Ilocano people of the Philippines
The narrow northwestern coast of Luzon directly facing the West Philippine Sea is the native domain of the Ilocano.
The Ilocano people live on the narrow northwestern coast of Luzon that faces the West Philippine Sea. Before the Spaniards came, the people who lived along the coast were called Iloko. This name comes from the prefix I which means “people of,” and the word lokong, which means “low-lying land” (Alvarez 1969, 143-149). The Iloko, on the other hand, are “people of the lowlands,” while the Igolot are “people of the mountains,” specifically the Cordillera mountain range. Ilocano is the original name that has been changed to sound more like Spanish. Iluko is the name of the Ilocano language.
The Ilocos region is low-lying because it is mostly made up of hills that are surrounded by the high peaks of the Malaya range and the higher ridges of the Gran Cordillera Central. Ilocos’s landscape looks like a bunch of salad bowls surrounded by rolling hills on a small table. Since the coast is mostly empty, the area is vulnerable to big changes in the weather. During the dry spell, the land is especially dry because the eastern ridges block wind and rain from the eastern valleys and uplands from getting to the land.
This coastal area has terrains that are very different from each other. At its southern spread in Pangasinan, there are fertile alluvial flats that go from the coast of Lingayen Gulf to the foothills of the Cordillera and the Caraballo Sur mountains. The towns of La Union and Ilocos Sur have both hills and flat land. Ilocos Norte’s landscape is made up of alluvial plains, hills, and deserts. At the northern tip, in Pagudpud, wooded mountains rise directly over a large area inhabited by other cultural minorities who have, for the most part, adopted Ilocano ways of life.
As of the year 2000, there were almost seven million people who spoke Iluko. They made up 9.07% of the total population of the Philippines, which was 76,504,077. This made them the third largest group of people who spoke a certain language, after Tagalog and Cebuano. Even though the Ilocano people are spread out all over the country, if not the world, the largest group of them is still in their original home provinces, where there are almost two million of them, broken down as follows: Ilocos Sur has a population of 658,587, La Union has a population of 741,906, and Ilocos Norte has a population of 568,017, making up 93% of the total population of 594,206. The other 7% is made up of Kankanaey, Isneg, and Tagalog people (NSO 2010).
But the Ilocano have also become the most important group in the provinces near them where they have moved: In Quirino, 72% of the people, or 106,640, are Ilocano. In Abra, 71.9% of the people, or 150,457, are Ilocano. In Isabela, 68.71% of the people, or 883,982, are Ilocano. In Cagayan, 68.7% of the people, or 680,256, are Ilocano. In Nueva Vizcaya, 62.3% of There are other provinces in northern Luzon where they make up the majority, or even if they look like the minority compared to the total population of a province, they are the largest group in real numbers because the rest of the population is made up of people from other ethnic groups: In Pangasinan, they are 44.25%, or 1,076,219; in Tarlac, they are 40.9%, or 436,907; in Nueva Ecija, they are 19.3%, or 319,858; in Zambales, they are 27.5%, or 118,889; in Baguio City, they are 44.5%, or 111,132; in Aurora, they are 31.43%, or 54,557; in Benguet, they are 13. (NSO 2000; 2010).
They make up almost half a million people in central and southern Luzon, which includes the National Capital Region (NCR), also known as Metro Manila. Bulacan, 24,159; Bataan, 11,259; Pampanga, 9,996; Angeles City, 3,680; and Olongapo City, 2.54% or 8,842. They are spread out in the NCR as follows: Quezon City (5.2% or 112,258 people), City of Manila (49,831 people), Caloocan City (44,487 people), Valenzuela City (15,092 people), Pasig City (13,668 people), and NCR (15,657 people). They live in the southern Tagalog region, also called CALABARZON, in places like Rizal, which has 37,278 people, Laguna, which has 16,692 people, and Quezon, which has 2,146 people. In the MIMAROPA area, there are 26,766 people living in Occidental Mindoro, 10,728 in Oriental Mindoro, 237 in Marinduque, and 24,902 in Palawan (NSO 2000; 2010).
According to a government count, about 200,000 Ilocanos live in Mindanao. This large number in that region is a result of the national government’s homestead program, which started during the Spanish colonial period, and the displacement of that region’s indigenous peoples, including Muslim groups: in Sultan Kudarat, there are 88,160 Ilocano, or 17.17% of the province’s population; in Cotabato, also known as North Cotabato, there are 65,832; in Sarangani, there are 19,106; in Zamboanga del By the middle of 2016, there would be at least 9.27 million Ilocanos in the Philippines, which is 9.07% of the total population of 102,250,133. (NSO 2000; 2010; WPR 2013).
