the death of the "Queen". The casas along with other international and national capitalist class groups left Iloilo when the sugar industry declined. The "Queen" was now asleep and my focus turned to how the "sleepiness" of the economy related with recent initiatives of economic decentralization. Even though the emphasis in the second part of Chapter 4 did not focus exclusively on the activities of the provincial elites themselves, their presence became evident by examining the details of the province's agrarian economy, with its limited number of economic functions in the city, a lack of diversity of industries, the disproportional concentration of population numbers in different income groups and labour sectors, the high rates of poverty, especially in rural settings, and the relatively low levels of urbanization. These were all elements of a non-capitalist or pre- 125 capitalist society where specific social groups hindered capitalist expansion. These were also symptomatic characteristics of how Smith conceptualized urban and rural economies in secondary cities with a limited number of industries, and moderate urban population sizes. In scaling down further, Chapters 5 and 6 represented the "view from below" and the human scale of how different families made sense of "living in the shadows of the Queen". The chapters showed how present social class structures affect the composition of local labour markets and the sorts of structural inequalities and related social behaviours that exist in both urban and rural settings. In Iloilo City, I argued that a 'closed' labour market, meaning a limited number of workers in specific industries, has contributed to quasi-involution, with government and professional type occupations superseding industrial employment, leaving the majority of the urban population working in lower paying urban service type occupations, or for lack of a better term, the 'informal sector'. I then moved to the specific details of work arrangements and income generating strategies that, in terms of stability and dependency relationships, paralleled the hierarchy of social class groups in Ilonggo society. Stable and better paying jobs went to more elite groups while lower income families engaged in a diversity of livelihoods. This also spoke to what groups could experience forms of out-migration and overseas work and their related benefits. Although mostly the domain of wealthier groups, there is the presence of a 'transitional class' group undergoing significant changes in their household divisions of labour, local social status, and general labour market participation, or lack thereof. In moving into the province, Chapter 6 argued that the nature of the land tenure system has led to restricted labour mobility for the majority of the rural population. This trend, combined with a closed labour market system in the city, helps to explain Iloilo's medium size and its growth through mainly natural population increase. The historical origins of this land tenure arrangement help to provide greater insight into the nature of the unequal distribution of wealth in rural areas, that leads farmers to perpetuate the social structures of inequality that serve to restrict their mobility. The few rural families with overseas workers, at least within the context of Region VI, suggest that overseas migration is overly concentrated in urban areas. With respect to the transformative properties of remittance capital, changes are taking place both externally and internally to households, both in terms of divisions and arrangements of labour, and socio-culturally by way of status and lifestyle. Families either supplement or enhance their general labour market practices, typically occurring within the city services sector while hiring other forms of labour for the household. It was also noted that the standby practice has evolved from economic and structural outcome to cultural custom and remittances greatly 126 serve to intensify these types of activities. Remittances also help in accelerating processes of chain migration and permanent immigration, even though such activities are only taking place within a relatively few, and mostly wealthier families. I also showed concern for the next generation of Ilonggo workers, the young people, and examined their expectations and hopes for working in the province, city and abroad, along with the types of social behavior youth groups practice given the structural inequalities in the city and province. Some determined individual agents will indeed take part in the growing trend of overseas work and go to sites of intense capitalist production, but most will never experience out-migration and will work in the same types of jobs as the previous generations. On the whole then, there are a number of key points that serve to answer my main research question. First, the structure of Iloilo's economy shifted from a core area under the Chinese international economy, to a pre-capitalist one after the sugar trade. This process of integration of the region under Spanish colonialism, and the structural changes it underwent, built on existing power structures, concentrating forms of power in specific social groups. Second, the absence of an international group of capitalists, such as the Chinese entrepreneurs and the casas, left the city and province under the control of landed elites who then shaped the local economy to meet their material interests. Third, these arrangements had serious effects at the local level as the presence of this social class structure corresponds to the relative economic conditions of households, the stability and types of occupations they work in, and to the groups that can out-migrate in both urban and rural settings. The original aim of this project was to examine the effects of national state level spatial economic decentralization polices on urban labour markets in Philippine secondary cities. One of the conclusions I have come to is that the administration and implementation of any type of decentralization strategy at the local level and within the context of the Philippines, becomes highly politicized and inevitably entangled with issues of class and power relations in the local political scene. Such decisions simply do not exist in a vacuum. So what then can be done to improve the spatial decentralization of the economy to peripheral urban regions and how can the lives of the 'regular' Ilonggos improve within this present social structure? Kelly (2000) has shown that the political and economic slogans of "decentralization and balanced regional growth" serve more as the metaphorical rhetoric of globalization than existing in reality. Global economic flows in the form of direct foreign investment and higher value added forms of manufacturing employment will continue to concentrate in the extended metropolitan region of Metro Manila with little growth in other 127 urban areas like Iloilo. So, as it has been for the last century, it is unlikely then, that the power structure in Ilonggo society will greatly change or be challenged and the expansion of capital will continue to be impeded. In terms of initiatives at the local level, unsuccessful microcredit and livelihood programs have been introduced in both Cuartero and Burot, but lower income families complained that only a small number of households are helped, while local government officials find that many families experience difficulties in paying back the loans.

