Ransoming Slaves and Current Terrorisms-Resonances of the Hispanic Past in Mindanao and Sulu

by Faina C. Abaya-Ulindang, Ph.D

Abstract

Historical encounters between the Muslims and the Roman Catholics in the islands of Mindanao and Sulu proceeds from a relation of mutual antipathy that was characteristics of religious fanaticism. Thus, violence and hatred although intermittent became the dominant theme of Muslims and Catholic relations during the three hundred thrity five years of Spanish rule in the Philippines. What was unique in these encounters, however, was the overweening racial prejudice of the arrogant conquistador to the native whose conversion became his ultimate obsession.

It has been said that wherever the "cross goes there follows the sword". This paper narrates a history of failed Spanish moro conversion by citing cultural and historical bases of their hostile relations focusing not so much on the religious efforts but on the failure of the Spanish civlian government to implant its political institutions into Mindanao.

By comparing civilizational influences on the Moro and Filipino native at present, this paper intends to see how closely they both resemble the past Moro-Christian Catholic relations during the Spanish period. Citing contemporary issues such as kidnapping, the author interrogates history thus-are these not mere reminiscent of slave-catching, which were retaliatory of the Spanish agressive conversions? If so, where and when and under what circumstances?

While the author does not aim to enlighten nor proseletize, she does however believe in seeing the light at the end of the tunnel through documentary research, especially utilizing the several volumes of Jesuit letters and correspondences between the moro nobilities and the conquistadores compiled by the Mindanao Studies Program/Center (now defunct)of the CIDS, UP Diliman and the Mindanao Studies Resource Collection in Mindanao State University, Marawi City. For contemporary sources, interviews and newspapers and other sources will be utilized.

American Homesteading as Culture Construct In Southern Philippines: The Saga of the Filipino Pioneers in Mindanao,Philippines

by Faina C. Abaya-Ulindang,Ph.D

ABSTRACT

Focusing on the period 1913-1957, the author traces how the present Filipino migrants into Mindanao developed a unique response to a combination of socio-political-economic problems that inhere in frontierland development.

Originating as far back as 1913 when the American colonizers opened north central Cotabato as agricultural settlements, Filipino settlers had been oriented to the Pioneer American Dream of a "self-sufficient owner-cultivator" and encouraged to "make do" despite all the odds. Such idea or culture construct became the pattern from which subsequent resettlement projects developed-first, under the Commonwealth, then, under the Philippine Republic under President Magsaysay (1954-1957). The author posits that while the Filipino tried to fit himself into the pattern, the material conditions had never been consistently satisfactory.

As resettlement persisted as a government measure to solve its agrarian problem, the migrants from Luzon and Visayas learned to adjust to their changed condition. These set of adjustments are thus termed by the author as "pioneering complex'. Homesteading as dictated and supported by the Americans demanded that the settler must have the pioneering virtues of industriousness and resourcefulness, among others. Except in Christian dominated areas, the settler had always been a stranger in the island of Mindanao.

This study thus, will look into the varied responses of the homesteaders in Cotabato and Lanao, during the core period (1913-1957) utilizing documentary as well as oral history for sources. Pioneering complex as defined by the author means the set of physical and non-physical manifestations, from political to religious symptomatic of their response to a host of problems in pioneering. Such would be the Filipino settler's answer to the culture of (American )homesteading.