From 1998 to 2005, at least half of the 62,366 Filipinos who moved to Hawaii were Ilocanos. There were 31,346 of them. Since there are 300,000 Filipinos living in this same state, it seems likely that at least 150,000 of them are from Ilocano. There are at least 253,350 Ilocano people working abroad all over the world. At least 133,850 of the country’s overseas workers are from the three home provinces of the Ilocanos: 24,444 are from Ilocos Sur, 94,111 are from Ilocos Norte, and 15,295 are from La Union. Many more come from nearby provinces that have a lot of Ilocanos, like Pangasinan, which has 64,106 overseas workers, Cagayan Valley, which has 44,630, and Nueva Vizcaya, which has 10,764 (Fonbuena 2014; NSO 2000; 2010).
Ilocano History
At the beginning of Spanish colonization, the trade posts along the coast of Ilocos were linked by sailboats and a common language called Samtoy. Samtoy is a contraction of the phrase “our language here,” which means “our language here.” Andres Carro, an Augustinian, wrote in a manuscript from 1792 that Samtoy was used so much that the Spanish colonists led by Salcedo in 1571 learned it because people from Bangui to Agoo spoke it. The natives called it the Ilocano language in the end.
Even though many people in Abra Valley can trace their roots to communities in the lowlands, they live in the Cordillera range. The rivers and horse trails in the hills were used by people in the past to move between this valley and the coast.
Ilocanos who lived in the port towns of Candon, Laoag, Vigan, Lingayen, Bolinao, and Sual traded with the Chinese as early as the 1600s. In 1582, Spanish expeditionary forces met the people who lived in the Ilocos. They said that the Ilocos people looked, dressed, and lived in a way that was similar to the mountain people and the people who lived on the southern islands, especially the Pintados (de Loarca 1903).
When the Spaniards, led by Juan de Salcedo, came to the Ilocos in 1573, the tightly knit trade posts put up a fierce fight against the invaders. Salcedo and his men destroyed more than 4,000 houses that year as a result. The loss of people was so bad that people in Mexico were afraid the Ilocos wouldn’t be able to recover in six years or ever. Salcedo became the first encomendero of the Ilocos after that. He built the Villa Fernandina near the old Vigan trade post. He named it after the young son of the Spanish king. After he died in 1576, an epidemic tore through the villa. It then came under the control of Vigan and was later added to the town.
All of the riverside trade posts from Lingayen to Bangui were the first ones to be turned into pueblos. They were the first ones to be set up in the typical grid pattern with the church, plaza, and town hall at the center. From the 17th century to the 19th century, the Spanish took control of the area by converting the native people. The process of “keeping the people under the bells,” or “reducción,” forced other natives to move to the backlands and remote valleys, where they met up with the Igorot. For many generations, these new mixed communities were safe from attacks by the Spanish and headhunting by the mountain people, until the mountain people were also converted by missionaries.
From the 17th to the 19th centuries, the Ilocanos rose up against the Spanish because they were making them pay more and more burdensome tributes and monopolies. Only 13 years after Salcedo died, in 1589, the people of the town of Dingras in the north took up arms against the colonizers. In 1660, Pedro Almazan, who had been inspired by the Malong Rebellion in Pangasinan, led a revolt in San Nicolas, Ilocos Norte. But Diego Silang and Gabriela de Estrada, a married couple, led the most famous Ilocano revolt from 1762 to 1763. The name “Ilocos Revolt” comes from the fact that people not only came from Vigan, the provincial capital, but also from other towns. At the same time, in Pangasinan, there was a revolt called the Palaris Revolt, named for its leader (Blair and Robertson 1906, vol. 49, 300).
The Ilocos Revolt can be broken up into two separate but related events. Diego Silang, who was born in 1730 and died in 1763, led the first uprising, and Gabriela de Estrada, also known as Gabriela Silang, led the second (born 1731-died 1763). When the sun came up on September 22, 1762, the day the British invaded Manila, Diego Silang and 2,000 armed indios showed up at the home of the alcalde mayor (provincial governor) to kill him. They came from many different parts and classes of Vigan and the towns around it, especially Bantay, Santa Catalina, and San Vicente in Ilocos Sur. After the governor was forced to leave, the uprising lasted for eight months, until Silang was killed on May 28, 1763, and even after that, when his wife Gabriela and her uncle Nicolas Cario brought it back to life (Palanco 2002, 521).
