2299 8234 1 PB

Mendoza / Landlessness, War, and Displacement 89
LANDLESSNESS, WAR, AND

DISPLACEMENT IN LITERATURES OF
MINDANAO AND SULU
Sherwin Mendoza
De Anza College, Cupertino, CA
mendozasherwin@deanza.edu
Abstract
This monograph attempts to clarify the relationships of Filipino Americans to the
diaspora of Christian settler colonists in Mindanao with the hope of facilitating solidarity
between Filipino Americans and the peoples of Mindanao and Sulu. It begins with a
consideration of Carlos Bulosan, perhaps the most prominent figure within the discipline
of Filipino American Studies, in terms of the brief appearance of Mindanao in America
is in the Heart. The bulk of the monograph, however, is centered on literatures of the
Southern Philippines, a region that is often overlooked within the discipline of Filipino
American Studies, and in particular it examines the historical evolution of landlessness,
displacement, and war in the Southern Philippines through the close reading of texts
produced there. The first text is Blue Blood of the Big Astana, a story from the
Commonwealth period of US-Philippine history, written by Ibrahim Jubaira, the most-
recognized Muslim writer in English from the Philippines. Jubairas story is notable
for its depiction of the persistence of ideas concerning land tenure, status, and kinship
from a time just prior to US colonial rule within a context determined by the increasing
inroads of merchant capitalism fostered by the US colonial state. However, Jubairas story
is very partial when contextualized in terms of debates concerning the fate of Mindanao
and Sulu during the years preceding the formal independence of the Philippines. The
monograph then moves to the near-present to consider a story by the Maranao
writer Loren Hallilah I. Lao, The Trip to a Forbidden Land, as a plea for peace that is
constrained by the middle-class setting of the story. Finally, the emphasis shifts to a set of
oral histories collected in the volume Land Tenure Stories in Central Mindanao. The shift
to this set of texts corrects an urban and middle-class bias in the stories of Jubaira and
Lao that would prevent Filipino American readers from understanding the concerns of
Muslims and indigenous peoples and the causes of conflicts in the Southern Philippines.
The stories of a specific conflict over land told by Muslims and Manobos in Land Tenure
Stories highlight the importance of land as a necessary part of the livelihoods of many
of the indigenous, Muslim, and Christian people of Mindanao and the ways in which
landlessness and the lack of livelihoods are causes of conflicts in the Southern Philippines.
Kritika Kultura 25 (2015): 141 Ateneo de Manila University

<http://kritikakultura.ateneo.net>
Keywords
Filipino American Literature, Filipino diaspora, internally displaced persons, landlessness,
Muslim Filipino Literature, Philippine Literature in English
About the Author

Sherwin Mendoza recently received a Ph.D. in World Literature and Cultural Studies
from the University of California, Santa Cruz, with a dissertation on the influence of the
movement for national democracy in the Philippines on works by Mila Aguilar, Linda
Ty-Casper, Jessica Hagedorn, and Ninotchka Rosca. His Ilocano maternal grandparents,
who were schoolteachers, were among the Christian settlers who moved to the province
of Lanao just after it was drawn up by the US colonial administration early in the 20th
century. He was one of the initial batch of students to participate in the Philippine
Studies Summer Program at UP Diliman for international students in 2003. He currently
teaches Asian American Literature and Writing at De Anza College in Cupertino,
California.

INTRODUCTION
The Forum Kritika of a recent issue of Kritika Kultura, Reflections on Carlos

Bulosan and Becoming Filipino, is an important expression of a current within
Filipino American Studies that is attempting to connect Filipino Americans to anti-
imperialist, pro-people movements in the Philippines. E. San Juan Jr. and Jeffrey
Cabusao situate Bulosans post-World War II writing and activism within the broader
context of anti-imperialist struggle against the emerging neocolonial regime in the
Philippines. Monica Feria, in telling the story of the relationship between Bulosan
and her mother Dolores, documents the creation of a united front between middle-
class individuals, workers movements in the US , and workers and peasants
movements in the Philippines. Marilyn Alquizola and Lane Hiyabayashi highlight
the aesthetic struggle of Bulosan in his attempt to both advance and represent the
struggle for a free Philippines, a Philippines of the workers and peasants, while Tim
Libretti focuses on Bulosans aesthetic strategies for imagining the relationships of
working class Filipinos to one of the major problems that confront them, the larger
structures of US colonialism and imperialism. Michael Viola, Valerie Francisco,
and Amanda Solomon Amorao do important work in conceptualizing ways in
which scholar-activists in the US can support and participate in movements that
aim to solve the basic problems that confront Filipinos and Filipino Americans. In
their co-written article they explicitly identify the problem of landlessness as one
of the key factors in creating the large-scale outmigration of Filipinos from the
Philippines. Amorao further elaborates on the necessity for an antipatriarchal and
anti-heteronormative stance in considering the history of Filipino working class
movements in the US , a stance that Bulosan develops in his literary work.
This monograph is an attempt to build on the work of the Forum Kritika on

Carlos Bulosan by considering another aspect of the Filipino diaspora, an aspect
that is obscured by a reified conception of the territorial borders of the Philippines
and the erasure or misrepresentation of non-Catholics in Filipino history. US
imperialism by force set the borders of the archipelago it would govern, despite not
only the aspirations for self-determination of the Filipino revolutionaries but also
the aspirations for self-determination of Muslims and indigenous peoples who were
never truly subjugated by Spain. Christian Filipinos during the US colonial period
would in large numbers migrate and settle on the island of Mindanao, a region
that during this period was populated primarily by people who did not identify
themselves as Filipinos. This diaspora to Mindanao crossed national borders, but
national borders that were not recognized by the US colonial state. This diaspora to
Mindanao was in fact an instance of settler colonialism. This monograph attempts
to clarify the relationships of Filipino Americans to the legacy of settler colonialism
in Mindanao with the hope of facilitating solidarity between Filipino Americans
and the peoples of Mindanao.1

To get a better sense of the relationships of settler colonialism in Mindanao

to the Filipino diaspora to the US it will be useful to look closely at a passage early
in Bulosans America is in the Heart, perhaps the most widely-read novel in English
by a Filipino writer and the central text of Filipino American Studies.2 The passage
is about the narrators brother Macario:
When the Spaniards discovered the Philippines in the later part of the fourteenth
century, war with the Moros began and continued for centuries. It was both a religious
and an economic war, for in those early days of global vandalism the sword and the cross
went together. But foreign aggression only made the Mohammedan Moros more ardent
defenders of their faith and their land, and even the Christian Filipinos became their
enemies when they attempted to impose their customs and laws.
When Macario went to teach in Mindanao, the Moros had not been entirely pacified.
But some of their young men and women were already absorbing Christian ideals and
modes of living. In fact, the better families were sending their children to America
for a liberal education. The sudden contact of the Moros with Christianity and with
American ideals was actually the liberation of their potentialities as a people and the
discovery of the natural wealth of their land.
My brother Macario sent his monthly earnings from Mindanao to my mother so
that we could pay the installment on our land. Then suddenly he stopped writing and
sending money. We had one more payment to make.3 (47)
Although America is in the Heart is widely read, this passage, to my knowledge,

has never received critical attention. The novel, for the most part, tells the story
of the narrator, who travels to the US from the Philippines during the Great
Depression. Macario, like the narrator, would within a few years travel to the US .
Like the overwhelming majority of the young Filipino men who traveled to the US
during the 1930s, he would experience tremendous discrimination and violence.
Although he was trained as a teacher in the Philippines, which at this time would
have normal schools modeled on the normal schools of the US , his employment
opportunities in the US would be limited to low-wage agricultural and service
work. Macario, like the narrator, would become involved with the labor movement
and the organizing for the rights and welfare of Filipinos in the US . At the end of
the novel, he would join the US military in order to fight against the occupation of
the Philippines by the Japanese military.4
The first two paragraphs of this passage make up one of many historical
interludes in the novel. On some points, the historical interlude is simply incorrect.
Spanish explorers did not arrive on the shores of the archipelago that would later be
named Las Islas Filipinas until 1521. Mindanao has never been entirely pacified by
Christian invaders.5 And most seriously, Bulosans claim that the sudden contact
of the Moros with Christianity and with American ideals was actually the liberation

of their potentialities as a people would be tragically false. It is true that there

was a certain discovery of the natural wealth of their land, but the mineral and
agricultural wealth of the island would be plundered to the profit of elite Christian
Filipinos and foreign multinational corporations, with Mindanao transformed into
a war zone from which hundreds of thousands would be forced to migrate from
the 1970s to the present.
The inaccuracies of the passage are attributable, perhaps, to Bulosans lack of

strong connections to Mindanao. If the connections were as strong as the ones
that he maintained with peasants from Luzon, he surely would have discerned the
similarities between the plight of his own family and the problems that Christian
migration to Mindanao were causing. The narrative in which this historical
interlude is embedded is a narrative of dispossession. The narrators family is
dependent on Macario for remittances so that they can make payments on land
that they had mortgaged in order to pay for Macarios education. When Macarios
remittances end, the family loses its land. Apparently, Bulosan did not consider that
the Muslims of Mindanao were, like the family of the narrator, being dispossessed
of their lands. The state that was becoming dominated by elite Christian landlords
and compradors which would uphold the legal framework for dispossessing the
narrators family was also imposing a legal framework on Mindanao that would
facilitate the dispossession of the peoples of Mindanao of their ancestral lands.6
Bulosan, unlike those who were petitioning for separate states for the Moro and
Christian peoples in the Philippines in the 1930s, was apparently unaware of this
process that was unfolding on Mindanao.
It should be remembered, though, that Bulosan was working towards creating

international solidarity and building a united front against the fascism of the 1930s
and early 1940s. America is in the Heart documents the ties of solidarity between
workers in the US and peasants in the Philippines, many of whom would travel
to the US after being dispossessed of their lands in the Philippines.7 Bulosans
follow-up to America is in the Heart, The Cry and the Dedication, would concentrate
on the continuation of the peasant struggles of Central Luzon. The Cry and the
Dedication, which is set just after World War II within the peasant struggles against
the US -backed, Christian-dominated state of elite Filipino politicians, thus acts as
a mediator alongside America is in the Heart since it connects the peasants who
remained in Central Luzon with the peasants who had migrated to the US and the
workers with whom they had built ties of solidarity.8
The Forum Kritika in the recent issue of Kritika Kultura is keeping a certain faith
with this project of Bulosans. I would like to propose that a way to advance this
current would be to move beyond the limitations of Bulosans works, limitations
that are visible because of events and movements that have arisen after Bulosans

death. It was perhaps because of material, historical constraints that Bulosan

could not imagine in any concreteness an alliance between Muslim and Filipino
peasants. However, Bulosan articulates, faintly, a desire for such an alliance against
the Christian state of compradors and big landlords. The passage about Macarios
journey to Mindanao narrates the history of the Philippines in a way that opens
up the possibility for alliance because of common long-running struggles against
colonialism. It references a time of global vandalism, when the sword and the
cross went together. The passage thus suggests that the relationship between
Christianity and colonialism is not actually essential to Christianity, and that
historical circumstances had lead to the co-optation of Christianity by European,
and especially Spanish, colonial projects. Furthermore, the passage goes on to
suggest that Christian Filipinos are not naturally or inevitably enemies of Muslims.
Bulosan traces the religious antagonism to specific actions the attempts of some
Christian Filipinos to impose their laws and customs on the people of Mindanao.
In order to advance Bulosans project of building international solidarity this

monograph addresses two barriers to the solidarity between workers and peasants
in the Christian Philippines, Filipinos in the US , and the peoples of Mindanao. The
first barrier is the non-recognition on the part of many Christian Filipinos of the
diversity of Muslim voices and political positions in the Philippines, despite the
existence of many literary and non-literary texts by Muslims in the Philippines.
This non-recognition is partially the result of a process of tokenization. Coeli Barry,
the editor of The Many Ways of Being Muslim, a recently published anthology of
Muslim literature in English from the Philippines, states that Ibrahim Jubaira
was in the 1960s the only Muslim writer whose writings were included in the
anthologies of short stories in English that became one of the building blocks for
the formation of the field of Philippine Literature in English (9). Since that time,
Jubaira almost by default has become the Muslim writer whose work has been
selected for anthologization and inclusion on the syllabi of English classes, and
his most widely-read work is the story Blue Blood of the Big Astana. Elsewhere,
Barry has read this story as an allegory, in which the astana, the house within
which a Muslim noble lives, stands for the Muslim people. Barry suggests that
Jubairas story articulates the position that the astana must accommodate itself
to the Christian state (Blue Blood). Perhaps one of the reasons why Jubairas
stories have been so widely anthologized is because this position has been the
least troubling one to the editors of anthologies published in Metro Manila and to
readers with a Christian bias. I will go on in this monograph to situate this political
position within a range of positions that each responded to the question of the
relationship of Muslims to Filipinos from the US colonial period up to the present.
In the first part of this monograph I will contrast the position advocated by Blue
Blood of the Big Astana, a position that I will call assimilationist, with a position
articulated in many petitions that were sent to the US colonial administration. In

particular, I will contrast the assimilationist position articulated in Blue Blood

with a bangsamoro position articulated in the document that has become known
as the Dansalan Declaration, a position that defines a moro nation that is distinct
from a Filipino nation and that unifies the Muslims who live within the borders of
the Philippine archipelago set by the US wars of conquest.
The second barrier to solidarity is the difficulty of many Filipino Americans in

recognizing the continuing importance of land to many people in the Philippines.
It is a continuing struggle within Filipino American Studies to remind readers and
scholars who are studying Bulosans works about the importance of his links to
peasant movements in the Philippines. Because of the differences in the meanings
and functions of land in an advanced capitalist society and a semi-feudal/semi-
colonial society, it is difficult for many readers in the US to discern the dynamism
of peoples outside of the cities and the intensity of the struggles around land in the
Philippines. The most important of these differences is the differing relationship
between land and the livelihoods of the people. The background of much of this
monograph is a story of landgrabbing leading to landlessness leading to diaspora
and war, leading to the further forced migration of peoples from their lands. The
second part of this monograph closely considers a story by Loren Hallilah I. Lao,
The Trip to a Forbidden Land, which was also published in The Many Ways of
Being Muslim. The story apparently has no relationship to struggles around land.
However, by attending to the specific history of the setting of the story, the Maranao
regions of Mindanao, I argue that the story is actually a plea for a peaceful resolution
to the conflicts that have caused so much suffering to the Maranao people.
In The Trip to a Forbidden Land, the setting is in an urban area, and the
characters are middle-class. There are thus layers of mediation between the
manifest content of the story and the actual conflicts around land that shape it. In
the stories that are the subject of the last part of this monograph conflict around
land is central. The stories were published in a volume titled Land Tenure Stories
in Central Mindanao. The heart of this volume is a set of case studies of land
conflict in central Mindanao, and each case study includes the testimony of major
actors in the conflicts. The case study that I focus on involves a conflict between
an indigenous group, the Ilian Aromanon Manobo tribe, and Muslim families who
had settled on the tribes ancestral lands. These stories show clearly, but in different
ways, the relationships between diaspora, landlessness, and wars wrought by US
imperialists and the elite Christian landlord and comprador politicians whom they
groomed and selected to govern their client state in the Philippines.