The initiative, and agency, rests with the Ilonggos themselves. As many families and individuals in this study have demonstrated, determination and ambition does lead to "greener pastures". I suspect that in the future more and more individuals from Iloilo City will be making the journey overseas in search of earning foreign capital. In terms of future research, it would be interesting to see how this theoretical debate in political economy between core-periphery thinking and a class fundamentalist view, manifests itself in other regions in the Philippines such as Negros or Mindanao or in another country in Southeast Asia. Finally, at a personal level, trying to understand Ilonggo society has given me a greater appreciation of my family and of myself and I know that today, more so than in the days before, that I am a very fortunate person. In telling the stories of Cuartero and Burot, and of who has left, and of who is back again, in a sense, is the telling of the story of my own family. But whether in the city or in the countryside, the story of the region is that the majority of Ilonggos are kept as a permanently underpaid and transient labour pool for the region. They are not destitute to the point of mass out-migration or wealthy enough to change their situations. But it is their lives and work that make urbanization and rural life happen everyday in peripheral spaces of the economy. 128 Bibliography

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BARANGAY CUARTERO HOUSEHOLD SURVEY

NAME: Household #:

1. How long have you lived at this address? Years

2. How many children do you have?

3. Please list the family members who live in your house? n. in. IV. v. VI. Name Gender Relation Place/Age Highest Occupation to you (arrival date, educational if not from here) attainment a. M/F / b. _ M/F c. _ M/F d- M/F e. _ M/F f. _ M/F M/F g-

4. Where are your other children? And how long have they been away? Name. Year of birth Year they left Where do they live Type of work now? (Which City,Country) h.

J-

5. Who helps in each of the following household chores? Names a. Cooking b. Wash clothes c. Cleaning d. Marketing e. Childcare f. HH repairs

6. What is your family's main source of livelihood? i.Name ii.Type of work? iii. Where? iv. Start Year v. Who from your family vi. In what way do they help? helps with this? 137 7. Please list other activities contributing to your family's livelihood? (For example, second and third jobs, small services provided). i. ii. iii. iv. v. vi. What is Who? Where? Start Who helps? How much it? Year? Does it provide?

8. Do you have bedspacers in your house? No Yes If yes then answer the following. i. ii. iii. iv. v. vi. Name Gender Age Arrived From? Highest Occupation (City, Province) Educational Attainment a. M/F b. M/F c. M/F

9. Is there anyone in your household currently working abroad? No Yes i. ii. iii. iv. v. vi. vii. Who? (M/F) Relation Where? Type of Educ'l Start to you? Work? Attnm't Year? a. ( ) b- ( ) _ c ( )

viii. Are they contributing? ix. How much do they send each month? a. a._ b. b. c. c.

10. Has anyone in your household worked abroad in the past? No Yes

i. ii. iii. iv. Who? Type of work? Where? When? (e.g. 1998-2000)

J 138 BARANGAY CUARTERO HOUSEHOLD SURVEY

PANGALAN: Numero sang balay:

1. Pila ka tuig na kamo diri nga naga-istar?

2. Pila ka bilog ang imo mga kabataan?

3. Palihog lista sang mga ngalan sang membro sang inyo panimalay i. ii. iii. iv. v. vi. Pangalan Lalaki/ Relasyon niya Lugar/edad Pinakataas Obra Babae sa imo (petsa sang pag-abot nyanga kung indi siya taga-diri) tinum-an a. L/B b. L/B c. L/B d. L/B e. L/B f. L/B g. L/B

