Ilocanos – Historically, We Are Farmers Of Quality!

Ilocano-ak.

I am Ilocano. Ilocanoness, I am in favor of a Federal Philippines. My grandfather Graciano Hilario has roots in Rosario, La Union. The family name of my mother, Sixta, is Agapito, Ilocano meaning to harvest.

With a Federal Ilocos Region, we Ilocanos would dig back enthusiastically through the centuries and learn more about our ancestors and how they lived and loved. (images  from Ilocano people[1], Ilocano women from Santa Catalina, Ilocos Sur ca 1900, Wikiwand)

Peter Xenos of Chulalongkorn University tells me in “The Ilocos Coast Since 1800: Population Pressure, The Ilocano Diaspora And Multiphasic Response” (January 1998, downloadable from ResearchGate), that

The Ilocos Coast achieved very high agrarian population densities long before most other areas of the Philippines and Southeast Asia. As a result, since before the mid-nineteenth century and for about a century thereafter, the region has exhibited a demography quite distinct for Southeast Asia.

We Ilocanos became the first people to be most industrious and populous farmers in the Philippines and Southeast Asia! That is telling me, “Ilocanos are farmers of quality.”

The Ilocano people are well known as migrants – to the Cagayan Valley, the Central Plain of Luzon, Zambales, Metropolitan Manila, Hawaii and elsewhere.

I know. My father himself, Dionisio, went to Hawaii as a sugarcane plantation worker. He did not talk about it, but I know he left the plantation as a stowaway in a boat – he had no money saved. He was not going to be a wage slave forever.

There was another intriguing thing about my father. As a rice farmer, before any harvester cut the first rice stalk, he would visit the whole field and cut off the richest-looking panicles of all. They would provide some seeds to go into the next crop – surely to give higher yields. An Agriculturist, I did not teach him that; my alma mater UP Los Baños did not teach me that. I told you: The Ilocanos are innate farmers of quality!

Federalism. With an Ilocano Regional State, we Ilocanos could find out more about us Ilocanos.

In subsistence terms, most of the lowland Ilocos population was settled in permanent villages by at least the end of the sixteenth century. Livelihood was based on a mixture of crops, including rice grown with a wet rice technology, and fishing.

The Ilocanos will settle, and settle well, when they will.

Adrian De Leon writes in “Sugarcane Sakadas: The Corporate Production Of The Filipino On A Hawai‘I Plantation[2]:”

This article traces a genealogy of “Filipino” ethnicity to plantations and labor management from the nineteenth century to 1913… Financial institutions… used ethnicity to manage Ilokano… migrant workers, who enjoyed relatively high mobility by virtue of their American colonial status. These institutions drew upon racial regimes developed through nineteenth-century Spanish agriculture, which generated an inland peasantry through the dispossession of their native lifeways.

With a federal Ilocos Region, we Ilocanos would happily dig into those buried native lifeways we were dispossessed of by the Spanish conquistadores.

All the more reason to welcome the Ilocano-ness in my heart.@517

 

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[1]https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Ilocano_people

[2]https://www.researchgate.net/publication/331687979_Sugarcane_Sakadas_The_Corporate_Production_of_the_Filipino_on_a_Hawai%27i_Plantation