THE FEUDAL AND SEMI-COLONIAL/SEMI-FEUDAL MEANINGS OF LAND IN

IBRAHIM JUBAIRAS BLUE BLOOD OF THE BIG ASTANA
Ibrahim Jubaira was a contemporary of Bulosans.9 Like Bulosan, Jubaira

believed that Muslims would prosper by assimilating to the US -Christian state.
Also like Bulosan, he apparently had no inkling of what would actually transpire
in the southern Philippines later in the 20th century. Ibrahim Jubaira was born
in the city of Jolo on the island of Sulu off the coast of Mindanao in 1920. His
father, who owned a gold and silversmith shop, was Arab, and his mother was
Tausug, the dominant ethno-linguistic group on Sulu (Jubaira, Fathers Control;
Habana 98). In 1933, his parents sent him to Singapore to live with his uncles.
Within a year, he moved to Zamboanga, the city that for several centuries had
been the Spanish military and trading outpost at the tip of the island of Mindanao
closest to Sulu. He completed the teacher training course at Zamboanga Normal
School, and he also graduated from Zamboanga A.E. Colleges. While in college,
he was editor-in-chief of the college newspaper. For nearly two decades Jubaira
taught in public schools in Zamboanga, contributed many articles and columns
to local newspapers, and from 1957 to 1959 he edited a magazine. He then began
to work for the Philippine government as a technical researcher for the Philippine
Congress and as an information officer for the Philippines Commission on National
Integration, an agency created by the Philippine government to pacify Muslims
in the south (Habana 98-99). He became a member of the Philippine diplomatic
corps, with posts in Malaysia, Sri Lanka, and Pakistan (Habana 99; Barry). Ibrahim
Jubaira died in 2003.
Blue Blood of the Big Astana, first published in 1941, is possibly Jubairas most-
read work.10 It is the story of a young orphan from the island of Sulu set during
the transition between the very nominal rule of Spain over Sulu and the tighter
control imposed by the US colonial regime during the opening decades of the 1900s,
around when Jubaira was born. The story simplifies this transition a great deal, but
it highlights its essential features. In this simplified transition, the story draws a
sharp contrast between a primarily agrarian economy and one in which commerce
becomes dominant.11 With some reservations, I will refer to the agrarian economy
as feudal, and the commercial one as semi-feudal/semi-colonial.12 The plot of the
story rests on the unevenness in the development of ideology and the development
of the political and economic context. In other words, the plot of the story rests
on the continuation of feudal ideologies within a semi-colonial and semi-feudal
political economy in which the status of individuals would be based on capital
rather than feudal genealogy.

Blue Blood of the Big Astana begins with a brief background of Jaafar, a young
orphan in Sulu. Jaafar is raised by his aunt, who weaves mats for a living, but she
cannot support him, and so she appeals to a noble with the title of Datu to take
him into his household as a servant. The Datu agrees, and the boy becomes the
servant of the Datus daughter. Jaafar becomes infatuated with the Datus daughter,
whom he refers to as Dayang-Dayang, the title of a young noblewoman. The
two grow up together, but then Dayang-Dayang marries the son of another Datu
in Sulu. Jaafar runs away from the house of the Datu, and the story continues
several years later. The Datu and his son-in-law revolt against the attempts by the
US colonial administration to establish control over Sulu. The Datu is killed, and
the son-in-law is imprisoned in a penal farm in Zamboanga. Jaafar, on the other
hand, mysteriously becomes rich. One day Jaafar, in a chance meeting, encounters
Dayang-Dayang. She is working with her sons on a small plot of land, since the rest
of her husbands land had been confiscated. They have a brief conversation, but
after Jaafar leaves and travels for about a mile, he is transfixed by the idea that he
could ask Dayang-Dayang and her children to come to his home. Jaafar concludes,
though, that such a request would be impossible.
On the face of it, this seems like a rather conventional romance, in which the
romantic hero is separated from his beloved by an impassable barrier. The closing
lines of the story define this barrier: That urge to go back to you, Dayang-Dayang,
was strong. But I did not go back for a sudden qualm seized: I had no blue blood.
I had only a harelip. Not even the fingers of Allah perhaps could weave us, even
now, into equality (14). Jaafar has no blue bloodhe does not belong to the Datu
class. Furthermore, Jaafar has a harelip, a feature that he attributes to an accident
his mother had while she was pregnant with him. This feature plays an important
role in the childhood relationship between Jaafar and Dayang-Dayangshe makes
fun of his harelip, and he laughs along with her; he fantasizes about tickling her
face with his harelip; Jaafar even endures punishment on behalf of Dayang-Dayang
at her school by having his harelip clipped together by the teacher (6, 8, 9). In
conjunction with his short stature when he and Dayang-Dayang were children,
the harelip makes it seem impossible that they could ever be equals; thus, he is
permitted an intimacy with Dayang-Dayang that a taller or more handsome young
man could not have (8).
What is not mentioned in the closing lines of the story, though, is a difference
in concepts of wealth. The story itself illustrates this in its descriptions. Jaafar
describes the young datu who marries Dayang-Dayang in feudal terms: The young
datu was handsome. And rich, too. He had a large tract of land planted with fruit
trees, coconut trees, and abaca plants (9). Land and the agricultural production
of the land is the primary form of wealth, and the punishment for revolt against
the US colonial administration is described as the expropriation of land. Jaafar

addresses Dayang-Dayang in an apostrophe: Your husband, to save his life, had to

surrender. His lands, too, were confiscated. Only a little portion was left for you
to cultivate and live on (11). In the semi-feudal/semi-colonial situation created
by the US conquest of Sulu, Dayang-Dayang takes on the status of a small peasant
landowner, cultivating her own land. Jaafar, upon seeing Dayang-Dayang and one
of her sons, thinks to himself of the labor that they must do in order to survive:
Poor little Datu, working so hard. Poor pretty Blue Blood, also working hard (12).
In contrast, Jaafar becomes a cattle merchant. In the conversation between

Jaafar and Dayang-Dayang after she has entered the peasant class, Dayang-Dayang
describes wealth in terms of land, while Jaafar describes his activity as buying and
selling:
We kept silent for a long time. And then: By the way, where was I living now? In
Kanagi. My business here in Bonbon today? To see Panglima Hussin about the cows he
intended to sell, Dayang-Dayang. Cows? Was I a landsman already? Well, if the pretty
Blue Blood could live like a countrywoman, why not a man like your old servant? You
see, luck was against me in sea-roving activities, so I had to turn to buying and selling
cattle.13 (12)
Jaafar, in contrast to Dayang-Dayang, conceives of wealth primarily in terms

of commoditieshis wealth consists of cows and the ability to buy and sell them.
The old concepts of classthe feudal hierarchy of Datus, panglimas, servants, and
nativesand the concepts of human relationships based on this class hierarchy
are put into crisis by new concepts derived from the relationships of individuals
to commodities and their production, exchange, distribution, and consumption.14
Genealogy, likewise, becomes unimportantblood is of no concern when it comes
to commodities.15 However, the new society is not simply a capitalist society
because residues of the feudal order persist. Even though colonialism is formally
established, feudal ideologies and cultural remnants survive. Blue Blood of the
Big Astana illustrates the way ideologies are embodied even when their political
and economic bases have shifted. The story is thus not simply a romance; rather, it
is a story about a very abrupt transition in Sulu from a feudal mode of production
to a semi-colonial, semi-feudal one.16
The categories of feudalism, semi-colonial, semi-feudal, and mode of production,

of course, were certainly not ones that Jubaira would have chosen to describe his
story. The story gives no indication that the natives or the servants, not to mention
the farmers who actually worked in the fields, could change their social conditions
through collective action. Jaafar, in his narration, notes the work that Dayang-
Dayang and her son must do in order to survive after their lands are confiscated by
the Christian government, but he never considers the fact that the overwhelming

majority of people on Sulu had to work just as hard. Instead, the story is told
from an emerging middle-class perspective tied to the increasing importance of
the commercial, capitalist economy. Furthermore, this middle-class perspective is
likely more tied to Jubairas position in Zamboanga, the center of Christian power
in the region, rather than his roots in Sulu. This middle-class perspective, though,
would itself be mixed insofar as within this class perspective there were differing
political positions towards the Christian government. The attitude expressed in
Blue Blood, what I will call an assimilationist position, is articulated most fully in
the following paragraph:
And Allahs Wheel of Time kept on turning, kept on turning. And lo, one day your
husband was transported to San Ramon Penal Farm, Zamboanga. He had raised his
hand against the Christian government. He has wished to establish his own government.
He wanted to show his petty power by refusing to pay land taxes, on the grounds that the
lands he had were by legitimate inheritance his own absolutely. He did not understand
that the little amount he should have given in the form of taxes would be utilized to
protect him and his people from swindlers. He did not discern that he was in fact a
part of the Christian government himself. Consequently, his subjects lost their lives
fighting for a wrong cause. Your Appah, too, was drawn into the mess and perished with
the others. His possessions were confiscated. And your Amboh died of a broken heart.
Your husband, to save his life, had to surrender. His lands, too, were confiscated. Only a
little portion was left for you to cultivate and live on. (11)
This passage refers to the revolts that occurred on Sulu that flared up
sporadically from shortly after the arrival of US forces up to the 1920s.17 Initially,
when the Philippine-American War began, the US government employed a
policy of attraction towards the Sultanate of Sulu by pledging to not interfere
with the society of the islands controlled by the Sultanate. However, after the US
military had devastated Filipino communities that opposed US rule in Luzon and
the Visayas, US military governors in the Southern Philippines imposed several
measures that resulted in a series of revolts, measures such as the disarmament
of Muslim warriors, the abolition of slavery, and, as the passage from Blue Blood
references, the imposition of taxes (Macasalong 56; Remollino 177).18 The passage
goes on to articulate the basic premise of the assimilationist position: that the
Christian government, which in 1941 was transitioning from direct US rule to
indirect rule by elite Christian Filipino compradors and big landlords, would be
benevolent. Furthermore, the passage states that the Christian government would
protect the property of Muslims from swindlers, those who would dispossess
the people of Sulu. The most important form of property, for the overwhelming
majority of people on Sulu, would be land, the source of livelihood. As we will see
later in this monograph, the Christian government would itself become the major
agent in dispossessing Muslims of land.

Jubairas assimilationist position was not popular. Jubaira, most likely, was
responding to a much more popular position, one adamantly opposed to Christian
Filipino rule of Mindanao and Sulu. In the mid-1930s, in the years just prior to
the publication of Blue Blood of the Big Astana, a combination of anti-Filipino
sentiment in the US that wished to prevent the movement of Filipino workers to
the US by classifying Filipinos as aliens, and the agitation of Filipino landlord and
comprador politicians, resulted in the Tydings-McDuffie Act of 1934, which set a
ten-year timetable for independence for the Philippines. Shortly after the passage
of the Tydings-McDuffie Act, in 1935, a letter, signed by over 100 Maranao leaders,
was sent to President Franklin Roosevelt and the US Congress. This letter, which
would become known as the Dansalan Declaration, articulated a Moro identity,
an identity for the Muslim peoples of Mindanao and Sulu.19 The letter predicted
disaster for the Moros if they were placed under Christian Filipino rule:
We would like to inform you (i.e. U.S. Congress) that because we have learned that
the U.S. is going to give the Philippines an independence...we want to tell you that the
Philippines...is populated by two peoples with two different religious practices and
traditions. The Christian Filipinos occupy the islands of Luzon and the Visayas. The
Moros predominate in the islands of Mindanao and Sulu. With regard to the forthcoming
Philippine Independence, we foresee what the condition we will be in and our children
when independence is granted these islands. This condition will be characterized
by unrest, suffering and misery... (Therefore) we do not want to be included in the
Philippines Independence (for) once an independent Philippine is launched there will
be trouble between us and the Christian Filipinos because from time immemorial these
two peoples have not lived harmoniously...It is not...proper to have two antagonizing
peoples live together under the Philippine Independence. One proof of this (is) when
Lanao had its (Christian) Filipino Governor, many leading Moro Datus were killed for
no apparent reasons.20
This quotation predicts that Christian Filipino rule over the Moros would
lead to unrest, suffering and misery for the Moro people. Furthermore,
the signatories state that a Christian government would be antagonistic
to the Moros, and this antagonism had already taken the form of political
repression such as the killing of Moro leaders.21
Elsewhere in the letter, the signatories describe the inequalities that had already
developed, inequalities that were also causing alarm among the Moros.22 First of
all, the signatories state that the Christians had excluded Moros from positions
of political power, positions of administration and management, in the colonial
government. Secondly, the Christian-dominated government took control of the
insular funds that were distributed from the administrative center of the colonial
government in the Philippines. Moros were thus prevented from participating in