4. Sa diin na ang imo iban nga kabataan? Daw ano ka lawig nga na wala sila diri? i. ii. iii. iv. v. Pangalan Tuig sang Tuig sang Diin na sila subong Klase sang obra Pagkabun-ag ila paglakat naga-istar (Diin nga syudad, nasyon) h. i. J- 5. Sin-o ang naga-obra sang sini nga mga ulobrahon? Pangalan a. Pagluto b. Pagpanlaba c. Pagpaninlo d. pagpaninda e. Atipan sang bata f. Pagpangay-o sa balay

6. Ano ang una nga palangabuhi-an sang inyo pamilya? LPangalan ii.Klase sang obra? iii. Sa diin? iv. Tuig nga siya nagsugod v. Sin-o sa inyo pamilya vi.Paano sila makabulig? ang nagabulig sini?

7. Palihog lista sang iban pa nga bulohaton nga nagabulig pa gid sa inyo palangabuhian? (Halimbawa, ikaduha kag ikatlo nga gina-obra, gamay nga bulig nga imo mahatag). i. ii. iii. iv. v. vi. Anoina? Sin-o? SaDiin? Tuig nga siya Sin-o ang Pila ang iya nagsugod? nagabulig? mahatag? 8. May naga-arkila bala sa inyo balay? Wala Huo Kun may-ara, sabta ang mga masunod. i. ii. iii. iv. v. vi. Pangalan Lalaki/ Edad Naghaiinsa? Mataasnga Obra Babae (Syudad, Probinsya) tinun-an a. L/B b. L/B c. L/B

9. May-ara bala sa inyo balay nga "overseas workers"? Wala Huo i. ii. iii. iv. v. vi. vii. Sin-o? (L/B) Relasyon Sa diin? Klase sang Mataas nga Tuig nga saimo? obra? tinun-an nagsugod? a. ( ) b. ( ) c ( ) viii. Nagabulig bala sila? ix. Pila ang ila ginapadala kada bulan? a. a. b. b. c. c.

10. May-ara bala sa inyo balay nga naga-obra sa iban nga nasyon "abroad" sang nagligad? Wala Huo i- ii. iii. iv. Sin-o? Klase sang obra? Sadiin? San-o? (hal. 1998-2000) APPENDIX B: BUROT HOUSEHOLD AND FARMING SURVEY BARANGAY BUROT HOUSEHOLD SURVEY

PANGALAN: Numero sang survey:

1. Pila ka tuig na kamo diri nga naga-istar?

2. Pila ka bilog ang imo mga kabataan?

3. Palihog lista sang mga ngalan sang membro sang inyo panimalay i. ii. iii. iv. v. vi. Pangalan Lalaki/ Relasyonniya Lugar/ Pinakataas Obra Babae sa imo (petsa sang pag-abot nya nga kung indi siya taga-diri) tinun-an a. L/B / b._ L/B / c. L/B d._ L/B e. L/B f._ L/B g-- L/B

Sa diin na ang imo iban nga kabataan? Daw ano ka lawig nga na wala sila diri? n. in. iv. Pangalan Tuig sang Tuig sang Diin na sila subong Klase sang obra Pagkabun-ag ila paglakat naga-istar (Diin nga syudad, nasyon) i.

5. Sin-o ang naga-obra sang sini nga mga ulobrahon? Pangalan a. Pagluto b. Pagpanlaba c. Pagpaninlo d. pagpaninda e. Atipan sang bata f. Pagpangay-o sa balay 142 6. What vegetables and fruits do you plant?

Type

7. Which members of your family help with the following farming activities? i. Names ii. Hired Help? a. Ploughing ______b. Planting c. Fertilizing d. Applying pesticides e. Weeding f. Watering g. Harvesting h. Selling vegetables i. Looking after livestock j.Bringing food to fields

8. Where did you borrow money for farming from?

i.Bank ii.Individual in Burot iii.Person not in Burot iv.Other (specify)

9. After all of your farming expenses and debts were covered, how much rice was left for you?

a.Last rainy season b.This dry season (cavans)

10. How much were you paid for each kilo of rice?

aLast rainy season (pesos/kg) b.This dry season (pesos/kg)