the development of urban societies, enjoying the benefits of modern civilization,

and participating in modern education.
The solution that the letter requests from the US government is for it to retain
control over Mindanao and Sulu. The signatories, on the surface, were apparently
misguided in believing that the US government would really act in the best
interests of the Moros. Clearly, they chose not to mention the causes of revolts
and the brutal repression of those revolts that had occurred under US rule. Given
the situation that they were facing and the specific aim of the letter, it is somewhat
understandable that the signatories would praise the US colonial administration.
However, the part of the letter that would prove well-founded is the description
of the threat that the rule of elite Christian Filipinos would become. The accuracy
of the description of the US colonial administration is questionable, but what the
description makes clear is the kind of political and economic situation that the
signatories desired. The description gives praise to an administration that respects
the religion, customs, traditions, and practices of the Moros. The description gives
praise to an administration that recognizes the rights of the Moros to their property,
which, as we will see, refers primarily to land as the provider of livelihoods. Finally,
the description gives praise to an administration that directs its efforts for the
welfare of its people. By implication, the Moros had no confidence that the rule of
Christian Filipinos would enact this kind of political and economic situation.
When the Dansalan Declaration was sent to Franklin Roosevelt, Jubaira had
just arrived in Zamboanga, a city to the west of Lanao, the province in which
the declaration was signed.23 Historically, Zamboanga has been the point of
connection between the three major Muslim polities, the archipelago of the Sulu
Sultanate, the Maguindanao Sultanate inland from the western coast of central
Mindanao, and the Pat a Pangampong a Ranao around Lake Lanao in the north
central region of Mindanao. The Spanish established the fort of Zamboanga in
1635 in order to divide the Muslims of Mindanao and Sulu, and shortly after US
soldiers took control of the fort, it became the seat of the colonial government
in the newly-created Moro Province in 1903. It is in Zamboanga where Jubaira
would receive much of his education, and it is from Zamboanga that Jubaira wrote
Blue Blood of the Big Astana. It is possible that Jubaira was not aware of the
Dansalan Declaration until long after he wrote Blue Blood, but his location in
Zamboanga, a long-established Christian stronghold on Mindanao that was the
administrative center of the US colonial government in the Southern Philippines,
as well as Zamboangas position at the intersection of routes between the Muslim
peoples of Cotabato, Lanao, and Sulu, meant that he would have been well aware
of the popular opposition to Christian Filipino rule. During the 1920s and 1930s,
several petitions from the people of Sulu, Lanao, and Cotabato urged the US
government to take steps towards preventing economic and political domination

of the Southern Philippines by Christians from the north. During this time an
emerging bangsamoro consciousness, a national consciousness among Muslims
in the Philippines, developed between people in Sulu, Lanao, and Cotabato who
recognized the common problems faced by Muslims within the territory of the
Philippines. Evidence for the emergence of this consciousness comes from the
petitions to the US government circulated by Muslims, several of which arose in
Zamboanga.24
SETTLER COLONIALISM AND THE ABSENCE OF PEACE IN THE TRIP TO A

FORBIDDEN LAND
The history of Sulu during the US colonial period, the setting of Blue Blood of
the Big Astana, contrasts significantly with the history of Lanao, the home province
of those who signed the Dansalan Declaration.25 The major contrast is the differing
impact of settler colonialism. Lanao, in contrast to Sulu, became the destination
of a huge influx of Christian settlers that would have devastating impacts on the
Muslims of Lanao. During the US colonial period from 1903-1939, the bulk of
the migrants to Mindanao settled in regions adjacent to the regions dominated
by Spain, on the coast of North Central Mindanao, north and northwest of Lake
Lanao. In Lanao, three quarters of the population growth during this period was
the result of in-migration. Between 1903 and 1939, about 165,000 people migrated
to Lanao, and between 1948 and 1960, an additional 165,000 people migrated
(Wernstedt and Simpkins 89, 92).26 The arrival of so many Christian settlers split
the province into two parts, and in 1959, Lanao was partitioned into two provinces,
the predominantly-Christian Lanao Del Norte and the predominantly-Muslim
Lanao Del Sur.
Loren Lao, a writer based in Lanao Del Sur, like Jubaira writes from a middle-
class perspective. Lao is an attorney who has taught in the English department,
the College of Law, and the Communication and Media Studies department
at Mindanao State University in Marawi City (Loren Hallilah I. Lao). She has
published several articles that document the efforts of Muslim women to educate
and organize each other in defense of their rights with a special emphasis on
women who consider the rights of women in a way that is consistent with Islam.27
She has also written a chapter in a report for the United Nations Entity for Gender
Equality and the Empowerment of Women on projects for popular education
and consultation among Bangsamoro women concerning the Convention on the
Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW ).28
To my knowledge, Lao has published only two works of fiction, both in the
anthology The Many Ways of Being Muslim. One story, Good Old Bapa, depicts

the plight of a 15 year-old girl who is married, clearly without her consent, to a much
older man.29 The other story, The Trip to a Forbidden Land, highlights tradition.
The immediately obvious conflict at the center of The Trip to a Forbidden Land
involves the observance of a marriage tradition which is presented as a tradition
that is very particular to the area around Lake Lanao. At first glance, the conflict
seems to be generational. The central character, Asnia, attends the funeral of the
aunt-by-marriage who raised her husband. Asnias mother, who is rather strict
with traditions, is furious because her son-in-laws family had not sought out the
bride and held a kalawi, during which the grooms family would escort the bride
from her home to the hometown of the groom, to welcome her daughter into the
family (152). Only after a kalawi would the bride be able to travel freely to the
hometown of her husband.
The basic argument that I would like to make about The Trip to a Forbidden
Land is that it is ultimately a plea for peace, a plea that must be understood in
terms of the barriers to peace and the experiences of war and diaspora that are
particular to the Lanao region. The story, much of which is told almost in the form
of a drama, revolves around a single scene of domestic conflict. In the first part of
the scene, Asnias mother visits her very early in the morning, and the two argue
about Asnias visit to the hometown of her husband. The argument is interrupted
when two of Asnias sisters-in-law arrive at the apartment. Asnias mother rushes
her into the restroom, answers the door, and tells the two guests that Asnia is not
at home. Asnias mother and the two sisters-in-law engage in a brief and awkward
standoff. The sister-in-law who needs to use the restroom insists on using it, and
after the other sister-in-law leaves the door Asnias mother lets her inside. The
story ends with Asnias mother touching her in-laws arm and asking, Please try to
understand me (159).
What bestows the plea for peace its poignancy is the conflict that permeates
the Lanao region. Laos story is one of domestic conflict, conflict within a single
household, in which the antagonists are women. However, with the arrival of
Asnias sister-in-law, the domestic conflict spills over into a space occupied by
multiple families. Inter-familial conflict, often called rido, is a major concern in
Lanao del Sur. Rido names a kind of clan conflict or feud characterized by a series
of acts of violence and retaliation.30 In Lanao del Sur, the number of rido declined
after the early 1990s and then spiked in the early 2000s (78). In Mindanao and Sulu
as a whole, the number of rido increased steadily since the 1980s, and the number
of documented cases of rido doubled from the year 2000 to 2004 (Torres 16). In
contrast to the domestic scene of conflict in the story, in which all of the major
participants are women, in the rido of Lanao del Sur, it is extremely rare for women
to be the assailants in carrying out retaliatory violence, and the overwhelming
majority of victims of retaliatory violence have been men (Matuan 83).31 The

emergence of a rido has devastating effects on families. In many cases, families

migrate away from the area, limit their movements within the affected areas,
prepare defenses against possible attacks, provide support to family members in
trouble, and experience serious effects on their economic activities (Matuan 85).
For many families, valuable time and energy is devoted to attempts to settle the
rido, and within the communities as a whole many feel alarmed.
The backdrop of inter-clan conflict increases the tension and the stakes of the
closing paragraphs of Laos story. Repeatedly in the story, the characters avoid
conflict.32 Asnias husband Omar, very early in the morning, lets his mother-in-
law and Asnias younger brother into the apartment, and he quickly recognizes
from the tone of her voice and her tensed up bearing that something is wrong
(152). He wakes Asnia, waits for her to get up so that he does not have to face
his mother-in-law, and then quickly leaves his wife to confront her mother alone.
Asnia initially tries to distract her mother by beginning to discuss buying clothes
for her siblings, but her mother forces a confrontation about Asnias visit to her
husbands hometown. Asnias little brother, once he realizes that his mother and
elder sister are beginning to argue, leaves the room and plays in the dining room.
The argument continues with Asnias mother heaping abuse on Asnias sisters-in-
law, who had also visited their husbands hometown without receiving a kalawi.
The two sisters-in-law, Sairah and Noraisah, knock on the door to the surprise
of Asnias mother. Asnias mother tells Asnia to wait in the restroom, and after
opening the door she tells Noraisah and Sairah that Asnia is not home. After a
brief standoff at the door the story concludes:
Why dont we just go? We have to hurry. It was Noraisah urging Sairah to leave,
sensing something wrong with the unmoving stance of the older woman at the door.
She felt that they were not welcome and so tried to dissuade her companion from going
inside.
But I [Sairah] really have to go.
Eee, why do you have to go?
I really have to.
Ok, Ill just wait in the car. At Noraisahs remark Asnias mother relaxed at the
doorframe. Noraisah then turned to leave and went back to the car.
Ok, Sairah said as the woman at the door let her in. Sairah quickly went in the
direction of the sole comfort room in the apartment. As she reached for the knob of the
door, the older woman touched the arm that held the knob stalling Sairah from going
inside.
Please try to understand me. (159)
Even Noraisah, whom Asnia had described as domineering, avoids a confrontation

with Asnias mother. Sairah, whose personality had been characterized as milder

than Noraisahs, insists upon using the restroom despite the posture of Asnias
mother. When Noraisah leaves the door, Asnias mother visibly relaxes and allows
Sairah into the apartment. Perhaps Asnias mother believes that Sairah will not
cause further trouble, which might ensue if Noraisah remains. At any rate, the
gentlest gesture from Asnias mother in the whole story is directed towards Sairah
she simply touches Sairahs arm to get her attention.
The final line of the storyPlease try to understand mesuggests that the
conflict between Sairah and Asnias mother, and more generally the potential
conflict between the clan of Asnias mother and the clan of Asnias husband, can be
resolved through understanding. The statement is thus a plea for peace in terms of
a method for maintaining peace. In other words, in order to avoid conflict, Asnias
mother asks Sairah to understand the situation and presumably to act accordingly.
Asnias mother seems to recognize her error as she anticipates Sairah learning that
she has lied about Asnia not being at home. Furthermore, Asnias mother had
not been hospitable when she initially refused to let Sairah use the comfort room.
Sairah would have a legitimate grievance, and she would then have the choice
either to condemn Asnias mother without further knowledge, or to find the more
basic problems that had created the situation where Asnias mother lied to her so
that she could understand the situation better.
The form of the story itself suggests that understanding is very difficult. In
order to articulate the causes of the conflict, the story must actually break from
its narrative flow. Within The Trip to a Forbidden Land, there is a tension as
an anthropological discourse, a commentary detached from the flow of the plot
contained within two paragraphs in the middle of the story, interrupts the dramatic
narrative:
A bride is not supposed to go to the grooms hometown, especially when he comes

from a different place, not until his relatives have gathered to look for the girl and take
her to their place for the kalawi. There, a kalilang and a feast would be held in honor
of the bride to welcome her to the place of the groom. Speeches extolling the visiting
relatives-in-law would be delivered. For really grand kalawi, gifts such as parcels of land
would be given to the bride and money would be distributed to her relatives. And to top
it all, a tankong awaits the bride while her new relatives wash her feet, the pamorawas,
after which she is finally carried by her relatives-in-law to the house where the feast is
to be held.
Many do away with this custom because of the expense it entails but many, especially
those from the Basak area where Asnias mother came from, are still quite strict about

this. There are absurd stories of married couples whose children had already grown
up and yet the wife had not yet stepped in her husbands place. An aging mother-in-
law laments that when she, this mother-in-law, eventually dies, her sole daughter-in-law
cannot go to the tibao because her sons wife was not able to attend her husbands burial
because his relatives had not yet complied with the lawi. While busy with the gawi-i, the
poor mans relatives had to make arrangements for the lawi of his wife so that she could
go to her dead husbands hometown and see his grave. Another couple got married and
years later divorced but the wife had not seen her estranged husbands place during the
entire period of their marriage because the husbands relatives had not looked for her.
(156-7)
Lao apparently felt it necessary to provide some background for readers who
would have no idea about the ways in which conflicts would be articulated within
a middle-class Maranao domestic space. In other words, Lao herself seems to
recognize that the lack of historical and cultural knowledge on the part of her
English-speaking readers would be barriers for interpreting the story, and she
addresses this lack through a shift in the way in which she writes the story.
The anthropological discourse, though, is not really detached insofar as it is

bound by the perspective of a specific socioeconomic class, an urbanized middle-
class. What is missing in this story is a way to place this middle-class within the
totality of socioeconomic classes in Lanao. It will be necessary, then, to consider
the ways in which this domestic space is contextualized within a society that is
structured by differences along the lines of socioeconomic class because the
activity of understanding, without any change to the economic basis and the
structure of political power of the society, does not solve the basic problems that
create conflicts. The economic base of Lanao is predominantly agricultural, and
the dominance of the Christian state has resulted in Muslims having less and less
access to land. The interlude into anthropological discourse in the story, which also
involves a periodization, gives only a few hints about the economic and political
shifts that have resulted in so many people of Lanao suffering from war and forced
migration. The two paragraphs of the interlude explain the practices around lawi
and relate anecdotes about the lengths to which the practices were observed. In
the next paragraph, the story returns to the narrative by describing the attitudes
of the family of Asnias husband Omar while simultaneously telling a sort of origin
story for the middle class:
Omar told his wife that his relatives no longer observed such things. The practice
was possible before when, very few married outside their place. Now that more and
more men in their family marry the girls they meet in school, the office or somewhere
else, girls who came from places all over the Ranao33 but not from their hometown, the

traditions could no longer be kept. From their brood alone, four of the six boys married
girls who came from different places. All his Babo [Aunt] Aminas three sons married
girls from outside their hometown. And there are still countless cousins who married
outside their town. If they look for all these girls for the kalawi, where would they get all
the money to spend for the feast and kalilang? (157)34
The paragraph divides the history of Omars family into two periods, and it makes
explicit certain historical shifts that created the conditions for the conflict between
Asnia and her mother. In the first period, kalawi could be held without being a
burden. Presumably, this was an agrarian period, in which travel and migration
was not common, in which the town and its surroundings were self-sustaining. In
the second period, the period when a middle-class created by the inroads of semi-
colonial capitalism began to develop, it would be impossible for the family to afford
to hold kalawi for all the young men who married young women from outside their
hometowns. The second period is one in which an urban middle-class develops,
a middle-class in which some young people would migrate for education away
from their hometowns, would search for middle-class employment (presumably
in offices) away from their hometowns, and would venture from their hometowns
because their livelihoods would no longer be so directly connected to agricultural
production.
Markers of being middle-class are scattered throughout the story. Omar works
in an office and drives a car; Asnia apparently does not need to work, and the
couple lives in an apartment; Asnias sisters-in-law arrive at the apartment in a
car. Furthermore, the family is relatively urbanized: Omars parents worked in
the city, Omar went to high school in the city, and Asnias sisters-in-law arrive at
her apartment on the way to the city of Cagayan de Oro. However, it would be an
analytical error to overlook the specificities of middle-class existence in this region
of Mindanao. The middle-class would be only a small fraction of the population.
The overwhelming majority would be tied to the land and to agriculture.35 Many
who had migrated to the cities to seek work would have an agricultural background
and would have direct experience with working on the land. Even those who seem
relatively well-off, such as the aunt of Omar, would likely be involved in some kind
of agricultural production for their own consumption.
The class position of Asnia and her family, and the position of the domestic
scene within an urban area, imply that the relationship of the events in the story
to the land is highly mediated. Nonetheless, land does appear, albeit briefly, in the
description of practices around a kalawi, most notably in the references to gifts
of parcels of land (156). It is necessary to pause here for a moment and dwell on
the contrast between the meaning of land in a fully-developed capitalist society in
contrast to the semi-feudal, semi-colonial setting of the story. In a capitalist society,

land is not the primary means of production, and wealth is measured primarily in
terms of money. Land is merely one of many commodities reducible to money,
and it is rarely given as a gift. In fact, once the payment is complete and the title
changes hands, it would be unusual for the buyer and the seller to stay in contact
since their relationship is first of all determined by the circulation of moneyonce
the transaction is complete, there is no reason for the buyer and seller to continue
their relationship. In the prior moment evoked in the story, however, land is a
means of production and itself a means for livelihood. Furthermore, the holding of
land is embedded in the life of the community. Land is not alienated through the
negotiation of contracts and the exchange of titles, which is likely to occur behind
the closed doors of banks and real estate agencies. Instead, the transfer of land
tenure is done during an elaborate ceremony with many witnesses. The transfer of
land in the kalawi signifies the full acceptance of the bride into an honored place
in the life of the grooms family. The community itself guarantees the right of the
bride to the land.
In the setting of The Forbidden Land, the community which previously

guaranteed rights to land must contend with outside forces that shift the meaning
of land. The context is one in which land is alternately regarded as, on the one
hand, a means of production, a place of domicile, and for a family a marker of
wealth and status within the community; on the other hand, land is regarded as
one of many commodities that can be possessed simply through a cash transaction
guaranteed by the state. This doubling of meanings is characteristic of the semi-
feudal/semi-colonial situation of this region of Mindanao. The double-ness arises
from the expansion of commodity-based economies into the region, with the result
that money gains increasing importance in the lives of people living there. This
double-ness is visible in the descriptions of the kalawi within the story. The bride
in particularly grand kalawi would sometimes receive land, and the relatives would
receive money. The situation that demands a kalawi, in which a son marries a
woman from outside of the sons hometown, becomes more common, and thus
Omars family feels that it cannot afford to continue the tradition. The story
goes on to articulate how the previous importance of the land has faded while
the importance of the money/commodity economy ascended: Many do away
with this custom because of the expense it entails (156). The term expense is
ambiguous insofar as it is not clear whether the expense is in money or in land.
The paragraphs that give a brief anthropological account of the conditions that
lead to the decline of the observance of the kalawi provide a sense of how historical
shifts within Maranao society lead to a domestic conflict, the conflict between
Asnia and her mother, and the potential for an inter-clan conflict. However, just
as it is important to consider the domestic space of the conflict within the wider
space of Maranao society, it is important as well to consider the links between this

domestic conflict and other conflicts within Maranao society and the role of the
Philippine state and the US colonial administration in Mindanao in creating these
conflicts. The economic and political conditions that lead to the formation of the
urban middle-class in Lanao Del Sur are the ones that have lead to the proliferation
of other conflicts, such as rido. A double-ness appears in the description of
the kalawi in The Trip to a Forbidden Land, with the older meaning of land
coexisting with the newer capitalist conception of land. The tradition of holding
kalawi, however, is not integral to the newer capitalist society within which the
domestic space constructed by the story is situated, and the characters in the story
are put into a position where they must choose between upholding the tradition or
not. The choice is not neutral, because in order to uphold the tradition characters
within the story would have to endure hardships within the capitalist society. The
double-ness that is visible in The Trip to a Forbidden Land is tied to the violence
that previous Maranao society has endured through the course of the 20th century,
a violence that has created a double economy and a double political structure and
has also created conditions that have lead to conflicts within Muslim communities.
Within Maranao society the most prevalent causes of the development of rido
in recent years have involved electoral violence and land disputes. These two
causes are intertwined. Electoral violence escalated after 1991, when locally elected
government officials gained control of Internal Revenue Allotment fundswhat
some might call a pork barreldistributed by the national government of the
Philippines. Meanwhile, the political authority of traditional Maranao community
leaders, who in previous times settled conflicts over land, has been eroded. Moctar
Matuan aptly describes one way in which the doubling of the political structure
within Lanao del Sur, between the older Islamic and traditional authority and the
authority of the national government of the Philippines, has created the conditions
for the proliferation of rido:
The Meranaos have their own concept of land ownership heavily influenced by Islam.
For this reason, many land owners do not bother to title their land under Philippine
laws. As the old folk pass away and the new generation inherit the land, disputes over
ownership and boundaries increase. There are cases where an educated family or clan
member placed communal land under his own name precipitating intra-clan feud. The
conflict between the Meranao concept of land ownership and that of the Philippine
government legal system was the second major cause [behind electoral violence] of
conflict and rido in Lanao del Sur. (79-80)
As Matuan describes it here, rido has arisen in some cases because unscrupulous
Muslims have been involved in land grabbing, relying on the legal authority of

the Philippine government instead of the traditional structures of land tenure to

guarantee their titles to land at the expense of their own relatives. However, this
kind of land grabbing is tiny in scale in comparison to other forms of land grabbing
whose origins are in the US colonial regime in Mindanao. From very early in the
US colonial regime, and continuing through the periods of the Commonwealth
and the Government of the Republic of the Philippines, the colonial and then
the neocolonial administrations attempted to relieve the pressures caused by
landlessness, produced by prior cases of land grabbing perpetrated by Filipino
elites against the peasants of Luzon and the Visayas, by encouraging people to
migrate from Luzon and the Visayas to Mindanao.36 Furthermore, shortly after
the US made the Philippines into a commonwealth the Philippine Commonwealth
Government took legal steps that facilitated land grabbing by Christian settlers.
In 1936, Commonwealth Act 141 declared all ancestral lands of Muslims and
indigenous peoples public lands, which meant that the lands became subject to
the private ownership of individuals and corporations. Maranaos, unaccustomed
to the land titling process imposed by the US and then the Philippine governments,
became vulnerable to losing their lands when settlers applied for legal titles.
Especially after World War II , the number of cases of land disputes multiplied.
In one month in 1962, a list of cases compiled by the Commission on National
Integration involved 20,000 hectares of land.37 These cases would most often be
decided against Muslims.38
Just as land disputes between Muslims are tiny in scale in comparison to the
historical land disputes between Muslims and Christian settlers, so the violence
between Muslims has been tiny in scale in comparison to the violence that
Christian settlers and the Christian state have inflicted on Muslims since the 1970s.
Settler colonialism, encouraged by policies of the US -colonial regime and then the
government of the Republic of the Philippines, lead to violence and the displacement
of Maranao people on a catastrophic scale. From late-1970 to mid-1972, a Christian
militia group named the Ilaga attacked Muslim communities in many provinces of
Mindanao, including Lanao del Norte and Lanao del Sur. From April 6 to July 22,
1971, 52 houses of Muslims were burned in the municipality of Wao in Lanao del
Sur (Lingga 14). In November of 1971, Philippine Army soldiers stationed in Barrio
Tacub, Kauswagan, Lanao del Norte, massacred over 30 unarmed Muslims who
were returning home after attempting to vote (Bentley 253). In the most infamous
incident of this period, the Manili massacre in the municipality of Carmen in
North Cotabato, the Philippine Constabulary called a meeting at a mosque on June
19, 1971. Once the meeting had gathered, the doors were bolted and a grenade
was thrown into the building, killing 70 people, including women and children
(Macasalong 100-101).

The loss of land and the violence of war that have been inflicted on the Maranao
people have created a massive diaspora of internally displaced persons. In 2002,
within the Philippines, 706,585 people of Maranao descent were living outside of the
regions traditionally inhabited by the Maranao people, over a quarter of the total
population of Maranao (Busran-Lao 33). After leaving their homes, many Maranaos
experience discrimination and exploitation. Basic services such as health care are
difficult to access due to discrimination based on their religious difference from
Christian health care providers, and they are denied economic opportunities such
as access to credit and employment in offices and firms because they are Muslims.
When deaths occur, there is often tremendous hardship in finding a suitable burial
place. Women who are displaced are vulnerable to human trafficking, and there
is sometimes pressure on them to consent to polygamous marriages (Busran-Lao
36).39
The history of Cotabato, the region to the south of Lanao, has paralleled
the history of Lanao. Both provinces were formed in 1914 by the US colonial
administration, and in both provinces both the US colonial administration and
the Government of the Philippines created programs that brought settlers from
the Northern and Central parts of the archipelago. Muslims in both regions thus
experienced massive demographic shifts. In 1918, in the province of Cotabato,
the population of non-Muslims was 61,052, while the population of Muslims
was 110,926. Muslims constituted 64.53% of the population. Between 1939 and
1948, the population of non-Muslims more than doubled, while the number of
Muslims actually declined.40 By 1960, the number of non-Muslims grew to 672,659,
while the population of Muslims grew at a much slower rate to 356,460. In 1960,
Muslims made up only 34.64% of the population of Cotabato. As a result of these
demographic shifts, Cotabato was partitioned into Christian and Muslim provinces
in 1966, just as Lanao had been partitioned in 1959. North Cotabato was further
partitioned in 1973, and currently only one of the three provinces carved out of
North Cotabato, the province of Maguindanao, is majority Muslim.41
Both Lanao and Cotabato experienced war during the 1970s, and both
experienced refugee crises as people were driven from their homes by militarized
conflict. The Ilaga Christian militia groups first appeared in North and South
Cotabato before extending their reach to Lanao Del Sur, Lanao Del Norte, and other
parts of Mindanao (Busran-Lao 10-11). In response to the escalation in violence
in Mindanao perpetrated not only by Christian militia groups but also the armed
forces and police of the Philippine state, and in response to the declaration of
Martial Law by Ferdinand Marcos, Muslims in Mindanao and the Sulu archipelago
launched the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF ) in order to struggle for self-
determination. The MNLF enjoyed wide popularity among Muslims in all parts
of what would become the Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao (ARMM ).

However, the war for the Bangsamoro nation would sow immense destruction, with
an estimated death toll of 100,000-120,000 for the years between 1972 and 1976
(Montiel et al. 79). Nearly 75% of the troops of the Armed Forces of the Philippines
were deployed to Mindanao and Sulu during this time (Hedman 3). Tragic as these
numbers are, they show not only the brutality of the Philippine military but also
the depth of support for the MNLF . Approximately 50% of those killed were MNLF
combatants, with 30% from the Philippine military, and 20% civilians (Montiel et
al. 79). During this period, the scale of the displacement of people in Mindanao
and Sulu was horrendous, and the aftermath of the massive escalation of the war
continues to affect the lives of people in Mindanao. More than a million people
were made homeless and destitute, and 200,000-300,000 Muslims were forced to
flee to other parts of the country and even to Sabah in nearby Malaysia (Buendia 4).
In Laos story, the forced migration of Muslims and the problem of landlessness
are far in the background and nearly undetectable. The focus of this monograph
will shift to stories about land conflict in which the connection between land and
livelihood is very clear. The stories of land conflict are separated from Laos story by
a division in economic class. In contrast to the urbanized, middle-class characters
of Laos story, the characters in the stories about land conflict are farmers on small
plots of land. Furthermore, while Laos story is fiction, the stories of land conflict
are non-fiction. The stories are recorded in a volume entitled Land Tenure Stories
in Central Mindanao, published by the Kadtuntaya Foundation in partnership with
the Mediators Network for Sustainable Peace and the Local Governance Support
Program in ARMM . The centerpiece of this volume is a series of case studies of
conflicts over land in which the writers attempted to allow parties on each side of
the dispute to tell their own stories with the aim of finding regions of agreement
that would lead to peaceful resolutions of the conflicts.42
INTERNALLY DISPLACED AND INDIGENOUS PEOPLES
The case study I will focus on here involves a dispute between Muslim families
and a group of indigenous people. The Muslim families had been aided by the Moro
National Liberation Front, and afterwards by the Moro Islamic Liberation Front
(MILF ).43 Even though both Moros and indigenous peoples in Mindanao have been
victims of policies of the US colonial regime and the Philippine state, relationships
between Moros and indigenous peoples have often not been harmonious. In
some ways, the story in this section mirrors the story told in the previous section
of this monograph, in which Christian settlers, who were likely dispossessed of
lands themselves, displaced long-established Muslim communities through the
sponsorship of the US and Philippine states. In this section, Muslims who were
displaced in turn displace indigenous peoples.

The group of indigenous people belongs to the Ilian Aromanon Manobo Tribe.
A major political factor in building the collective strength of indigenous peoples in
Mindanao is the founding of Lumad Mindanaw in 1986, which was an important
moment in the creation of a movement for the self-determination of indigenous
peoples on Mindanao. Fifteen tribes of Mindanao, including representatives from
the very large Manobo tribe, participated in the founding congress in Cotabato.
The congress chose to name the indigenous tribes collectively as Lumad, the
Bisayan term for native (Rodil). Furthermore, indigenous peoples won recognition
from the Philippine state through the Indigenous Peoples Rights Act (IPRA ) of
1997, which would provide a legal mechanism for titling the ancestral domains
of indigenous peoples to indigenous communities and which would lead to the
creation of the National Commission on Indigenous Peoples (NCIP ).44 In recent
years, indigenous groups in Mindanao have raised concerns that their claims to
ancestral domain and the right to use the lands on their ancestral domains will not
be safeguarded by Muslims.
Claims to ancestral domain are so important because they have recently become
a means by which both Muslims and indigenous peoples have attempted to preserve
and regain their livelihoods. The stories of the Muslims and the Manobos in the
case study from Land Tenure Stories in Central Mindanao are set primarily in the
barangay of Kimadzil in the municipality of Carmen in the Province of Cotabato.
In the SOCCSKSARGEN region, which includes the municipality of Carmen and
which was carved out of the formerly-Muslim Cotabato Province, around 50% of the
people were engaged in agriculture in 2012 (Regional Profile: SOCCSKSARGEN ).
This number is likely too low, considering the fact that many people who formerly
engaged in agriculture have been displaced by landlessness and war and have been
forced to leave their previous livelihoods. Solving the problems of landlessness
and war through genuine agrarian reform would likely result, in the short run, in
the return of many people to again engage in agriculture.
In the stories of the Muslims and the Manobos in Land Tenure Stories in Central
Mindanao, there is a substantial region of agreement. According to the accounts of
both the Muslims and the Manobos, Antig Abang was the first Muslim to settle in
the sitio of Kilabaw in the barangay of Kimadzil. He arrived in the 1960s, and the
timuay/datu, Pedro Ampalid, very generously granted Antig Abang some land.45
Some of Abangs relatives arrived soon after, and Timuay/Datu Ampalid granted
them also land in this area. When war erupted close to this area of Mindanao in the
1970s, an officer of the Moro National Liberation Front, Amay Kugaw, approached
Timuay/Datu Ampalid in order to ask for help in aiding refugees. Timuay/Datu
Ampalid allowed the Muslim refugees to cultivate lands in an area that became
known as Sitio Pagalungan, also in the barangay of Kimadzil. Timuay/Datu Ampalid
died in 1992, and his son Damasco took on his roles as both Timuay and Datu. The

Muslim refugees stayed on these lands as well as the lands in Sitio Kilabaw until the
early 2000s, when war again displaced them. During an offensive of the Armed
Forces of the Philippines, soldiers of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front opened
fire on Datu/Timuay Damasco Ampalid, and soon after, in another incident, his
nephew was killed. After Muslims left the area of Kilabaw, they have not returned,
but some of the displaced Muslims were able to return to the lands in Pagalungan.
The story told by the Muslims and the story told by the Manobos have different
emphases, but taken together they reveal the immense impact of the problems
of landlessness and war on the peoples of Mindanao. Land is central to the story
told by the Manobos, and the gift of land bears two fundamental meanings. The
story emphasizes that land means livelihood. Furthermore, the Manobo story
emphasizes the way in which the right to land is one strand in a web of social
relations. As Timuay Damasco Ampalid narrates,
I had an uncle named Pancho who became a friend of Antigs. They were close friends
for a long time. In their closeness they agreed to have one of their children become part
of each of their families. And so it happened that Panchos child, Hemistan, became a
part of Antigs family and Kasamela, of Panchos family. My uncle gave four out of his
10-hectare land to Antig to help him raise his child. Their friendship deepened and they
became good leaders. That was how they were able to occupy lands in our territory. My
uncle shared and entrusted these lands to them out of friendship. (125)
In Ampalids account, the land transaction is not a money transaction. The

terms that Ampalid uses are primarily terms of human relationshipsthe land
was shared and entrusted, and the families became bonded through intermarriage.
The gift of land is further motivated by economic concernsthe land would help
Antig Abang to raise his child.
The importance of land to livelihood is reinforced in the next paragraph of

Ampalids account. This importance becomes clear when people in the story are
deprived of land:
When the war erupted in the 1970s, Muslims in the Muleta area became targets of the
military operations of the 27th Battalion. These operations forced Muslims to flee to safer
grounds, leaving their farms unattended. Because of this, then MNLF s area commander
Amay Kugaw met with my father. He told my father how the people under his leadership
lost their livelihoods due to constant harassment by the Military. He asked my father
for assistance to solve his problem. My father offered to Amay Kugaw the area which
was evacuated by some of his subjects. He said, in the meantime that my men has not
returned in Pagalungan, your men can stay and work there. But when my subjects return,
and your area in Muleta would be peaceful, your men must leave the area. (125)

Ampalid tells the story in a way that makes explicit the fact that the refugees are
farmers: When they flee from the Armed Forces of the Philippines, what they leave
are their farms. Because they are farmers, they leave not just their homes but also
their livelihood and the fruits of their labor. Ampalids father does what he can in
order to help the refugees. He provides them with land they can work on so they
can again earn their livelihood.
The Manobos, in turn, themselves experienced displacement. In Ampalids

narration of the time after the conflict subsided landlesness, and thus the lack of a
means for livelihood, becomes a central concern:
In those days, many returning Manobos had no lands on which they could live
on. Without lands to till, they were plunged to difficult conditions. Some had almost
nothing to eat and had to ask for food from the Muslims who were then benefiting from
their lands. My father asked the Muslims to leave the area, but they refused. So my
father told one of his aides, since they refuse to leave, it might be worthwhile to ask the
Muslims there to share their income, even if not on a fixed percentage, so that those who
returned have something to live on. The Muslims verbally agreed to share their income
from harvests. But during harvest time they refused to give share as agreed. When the
Manobos insisted on their share, the Moro occupants brandished armalite rifles. With
that, we started to fear for our lives. (126)
The bonds that were forged earlier between Pedro Ampalid and Antig Abang were
based on trust, the sharing of land, and a concern for the livelihoods of people in the
community. In Damasco Ampalids narration, these bonds are broken. First of all,
the promise to vacate the lands is not kept. Ampalids narration highlights further
the breach of trust as the different communities occupy different positions within
similar narratives. The Manobos are put into the position previously occupied by
Muslims who had been displaced and the Muslims are put into the position of the
Manobos, but the Muslims, instead of sharing, threaten the Manobos.
Furthermore, Manobos were forced to enter into very unequal arrangements

with the Muslims who occupied their lands:
We realized that the Muslims did not have any intentions of vacating the lands, and
that it was not possible to recover our land. Because of these, some of us decided it was
better to mortgage lands if we wish to benefit from our rights. Eventually, some of us
accepted carabaos as mortgage payment; others agreed to one carabao in exchange for
eight to ten hectares of land. Others were left with no option but to accept a carabao as
payment because the Muslims would not agree that they just mortgage their land. (126)

In this passage, the words accepted and agreed are used in very strange ways
insofar as the Manobos were forced into signing documents with very unequal
terms.46 The solution that the Manobos favored was for the Muslims to vacate the
lands. Instead, some Manobos received no benefit from their lands, some people
mortgaged their land, and some even sold their land.
In the aftermath of these events, one thing that is clear is that there was
a division between the Muslims and the Manobos of these barangays of Carmen
concerning what constituted their rights to the land. Muslims would later produce
documents of mortgage and sale signed by Manobo mortgagers and sellers (130).47
Furthermore, according to Ampalids narration the relationship between land and
armed conflict is one in which Muslims, themselves displaced by armed conflict, in
turn attempt to use military means to grab the lands of the Manobos: They attacked
us so that they could take over this place. We cant say they were out to grab our
properties; we had none of those, except our lands (127). In the accounts of the
Muslims, on the other hand, the relationship between land and armed conflict is
more complicated. The conditions of this particular armed conflict, in which the
government of the Philippines uses techniques of counterinsurgency warfare with
the support and training of the US military, are major barriers to achieving peace in
Mindanao. The conditions of counterinsurgency warfare are barriers to peace not
only because of the physical violence they create but also because of the barriers to
interpretation that they create.
In contrast to the Manobo story, the Muslim story is not narrated by a single
person. The story was generated through two sources: an interview with an officer
of the MILF and a focus group discussion that brought together Muslims from
among the 186 families who were involved in the land dispute. The focus of the
Muslim story is on the displacement of Muslims by war, and in particular by war
fought by militias supported by the Armed Forces of the Philippines. In a previous
moment, the creation of one militia served as the occasion for bringing Muslims
and indigenous peoples together. Later on, the creation of another militia drove
the Muslims and indigenous peoples apart.
Kumander Iskak, the MILF officer in Kapalawan Province who was responsible
for administering assistance to Moros who were displaced by war, describes this
previous moment (124).48 Ilaga militias in the early 1970s drove Muslims to flee
their homes in other barangays of Carmen and to appeal to Pedro Ampalid and
seek refuge in the lands of the Manobos:

At that time, there was no one who can act as guarantor for the entry of the Moro
except Datu Ampalid. People were then still afraid of the presence of the Ilaga. Also at
that time, we saw some natives who were among the Ilaga. If you are not accompanied
by a native, you cannot guarantee the safety of Muslims. And Datu Pedro, because
of his being an authority, wielded influence among the natives. He guaranteed the
Maguindanaos safety. He escorted the second batch of 86 (all from Bgy. Kibayao and
Kasapian) Moro families who entered the Manobo territory.49 (128)
At this time, the Moros were afraid that members of the Aromanon Ilianon
Manobo tribe were themselves Ilaga.50 Pedro Ampalid, in Iskaks account, acted as
a mediator. He was uniquely positioned to act as a mediator because he held the
title of both datu and timaway. After the death of Pedro Ampalid, his son Damasco
also received the title of datu and played a crucial role in keeping peace between
Moro and Manobo people in the area. A certain tension arises, though, between
Iskaks and Damasco Ampalids stories when they recount the period between
the arrival of the Muslim refugees and their forced displacement during the war
in the early 2000s. Iskak claims that the period was one of harmony and peace,
while Damasco recalled the period as one in which Manobos suffered because they
could not return to the lands that the Muslims had settled. In other words, Iskak
emphasizes the military aspects of the situation, while Damasco emphasizes the
economic, and in particular the livelihoods of the Manobos and the Muslims.
The passage of the Moro narrative, in which the transition between the period
of peace during the 1980s and 1990s and the period of war during the early 2000s,
is split. The beginning of the passage is narrated by Kumander Iskak, who was
interviewed by writers of Land Tenure Stories in 2009 at an undisclosed location
because, as a member of the MILF , he was a target of the Armed Forces of the
Philippines (146 note 90). The second part of the passage is taken from a focus
group discussion conducted a few weeks before the interview with Iskak, and it
was held at a public location, the poblacion of the municipality of Carmen (146
note 94):
[Iskak] There were no unresolved disputes between the Moros and the Manobos.
We lived in absolute harmony and peace. All of us looked upon Damasco as our datu.
He was recognized as an elder. He resolved disputes which were not complicated, not
violent, such as marital disputes, and brawls. When a Moro and a Manobo figure in a
conflict, Datu Damasco and I were tasked to resolve it.
We used the process of resolving disputes according to tradition and according to the
MILF system. At that time, Datu Damasco was not yet elected kagawad [member of the
barangay council]. He was a ranking member of the MILF . [Focus group] We join each
others activities and celebrations. There were intermarriages between the two groups.

There were no segregation in dwellings; Moro and Manobos houses were built close to
each other.
During the all-out-war of 2000, MILF combatants passed by Pagalungan from Muleta
on their way to their camp at Kilabaw. This made the Manobos suspect that we sided
with the MILF . At that time, there was no chance to explain because of the security
condition. We were also afraid to go to the Manobo area because the Manobos were
identified with government. Among them were CAFGU members who were targets of
MILF men. They believed they fought at the side of government by acting as military
guides.51 (128-9)
In this part of the narrative of the Muslims, the portion that is attributed to
Iskak emphasizes the harmonious relations between the Muslims and the Manobos.
The portion that is attributed to the focus group begins with confirmation of
the story of harmonious relations, but the emphasis shifts to the militarization
of the relationship. The account itself presents a barrier to interpretation: the
members of the focus group believed that the Manobos included Citizen Armed
Force Geographical Unit (CAFGU ) members. In other words, the members of the
focus group could not be certain that the Manobos were collaborating with the
Armed Forces of the Philippines, who had launched an offensive against Muslims
in Mindanao.
It will be necessary here to go into some depth about the history of the CAFGU s,
and the reason why the suspicion of Manobos being CAFGU s would be such a
serious matter. The CAFGU s descend from a line of militias that were formed
by successive governments of the Philippines since the end of World War II in
order to wage counterinsurgency warfare against the Filipino people.52 Militias
were given the name of CAFGU in 1987 during the regime of Corazon Aquino,
ostensibly to consolidate all auxiliary, non-regular military forces under a single
command under the Armed Forces of the Philippines and to comply with the 1987
Philippine Constitutions prohibition on private armies and non-statutory forces
(Institute 17-8). However, CAFGU s are currently classified into two types: CAFGU
Active Auxiliaries who are directly supervised and paid by the AFP , and Special
CAFGU Active Auxiliaries (SCAA s), who are paid by private businesses and local
government units. SCAA s are accountable primarily to the companies and local
government officials who pay them, and thus they are hard to distinguish from
private armies (Institute of Bangsamoro Studies 19).
For many people in the Philippines, the term CAFGU invokes human rights
abuses such as torture, murder, extrajudicial killings, rape, looting of property,
forced disappearances, and arson. According to the Philippine Commission on
Human Rights, in the year 2000, 853 cases of murder, execution, disappearances,

and illegal arrest were filed against 1,017 CAFGU s. The Ecumenical Movement
for Justice and Peace recorded around 20,000 cases of human rights violations
attributable to CAFGU s. After declining in the 1990s, the number of CAFGU s has
risen dramatically since 2000. In 2007, there were about 53,000 CAFGU s, while
the number of active duty members of the Armed Forces of the Philippines was
about 120,000 (Institute of Bangsamoro Studies 24-25).
In the narrative of the focus group, the alleged-CAFGU s are suspected of being
guides. This suspicion stands as a barrier towards interpreting the statement of
the focus group. Within the context of the Philippines, the human rights violations
of the Ilagas and the CAFGU s would shadow any reference to them. The barrier
to interpretation also stands as a barrier to peace, and the barrier to interpretation
exists because of the militarization of Mindanao wrought by the Government
of the Republic of the Philippines and its armed wings, the Armed Forces of the
Philippines and the CAFGU s. According to the editors of Land Tenure Stories, for
the conflict to be resolved the Moros believe that justice must be in place. Justice
would be achieved when the problem of mutual accusation, i.e. Moros siding
with the MILF and Manobos becoming CAFGU s, is clarified and the search for
solutions to achieve peace is undertaken (129). This situation exists because the
MILF was targeted by the government of the Philippines, making it impossible for
MILF members to reveal their affiliation. On the other side, the CAFGU s, unlike
regular members of the AFP , are not readily identifiable, and thus they are even
less accountable than regular personnel of the AFP . Furthermore, it is not clear
whether the CAFGU s were under the command of the AFP , a local politician, or a
private corporation.53
At the time of writing of Land Tenure Stories, the conflict between the Muslims
and the Manobos was unresolved. However, the resolution of the conflict cannot
arise simply from MILF forces capitulating and laying down their arms. For the
Muslims, a resolution of the conflict would require the negotiators to address their
lack of livelihood. The Muslims who were displaced during the all-out war of the
AFP in 2000 became dependent on their families who lived elsewhere, and where
possible they hired themselves out to farming (124). They expressed a desire to
return to the lands they previously occupied, and this desire was urgent. They
agreed to attend the focus group discussion because they believed that it would
speed up the process of resolution (130). However, the negotiations were very
difficult because Manobos who had previously vacated the lands might have
returned to work on them.
The resolution of the conflict cannot occur unless much larger issues, that affect
all of the peoples of the Philippine archipelago, are addressed. A just and lasting
peace would address the issue of the lack of livelihood, which, as the narrative of

the Manobo Timuay Pedro Ampalid suggests, must address issues around land
and landlessness. However, the militarized response to the issues around land
and landlessness pursued by the Government of the Republic of the Philippines,
instead of solving the problems, creates deadly conflicts and the displacement
of peoples. Because of the economic crisis in the Philippines the stipend paid
to CAFGU s attracts recruits, who join primarily because of their lack of other
forms of livelihood (Institute of Bangsamoro Studies 40). However, although the
recruitment of CAFGU s divides communities and creates conditions for deadly
conflicts, it does not create livelihoods for the people. One of the major reasons why
CAFGU s are recruited is because the Philippine state cannot afford the militarized
solution to conflict. CAFGU s are paid much less than regular AFP soldiers and do
not receive benefits equivalent to regular AFP soldiers (Institute of Bangsamoro
Studies 18). A statement by a CAFGU on the island of Basilan, a heavily militarized
island just south of Zamboanga, further shows the inadequacy of the stipend in
solving problems around the lack of livelihoods:
I look forward to that day the CAFGU s allowance will be increased and released
regularly on time. Nowadays, our families face financial hardship. Our small allowance,
which is not enough for our daily needs, is delayed for three months. My wife, [a fish
vendor in the market], borrowed money as capital from a money-lender with a high
interest. Her capital for vending fish went instead to our daily needs. (Institute of
Bangsamoro Studies 41)
Clearly, in this case, the needs of CAFGU s are not prioritized by the government
of the Philippines, and it is likely that CAFGU s, even when they receive their pay,
still suffer from financial hardship. The story suggests that, even for the CAFGU s,
the militarized response to peoples movements is not sustainable.54
The Philippine state has played a significant role in exacerbating the conflict
between the Muslims and the Manobos of Barangay Kimadzil. According to Eddie
Quitoriano, most male members of the Manobo community in Kimadzil joined
the CAFGU , and they were deployed in another part of Carmen as part of the AFP
operations in this part of Mindanao (Impact 21). Meanwhile, state efforts to aid
the Manobos have been inadequate, and NGO s such as the Kadtuntaya Foundation
and Tabang Mindanao have undertaken relief operations in Carmen to provide
farm animals such as goats, pigs, and carabaos (Candelaria et al. 98). State support
for Muslim refugees has also been inadequate, and the MILF seems to be the only
state-like entity that provided the families aid. Furthermore, the current Philippine
government institutions for implementing the redistribution of land have also
been inadequate and might even have caused harm. Also according to Quitoriano,
legal title to Aromanon Manobo lands have been transferred to outsiders through
the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (CARP ), the heavily-criticized land

reform law of 1988 (Land 17). It is curious that in the Muslims account of the
events in Kimadzil they made no mention of attempting to return to the lands that
the Ilaga forced them to vacate, lands in nearby barangays as well as the provinces
of Maguindanao and Sultan Kudurat, and it does not seem that the Philippine state
has provided a way for them to reclaim their lands (Kadtuntaya 128). Meanwhile,
Aromanon Manobo claims to ancestral domain through IPRA , like many ancestral
domain claims of indigenous peoples in the Philippines, are held up in processing
(Lacorte).
The stories told by the Muslims and the Manobos of the barangays of Carmen
provide necessary perspective for the literary texts of Bulosan, Jubaira, Lao, and
other writers whose works have touched on Mindanao and Sulu. This perspective
is particularly necessary for those who desire a just and lasting peace in the
Philippine archipelago. In order to sustain peace the livelihoods of the peoples of
Mindanao must be the primary concern, and the livelihoods of the overwhelming
majority of the peoples of Mindanao are tied to the land. The Government of the
Republic of the Philippines has repeatedly shown, not only with regard to Muslims
and indigenous peoples but also with regard to the overwhelming majority of
Christian Filipinos, that the profits of multinational corporations, the strategic
interests of the US in the Asia-Pacific region, and the fortunes of the handful of
elite comprador and landlord families are its primary concerns, with little concern
for the peoples of the Philippine archipelago.
At the time of the writing of this monograph, the Government of the Republic
of the Philippines and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front are apparently nearing
a peace agreement that would establish a Bangsamoro region within the borders
governed by the Philippine state. In 2012, the Philippine Government and the MILF
reached a framework agreement on the creation of a Bangsamoro political entity
that would replace the Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao (ARMM ), which
was created in 1989 through negotiations between the Philippine Government
and the MNLF , and in 2013, the Philippine Government and the MILF reached
a comprehensive peace agreement. The Bangsamoro region would potentially
include not just Lanao del Sur, most of Maguindanao, and most of the Sulu
archipelago, which are already governed by the ARMM , but also Cotabato City,
predominantly Muslim municipalities of Lanao del Norte, and barangays in North
Cotabato (GPH -MILF 6). On September 10, 2014, the Bangsamoro Basic Law
(BBL ), which would establish a legal framework for a Bangsamoro territory with
certain powers reserved for the Government of the Republic of the Philippines,
was submitted for approval to the Philippine Congress.

Currently Barangay Kimadzil is not included in the proposed Bangsamoro

region, although two other barangays in Carmen are included (Rodil, Indigenous).
Aromanon Manobo leaders specifically requested from the Philippine Congress
in June of 2014 that their lands not be included in the Bangsamoro autonomous
political entity. Instead, Manobo leaders requested that Congress direct the
National Commission on Indigenous Peoples to fast-track the delineation and
titling of the ancestral domains of their peoples and the other indigenous peoples
who live adjacent to the proposed Bangsamoro territories (Lacorte).
Although very few Aromanon Manobos live in the proposed Bangsamoro

region, large groups of indigenous peoples in the province of Maguindanao, to
the west of Carmen, live near the center of the Bangsamoro region. The largest
of these groups is the Tedurays, with a population of 57,296 in Maguindanao
according to the 2000 census (Rodil, Indigenous). The total population of
non-Moro indigenous peoples within the proposed Bangsamoro territory is
estimated at 122,980 (Tauli-Corpuz, BBL ). Indigenous peoples have had to
struggle to participate in the process for creating the Bangsamoro territory and
to be acknowledged in the proposals for the Bangsamoro Basic Law, and these
struggles have won some limited success. Moro leaders have responded positively
to indigenous leaders who have referenced a pact between common ancestors of
the Moros and Lumads, the Mamalu-Tabunaway pact, concerning the delineation
of territories for peaceful coexistence. Furthermore, two lumads were appointed
to the transitional Bangsamoro Transition Commission, which is tasked to draft
the Bangsamoro Basic Law (Paredes 175).
A UN Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, Victoria

Tauli-Corpuz, has acknowledged the effects of the efforts of indigenous peoples
on the current draft of the BBL being considered in the Philippine House of
Representatives. The document specifically acknowledges that indigenous peoples
are not subsumed within a Moro identity, a response to the demands of indigenous
peoples to maintain their own identities. Unlike previous drafts, the draft as of
May 26, 2015 uses the term non-Moro Indigenous Peoples in several places in
the BBL , including the preamble. Furthermore, Section 9 Article IV is entitled
Declaration on the Rights of Non-Moro Indigenous Peoples.
However, the UN Special Rapporteur also states that the document is somewhat
incoherent insofar as Article 11 states that all non-Moro Indigenous Peoples are
Bangsamoro, which runs counter to the concern that the identities of indigenous
peoples need to be acknowledged (BBL ). Tauli-Corpuz also raises concerns
about whether the proposed Bangsamoro region would also allow indigenous
peoples to pursue claims to ancestral domains. Within the Autonomous Region
of Muslim Mindanao no ancestral domain title has ever been issued because the

ARMM has not implemented IPRA (Paredes 173). In initial drafts of the BBL , there
was no reference to IPRA , leading many indigenous people to raise concerns that
they will not be able to title their ancestral domains. In response, in the May
26 House draft of the BBL , there is a reference to IPRA and an article that states
that the Bangsamoro and Philippine governments will cooperate and coordinate
through existing national laws to create policies for the identification, delineation,
and titling of ancestral domains. However, the article does not clearly state that
the objective of these laws will be to recognize and protect the rights of non-Moro
indigenous peoples that are enshrined in IPRA and the UN Declaration on the
Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Furthermore, in another article the Bangsamoro
government is given exclusive power to recognize traditional possession of lands
and resources by indigenous cultural communities subject to judicial affirmation,
but there is no clarity about what body will issue the judicial affirmation. In IPRA ,
there is no reference to judicial affirmation, which would not be appropriate to
Native Title, which refers to pre-conquest concepts of land ownership before the
colonial declaration that the lands were public lands subject to the settlers courts
(Tauli-Corpuz, Non-Moro).
There are many hopes tied to the peace process for the people of the Philippines,
and this process is so important because it is an occasion to address historical
wrongs and establish justice. It would be a great tragedy if the final version of
the BBL results in the continued or even intensified oppression of indigenous
peoples and Muslim and Christian farmers, workers, and refugees of the proposed
Bangsamoro region. It remains to be seen whether the BBL and the state that it
would create will allow the peoples of Mindanao and Sulu to regain, preserve, and
develop their livelihoods and put an end to the cycles of war, dispossession, and
forced migration. If the BBL passes in its current form, those who would stand in
solidarity with indigenous peoples must be vigilant so that the rights of indigenous
peoples are upheld; those who would stand in solidarity with the overwhelming
majority of Moros, who rely on land for their livelihoods, must also monitor the
situation carefully because there is no provision in the BBL for land reform.
On the question of the possibility of solidarity between Filipino Americans and

the peoples of Mindanao, it will be helpful to return to the Forum Kritika on Carlos
Bulosan and becoming Filipino. John Streamas contribution to the forum provides
comments on the reception of America is in the Heart among Filipino American
students at Washington State University. Most of the Filipino American students
are from an urban area, Seattle, but the main campus of Washington State University
(WSU ) is situated in a rural area in which the overwhelming majority of people are
white. Apparently, the Filipino American Students Association (FASA ) plays an

important part in the educational experiences of Filipino American students at

WSU . The presence of a Filipino American student organization certainly plays
a part in the reception to America Is in the Heart that Streamas records for his
introductory literature courses:
Most of my Filipino American students feel close ties to the Philippines, whether or
not they often visit family there, and the significance of the books first part is not lost
to them, even if they feel closer identifications with its subsequent parts. They know
the history of colonization, and they have seen film documentaries about contemporary
issues such as the exploitation and violence against overseas domestic workers; and,
better than most other Asian American students, they know the historical ties between
past and present problems. (214-215)
In contrast to many readers, including literary scholars in the US , many of the

Filipino American students see the importance of the books first part, most of which
is set in rural parts of the southern Ilocano region. Streamas notes, though, that as
a result of neoliberal reforms, the histories of people of color in the US , including
Filipinos, are increasingly left out of the kindergarten-12th grade curriculum in the
state of Washington. Recently, according to his assessment, FASA has lost much of
its activist and historical focus.
Nevertheless, there is still a strong activist current in the US that must act in the
present based on knowledge of the actual histories of the Philippines and the US .
In a note, Streamas mentions Stephen Bishcoff, Associate Director of Multicultural
Student Services at his university, who tells students that many of the experiences
[of Part I of America is in the Heart] are still relevant today.
Hopefully this relevance will be further articulated in terms of the continuing

struggles over land and livelihoods that many Filipinos experience today.
Peoples of Mindanao and Filipino Americans have recently accelerated

efforts to build bridges, especially since Tropical Storm Sendong and Typhoon
Pablo devastated large parts of Mindanao in 2011 and 2012. Large numbers of
Filipino Americans organized and contributed to disaster relief events in the
US , and significant numbers helped to organize and participate in medical and
relief missions. Furthermore, it is becoming clear to increasing numbers of
Filipino Americans that the disastrous effects of climate events in the Philippines
are intensified by corruption, militarization, and the neglect with which the
Philippine government treats the overwhelming majority of Filipinos. Groups
based in the US such as the National Alliance for Filipino Concerns (NAFCON ) are
calling for and participating in grassroots efforts to enact environmental justice
and sustainability in the Philippines, and NAFCON is actively partnering with

networks such as BALSA Mindanao and Salugpongan International. The Save Our
Schools campaign of Salugpongan International is an attempt to safeguard Lumad
schools and educational centers, many built in the aftermath of Pablo, from the
militarization wrought by the Armed Forces of the Philippines and its sponsors in
the US military. Lumad communities have established 146 alternative schools and
programs, but this is not nearly enough because nine out of ten Lumad children
have no access to formal education (Infographic). The response of the Armed
Forces of the Philippines has been to attack these schools, with 214 reported cases
of military attacks (Romero).
On relations between Filipino Americans and Muslims in the Philippines, there

is much less clarity. Most of this monograph is focused on narratives written by
Muslims, but there is still much work to be done so that Filipino Americans will
begin to both understand their relationships to Muslims in the Philippines and
to build concrete connections with Muslim peoples. Perhaps one of the tasks for
predominantly Christian Filipino American organizations is to make it a priority
to build more connections with Muslim Filipinos in the southern Philippines
as well as Muslim Filipinos who have been displaced and who have migrated to
the Visayas, Luzon, and overseas. Such relationships are being formed. Peoples
Community Organization for Reform and Empowerment (Peoples CORE ), an
alliance of organizations in the US , has partnered with Moro Peoples CORE in
North Cotabato, a group that has programs on human rights and peace advocacy,
farmers livelihood and development, cultural arts enhancement, education and
literacy, and environmental justice and advocacy. Furthermore, in response to
the Mamasapano Massacre of January 2015, in which a US -instigated operation in
territory controlled by the MILF resulted in the deaths of several civilians and 44
members of a special unit of the Philippine National Police, a NAFCON statement
includes the following words by Potri Ranka Manis, a Maranao Bai Labi (a title of
nobility) and a founding member of Kinding Sindaw, a Maranao-based member
organization of NAFCON :
The divide and rule tactics using north against south, Christian vs Muslims, is an
old scheme that has been used to divide Filipinos. How can the Philippine government
who signed a ceasefire agreement send its own police forces to be sacrificial lambs? The
scripted violation of the peace process shows who controls the Philippine government
officials; this is a mere act to reinforce the rationale for foreign military to continue
staying in the Philippines to train and protect its citizens, when in reality the U.S. military
is there to protect the interests of the American elite. Its time to unite and to assert our
rights for self-determination. (NAFCON )
Manis statement refers to the continuing imperialist control that the US exerts
over the Philippine government, and a basis for unity between most Christian

Filipinos, indigenous peoples, and Muslims in the Philippines is a common struggle

against US imperialism. Additionally, a basis for unity is an economic struggle for
livelihood, which for many people in the Philippines is a struggle for land.

Notes
1. This monograph uses a definition of settler colonialism based on David
Lloyd and Laura Pulidos formulation: Settler colonialism is the practice
of conquering land and then populating it with the victorious people, the
settlers (796). This definition is currently being elaborated in attempts to build
solidarity between people in the US and people in Palestine. Recently several
US academic formations, including the American Studies Association, the
Association for Asian American Studies, and the Critical Filipina and Filipino
Studies Collective, have issued statements in support of the Palestinian people.
A definition proposed by Candace Fujikane for the term settler colonialism in

Hawaii might illuminate some aspects of the situation in Mindanao: Asian
settler colonialism refers to the present participation of all Asian Americans
in Hawaii in US settler colonialism through different kinds of settler practices,
ranging from colonial administration to the routines of everyday life (Fujikane
191-2). The position of settler colonist in Mindanao through the US colonial
period and up to the early decades of the Republic of the Philippines was
occupied primarily by Christian Filipinos. However, as Patricio Abinales has
outlined, some Muslims have been able to negotiate positions for themselves
as elected officials and high-ranking bureaucrats in the Philippine state and the
Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao. Furthermore, the dispossession of
so many Muslims since the 1970s has lead to increasing instances of conflict
between landless Muslims and indigenous peoples over land. A later part of
this monograph will be focused on a specific conflict in which landless Muslim
settlers attempt to dispossess a group of indigenous people from their ancestral
domain.
The reference to Hawaii brings up another possible point of comparison

between Hawaii and Mindanao, but to a part of Mindanao that has historically
had fewer Muslims and more indigenous peoples. During the US colonial period
settlers from the US established abaca plantations in Davao in southeastern
Mindanao, but a large number of migrants and settlers from Japan were much
more successful in agricultural endeavors (see Abinales 74-86). It would be
important, though, to consider more carefully the effects of this settlement on
the indigenous peoples of Davao and their responses to the settler incursions.
2. John Streamas documents the problems that literary critics have encountered
in identifying the genre to which America is in the Heart belongs. I will call the
book a novel, but I agree with E. San Juan Jr.s assertion that it is a popular front
allegory.
3. America is in the Heart is often included in the syllabi of American Studies,

Labor Studies, and Asian American Studies classes in the US . The novel is
quoted extensively in the most often-used textbook of Asian American History,

Ronald Takakis Strangers from a Different Shore. The only novel in English
among those written by Filipino writers that can rival America is in the Hearts
circulation is Jessica Hagedorns Dogeaters.
4. Macarios story is largely based on the story of Bulosans brother Aurelio.

Aurelio was born in November 1904 and after graduating from high school he
taught first in Pangasinan before being transferred to Mindanao. He traveled
to the US in 1929 with a student visa. Unfortunately, Aurelio in this interview
does not state exactly where in Mindanao he was located (Chow 156).
5. Carlos Bulosans claim in America is in the Heart that the Moros were not
entirely pacified is perhaps a reference to revolts against the disarmament
of village leaders, the imposition of a poll tax, and compulsory education in
the province of Lanao during the 1920s, which his brother Aurelio might have
been aware of due to his presence in Mindanao as a teacher during the 1920s
(Kawashima 140).
6. As we will see later in this monograph, one of the effects of US colonial rule
on Mindanao and Sulu would be the degradation in the status of community
leaders who traditionally preserved the land tenure of peasant families and
who settled conflicts within the community. The degradation in the status of
community leaders would thus facilitate the imposition of a legal system that
would sanction the dispossession of Muslim and indigenous communities by
outsiders through the privatization of land and the introduction of a foreign
process for acquiring titles to land.
7. The effort of building solidarity between workers in the US and peasants in

the Philippines is arguably an extension of the efforts to build solidarity
within the Philippines between workers and peasants that found expression
in actual alliances formed on the island of Luzon in the late 1930s. The size
of this working class was limited by the lack of industrial development in the
Philippines, which was prevented by the US colonial regime.
8. The new Philippine government in the early 1950s attempted to solve the
problem of landlessness in Luzon and the Visayas by settling peasants and
soldiers from these regions in Mindanao. This program, however, was not new,
because the US colonial regime and the previous Commonwealth government
of the Philippines had attempted to quell peasant revolts in Luzon and Visayas
by relocating peasants to Mindanao since the early 1910s.
9. There are several theses on Jubairas works that I have not been able to read:
Isolation in the short stories of Ibrahim A. Jubaira by Amor Babiera (San Carlos
1967), An analytical study on selected short stories of Ibrahim A. Jubaira and
their educational implications by Luzviminda Cagas (Ateneo de Davao 1973),

and Reflections of Muslim culture and human values in Ibrahim A. Jubairas

short stories, A Canto Of Summer and other stories by Linda Orduna (Saint
Louis University 1980)
10. I will assume in this monograph that the story was written in the late-1930s
or early 1940s, and that it was published in 1941. Pacita Habana, in her
bibliographical note on Ibrahim Jubaira, gives a publication date for Blue
Blood in 1957 in the anthology Best Philippine Love Stories. I have personally
not been able to read issues of Graphic magazine from this period. Leopoldo
Yabes, in the anthology Philippine Short Stories1941-1955, gives the publication
date of Blue Blood as August 28, 1941, in Graphic magazine. Habana does list
other stories that were published by Jubaira in the magazine Graphic in 1939
and 1940.
11. I do not wish to give the impression that Sulu was isolated and did not engage
in trade prior to US rule. This, of course, is far from the truth. However, Sulus
status as an entrepot in Southeast Asia declined during the second half of the
19th century as Spain began to attack Sulu and Sulus shipping with steam-
powered naval vessels.
12. For the purposes of analysis, I will define a feudal economy as one that is
based primarily on agriculture, in which there is contention between peasant
producers and noble landowners over the fruits of agricultural production.
Most production is directly consumed by the peasant producers, with a surplus
extracted by the landowners. A minor part of this surplus is used to engage
in commerce. In the semi-colonial/semi-feudal economy, commerce expands
and more of the peasant production is directed towards trade. In a capitalist
economy, like the one depicted in the US in America is in the Heart, relatively
few of the people would continue to use most of their produce for their own
consumption; instead, farmworkers would work for wages in order to purchase
their needs. One of the reservations in referring to the agrarian economy as
feudal arises because the destruction of the authority of the noble landowners
in Mindanao and Sulu resulted in a degradation also in the status of many of
the peasant producers.
13. Panglima is the title of a noble below the rank of Datu who performs
administrative tasks for a datu.
14. The term native appears in the following sentence, which is part of the
description of the marriage of Dayang-Dayang: Half-clad natives kindled
[coconut leaves] over the cooking fire. Some pounded rice for cakes. And their
brown glossy bodies sweated profusely (10). The term is, in one respect, a
holdover from the language of US and British colonization projects. In another
respect, though, it maps onto the specific situation of Sulu. The three major

states of the Mindanao/Sulu region all participated in a slave trade in which

Christians and indigenous peoples were enslaved. See the story of Kumander
Iskak later in this monograph for a more recent use of the term. It is important
to note, though, that the leaders of many indigenous tribes on Mindanao
embraced the term lumad, the Bisayan word for native, in the late 1980s in
order to unify themselves.
15. Jaafar omits a crucial piece of information: the source of his initial capital. This
is a convention of much capitalist storytelling, which denies the violence with
which capital was originally accumulated.
16. The character of pre-capitalist modes of production in the Philippines needs

elaboration beyond the scope of this monograph. The term feudal in the
Philippines is tremendously complicated insofar as those who have occupied
the position of landlord have been so varied. In the north there would be
a combination of Spanish, Chinese, and Malay influence on the meaning of
feudalism. In the south there is the influence not just of Islam but also the
different places from which Muslim influence emanated such as Arabia, India,
and other parts of maritime Southeast Asia.
17. It is possible that Jubaira refers in this passage specifically to the 1927 incident
in which Datu Tahil of Patikul refused to acknowledge the authority of US
colonial government officials. The location of the Astana in Blue Blood is
Patikul, a municipality close to Jolo. Datu Tahil lead a popular movement to
abolish the land tax, contest compulsory attendance of children at school, gain
the privilege to bear arms, and to remove certain provincial officials. He built
and defended a fort, but government forces sieged and then overran it. He was
captured and initially sentenced to serve ten years imprisonment and pay a fine
of $10,000 (People).
18. The most brutal of the US military operations in Sulu, the Battle of Bud Dajo
in 1906 in which US forces killed all but six of the 800-1,000 people who had
fortified a position on the mountain of Bud Dajo, was precipitated by the
refusal of the people to pay taxes to the US military government. The New York
Times published an article shortly after the battle with the headline Women
and Children Killed in Moro Battle. A second battle would occur on Bud Dajo
in 1911. See Michael Salman, The Embarrassment of Slavery, for an account of
the discourses of US military officers regarding slavery in Sulu and Mindanao.
It should be noted that the discourses of US military officers regarding slavery,
and the actions of the occupation regime, were clearly not motivated by any
desire to improve the well-being of those enslaved; rather, the discourse of
slavery served as the justification for the violent seizure of sovereignty and the
eradication of the state that opposed the US .

19. The term moro is a remnant of the Spanish wars against the Muslims of
Mindanao and Sulu, but the US colonial administration used the term to name
the Muslim regions of the Philippines as well as the wars that the US military
fought against peoples of these regions.
20. This quotation, including the parenthetical additions to the text, is taken directly
from the thesis of Marjanie Macasalong. Macasalong acknowledged the help of
Ustaz Abdulwahab Amerol in retrieving a photocopy of the document from the
Franklin D. Roosevelt presidential library. A scanned copy of this document
should be more accessible. The number of signatories is inconsistent between
commentators, ranging from 100-200. This number might be verified by
examining the original document.
21. It is possible to regard the Dansalan Declaration, in its protest against political
repression, as an early articulation of anti-fascism in the 1930s.
22. Portia Lei Braza, a blogger in Iligan City, has posted the text as well as some
details about the circulation of the letter. According to the blog post the
letter was left with a US military officer, Lt. Col. Wallace C. Philoon, who then
forwarded it to the commanding general of the Philippine Department.
23. The prison of San Ramon near Zamboanga is where Dayang-Dayangs husband
is incarcerated.
24. See Kawashima Midori, Transformations of Concepts of Homeland and

People Among Philippine Muslims, for a catalog of the petitions circulated
by Moro leaders. Midori pays careful attention to the fact that these petitions
were written in vernacular languages and then translated into English. Midori
elsewhere has written in detail about the political context in Lanao that gave rise
to a petition shortly before the Dansalan Declaration was written. Commentary
on a Maranao Petition. This petition had around 30 signatories, and Midori
traces the outlines of the organization of religious leaders and educators who
produced the document. However, apparently, the political situation changed
significantly between 1934 and 1935. The Dansalan Declaration, in contrast
to the 1934 petition, invokes a Moro political identity that extends across
Mindanao and Sulu.
25. The Dansalan Declaration is named for the place in which it was signed, which
was the capital of the province of Lanao during the US colonial period. In 1956
Dansalan would be renamed Marawi City, the major city of Lanao Del Sur today.
26. To provide a sense of scale for this migration, the US Census of 1960 counted
176,310 Filipinos in the US (US Census Bureau). During the huge spike in
migration to Mindanao between 1948 and 1960, the US maintained a quota

of around 100 immigrants from the Philippines. A more thorough account

of the early-20th century migration to Lanao would consider the problem of
landlessness in the Visayas, from which most of the settlers departed.
27. See, for example, Unveiling the Law and The Debutante is a Muslim Princess
in Inquirer.net and This Ali Fights for Muslim Women in Newsblaze.
28. According to the web site of the Womens Islamic Initiative in Spirituality
and Equality Lao has had some involvement with Nisa, a network of Muslim
womens rights advocates in Muslim Mindanao. According to one of its
members, Nisa works on gender issues in the context of discourse in Islamic
legal theory, vis-a-vis womens human rights and gender, and supports
grassroots initiatives through its member organizations. Nisa is involved in
raising the level of awareness of open-minded Muslim women and men as
regards Muslim womens rights. It achieves this goal through its programs on
women empowerment; policy reform; research and advocacy; protection and
promotion of womens rights, including litigation; and women in peace and
security (Laisa Masuhud Alamia).
29. In her report on the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of

Discrimination Against Women, Lao wrote extensively about early marriages. It
should be noted that under the Code of Muslim Personal Laws in the Philippines
a wife may divorce a husband if certain conditions are met. Christian women
in the Philippines are not able to divorce their husbands.
30. Rido or ridu is a Maranao, Iranun, and Maguindanaon term. These are the
three largest Muslim ethno-linguistic groups on Mindanao. According to
Wilfredo Torres, this term was in existence prior to the adoption of Islam by
these groups (12).
31. Matuans inventory of ridos during the period from 1994 to 2004 documented
only one case in which a woman was the assailant. Of the victims, 11 were
women and 189 were men.
32. Lao has herself written on the myth that Muslims are violent (12 More Myths
about Islam).
33. The region around Lake Lanao in northwestern Mindanao to the east of the
Zamboanga peninsula.
34. Kalilang refers here to festivities around the kalawi.

35. In 2012 in the ARMM as a whole, which includes the province that contains the
Ranao, over 70% of the people engage in agricultural employment (Philippine
Statistics Authority, Regional Profile: Autonomous Region of Muslim
Mindanao)
36. Land grabbing in Mindanao was facilitated by the titling process for
homesteaders. Homesteaders from Luzon and the Visayas were often awarded
titles from Manila, while Muslims who already lived on the land had to go
through the titling process themselves without support. In 1913, Christian
homesteaders were entitled to 16 hectares, while Muslims who went through
the homesteading process were entitled to only 8. In 1919, a new homesteading
law entitled Christians to 24 hectares, with Muslims who went through the
titling process receiving only 10 (Abreu 22). The Philippine government initially
allowed corporations to control up to 1024 hectares, but US corporations such
as Del Monte were able to circumvent the law and establish huge plantations
on Mindanao (History of Dole).
37. 40 acresthe area of a very large farmis equivalent to just over 16 hectares.
38. T.J.S. George, quoted in Busran-Lao (9).
39. Rufa Cagoco-Guiam has written on the efforts of internally displaced peoples in
Mindanao to survive (seeGender and Livelihoods among Internally Displaced
Persons in Mindanao, Philippines). Regarding polygamous marriages, it
would be important to consult women who are in these marriages.
40. According to Wernstedt and Simpkins, the overwhelming bulk of the

immigration to Cotabato during this period occurred after World War II ,
between 1945 and the census enumerations of 1948 (88).
41. The following provinces and cities were carved out of the center of what was
once the Maguindanao Sultanate in South-Central Mindanao: South Cotabato,
North Cotabato, Maguindanao, Sultan Kudarat, Sarangani, and Cotabato City
and General Santos City. The province of Cotabato was created in 1914, then
partitioned into North and South Cotabato in 1966, and North Cotabato was
further partitioned into Maguindanao, North Cotabato, and Sultan Kudarat
in 1973. An act of the Philippine National Assembly in 1983 renamed North
Cotabato to Cotabato (Cotabato Province Government).
42. Land Tenure Stories is an immensely complex volume. Several agencies based
in three different cities were involved in publishing it, the state of war made it
necessary for some people involved in its production to exercise discretion, and
the technical team included an advisory committee, a panel of reviewers, seven
writers, two researchers, nine research assistants, three technical coordinators,

and two editors. I can only hope that such a large collective effort aspired
towards creating conditions for a just and lasting peace in Mindanao.
43. The group that would become the MILF originally split from the MNLF in 1977.
The MILF was launched in 1984, and it became the primary target of attacks
from the government of the Philippines. The MILF and the Government of the
Republic of the Philippines agreed to a cease fire in 1997, but this was broken
with the all-out war waged by the AFP in 2000. Peace talks and a cease-fire
resumed in 2001, and after a flare-up of war in 2008 a framework agreement
between the MILF and the GRP was reached in 2012. There is a regional and
ethno-linguistic difference between the bases of support of the MNLF and the
MILF . The MNLF is strongest among the Tausug and Sama ethnic groups on
the Sulu archipelago, while the MILF is strongest among the Maguindanao and
the Maranao in Central Mindanao (Rivera 42).
44. Although the mechanism exists for indigenous peoples to claim their ancestral
domains, and some claims have been approved, the process is far from perfect
because the NCIP , the agency that processes the claims, is severely under-
resourced. Currently, only one claim per province per year can be in process,
and the delineation and processing of claims can take several years (Paredes
171-2). Some indigenous peoples groups have criticized IPRA and NCIP .
According to Giovanni Reyes of KASAPI (Coalition of Indigenous Groups in the
Philippines) the NCIP by 2010 had issued 156 Certificates of Ancestral Domain
covering 4.3 million of the 7.5 million hectares of ancestral domain. However,
only about 937,000 hectares had been titled. In comparison, as of 2010 the
NCIP had issued 320 certifications for mining, logging, and dams (Salamat).
45. Datu is a Muslim title, and Timuay is a Manobo title. Traditionally, the
datu and the timuay held positions of leadership in Muslim and Manobo
communities. Pedro Ampalid was a recognized leader among both the
Muslims and the Manobos. It is important to point out that Pedro Ampalids
son, Damasco, does not refer to himself as a datu.
46. It is possible that the words accept and agree have lost nuance in translation.
47. The genealogies for concepts of land tenure among Muslims in Mindanao are
surely very complicated. I imagine that they involve complex interactions
between Sharia, indigenous understandings of land rights, and Philippine
law, which itself draws on US and Spanish legal concepts. In terms of this
monograph the examples of the thoughts of Muslims on land and land tenure
diverge sharply. The stakes of this question are particularly high now because
both indigenous peoples and Muslims in the Philippines are articulating land
claims in terms of ancestral domain.

48. Kumander, a title for officers within the MILF , should be pronounced similarly
to the English word commander.
49. The interview might have a slight mistranscription. According to the 2010
census in the municipality of Carmen there is a barangay named Nasapian. The
census lists the spelling of Kibayao as Kib-Ayao.
50. The use of the term native here is reminiscent of Jubairas usage of the term.
It is possible that the term is a translation of lumad, which has been embraced
as a name by peoples from many indigenous tribes in Mindanao.
51. There is an opaque but complex set of mediations between the Muslim families
and the text that appears in Land Tenure Stories. Writers of the volume decided
to place, apparently seamlessly, the narration of Iskak together with statements
at the focus group meeting. It is unclear whether Iskak was at the focus group
meeting, and it is not clear who are the referents for the pronoun we. The
writers of the report surely faced challenges in transcribing the focus group
discussion.
52. The historical genealogy of this tactic of counterinsurgents in the Philippines is

traceable to the Philippine American War, in which US forces enlisted groups
such as the Macabebe scouts who lead US forces to Emilio Aguinaldo. Since
Philippine independence the primary target of the US -backed armed forces
of the Philippines has been popular movements of peasants, workers, and
students, as well as Muslims across class lines.
53. According to a USAID and Asia Foundation-supported summary, Bisaya settlers

who controlled municipal and barangay governments in North Cotabato and
the neighboring province of Bukidnon convinced Manobos to enlist as CAFGU s
and CVO s (another paramilitary formation that supports the AFP ) (Alim et al).
54. This excerpt of the interview with the CAFGU provides a glimpse of the gendered
experiences of war. It is not a viable option for most Muslim and Christian
women to join the CAFGU in order to supplement their families incomes. Rufa
Cagoco-Guiam has written on the gendered effects of displacement due to war,
and especially the important roles of women in seeking livelihoods for their
families (seeRufa Cagoco-Guiam, Gender and Livelihoods among Internally
Displaced Persons in Mindanao, Philippines). In Guiams report, internally
displaced women receive almost no support from the state in their livelihood-
seeking activities.

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Mendoza / Landlessness, War, and Displacement  89

LANDLESSNESS, WAR, AND

Kritika Kultura 25 (2015): 141 Ateneo de Manila University

About the Author

Kritika Kultura 25 (2015): 141 Ateneo de Manila University

The Forum Kritika of a recent issue of Kritika Kultura, Reflections on Carlos

This monograph is an attempt to build on the work of the Forum Kritika on

Kritika Kultura 25 (2015): 141 Ateneo de Manila University

To get a better sense of the relationships of settler colonialism in Mindanao

Although America is in the Heart is widely read, this passage, to my knowledge,

Kritika Kultura 25 (2015): 141 Ateneo de Manila University

of their potentialities as a people would be tragically false. It is true that there

The inaccuracies of the passage are attributable, perhaps, to Bulosans lack of

It should be remembered, though, that Bulosan was working towards creating

Kritika Kultura 25 (2015): 141 Ateneo de Manila University

death. It was perhaps because of material, historical constraints that Bulosan

In order to advance Bulosans project of building international solidarity this

Kritika Kultura 25 (2015): 141 Ateneo de Manila University

particular, I will contrast the assimilationist position articulated in Blue Blood

The second barrier to solidarity is the difficulty of many Filipino Americans in

Kritika Kultura 25 (2015): 141 Ateneo de Manila University

THE FEUDAL AND SEMI-COLONIAL/SEMI-FEUDAL MEANINGS OF LAND IN

Ibrahim Jubaira was a contemporary of Bulosans.9 Like Bulosan, Jubaira

Kritika Kultura 25 (2015): 141 Ateneo de Manila University

Kritika Kultura 25 (2015): 141 Ateneo de Manila University

addresses Dayang-Dayang in an apostrophe: Your husband, to save his life, had to

In contrast, Jaafar becomes a cattle merchant. In the conversation between

Jaafar, in contrast to Dayang-Dayang, conceives of wealth primarily in terms

The categories of feudalism, semi-colonial, semi-feudal, and mode of production,

Kritika Kultura 25 (2015): 141 Ateneo de Manila University

Kritika Kultura 25 (2015): 141 Ateneo de Manila University

Kritika Kultura 25 (2015): 141 Ateneo de Manila University

the development of urban societies, enjoying the benefits of modern civilization,

Kritika Kultura 25 (2015): 141 Ateneo de Manila University

SETTLER COLONIALISM AND THE ABSENCE OF PEACE IN THE TRIP TO A

Kritika Kultura 25 (2015): 141 Ateneo de Manila University

Kritika Kultura 25 (2015): 141 Ateneo de Manila University

emergence of a rido has devastating effects on families. In many cases, families

Even Noraisah, whom Asnia had described as domineering, avoids a confrontation

Kritika Kultura 25 (2015): 141 Ateneo de Manila University

A bride is not supposed to go to the grooms hometown, especially when he comes

Kritika Kultura 25 (2015): 141 Ateneo de Manila University

The anthropological discourse, though, is not really detached insofar as it is

Kritika Kultura 25 (2015): 141 Ateneo de Manila University

Kritika Kultura 25 (2015): 141 Ateneo de Manila University

In the setting of The Forbidden Land, the community which previously

Kritika Kultura 25 (2015): 141 Ateneo de Manila University

Kritika Kultura 25 (2015): 141 Ateneo de Manila University

the Philippine government instead of the traditional structures of land tenure to

Kritika Kultura 25 (2015): 141 Ateneo de Manila University

Kritika Kultura 25 (2015): 141 Ateneo de Manila University

INTERNALLY DISPLACED AND INDIGENOUS PEOPLES

Kritika Kultura 25 (2015): 141 Ateneo de Manila University

Kritika Kultura 25 (2015): 141 Ateneo de Manila University

In Ampalids account, the land transaction is not a money transaction. The

The importance of land to livelihood is reinforced in the next paragraph of

Kritika Kultura 25 (2015): 141 Ateneo de Manila University

The Manobos, in turn, themselves experienced displacement. In Ampalids

Furthermore, Manobos were forced to enter into very unequal arrangements

Mendoza / Landlessness, War, and Displacement 89

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