Aside from the people’s dislike of the alcalde mayor, the revolt was caused by their strong opposition to the tribute and forced labor, the British taking over Manila, which showed how weak the Spanish colonizers were, and the ban on free trade in the provinces (Palanco 2002, 521-522).
When government officials were involved in trade, they often used their power to get money from native traders and producers. Judge Santiago Orendain, who was a close friend of Silang, presided over the trial of the alcalde mayor seven years before Silang’s revolt. Three members of Vigan’s principalia, Don Julian Miranda, Don Martin Crispin, and Don Juan Salazar, were among the people who brought charges against the alcalde. But using the law to stop government corruption didn’t work. So, a few years later, the government decided to make money off of illegal trade by putting an alcabala tax on it. Seven years later, when Silang rose up against the Spaniards and the British took over, Orendain sided with Silang against the Spaniards and helped Silang talk to the British. During the revolt, the three people who brought charges against the alcalde joined Silang’s advisory council (Palanco 2002, 516-526).
After stopping two Spanish counterattacks over the next few months, Silang set up a government that was, at best, shaky. He had to deal with both the Spanish and British threats, as well as the Ilocano elite’s growing dislike of him. He had asked the Spanish government to get rid of all Spaniards and mestizos from the province, and most of his followers were timawa, or “common people.” Miguel Vicos and Pedro Becbec (or Bicbic), two of Silang’s former allies, killed him at the request of the Augustinian friars and with the blessing of Bp Bernardo Ustariz (Palanco 2002, 523-530; Blair and Robertson 1906, vol. 49, 163-168, 302).
Gabriela de Estrada and the venerable elder Nicolas Cariño continued Silang’s fight. On June 23, 1763, the rebels burned down Santa Catalina to get rid of Pedro Becbec, who had been made chief justice as a reward for killing Silang. By mid-July, however, the Augustinians had gathered about 9,000 men from the north to recapture Vigan and destroy its visitas so that all the natives would be forced to move to Vigan “within hearing of the bells.” On their way to attack Bantay, the colonial troops burned down all the barrios and killed everything that moved, including the people who had taken refuge in the church after the Spanish commanders told them to do so. The soldiers then made these people leave, and they were killed on the church patios (Palanco 2000, 530-531).
People who were afraid of being hurt by the Spanish went to Pingit Island, which is now called Puro Pingit. Gabriela de Estrada ran away to the highlands of Abra, where Tinguian warriors with bamboo lances and amulets helped her. The colonial forces on the trail of the rebels fought them at Sitio Banaoang, which is between Ilocos Sur and Abra, and lost 35 soldiers. But on September 20, colonial troops from Cagayan led by Captain Manuel de Arza put down the rebellion with their better guns. Gabriela de Estrada and 90 other people were put to death on the gallows. The burial record of Diego Silang’s widow reads: “Doña Gabriela de Estrada, viuda de Diego Silang, natural de esta ciudad, del barangay de Endaya” (Palanco 2000, 531-532). The important Vigan clans that had helped the Silangs left the city. In Bantay, Ilocos Sur, a monument that had been built for the assassin Vicos was replaced by one for Diego Silang.
Governor-General Jose de Basco put in place the Tobacco Monopoly in 1781 to bring in money for the colonial government. In 1788, Ilocano farmers led by Juan Manzano again rose up in Bacarra and Laoag. Then, Lumgao led another revolt that had religious undertones and led to the division of the Ilocos province into Sur and Norte in 1822.
The Basi Monopoly was also put in place in the first ten years of the 19th century. The decree said that anyone who drank basi (wine made from sugarcane) that wasn’t bought in government stores would be severely punished and fined. Even though native wine is usually fermented at home, the Ilocano had to sell their crops to stores at a low price. They then bought the wine back from the stores at a higher price. A few years after the monopoly was put in place, in 1807, the Ilocano from the northern towns marched with their bolos and bows and arrows all the way to San Ildefonso, which is close to the capital city of Vigan. The Basi Revolt began in the hilly town of Piddig. Pedro Mateo and a few Spanish deserters from Vigan were in charge of it. The rebels got the people in the towns they went through to join them. As the rebels got closer to the Bantaoay River in San Ildefonso, however, it became harder to control the large group of people who had lost hope. The colonial forces of Vigan were well placed on the southern bank of the river, which made it easy to block the rebels. Even with this problem, the rebels tried to cross the river, but they were easily defeated because they were in a weak position. The revolt is also called the Ambaristo Revolt, after Mateo’s bravest assistant (Ramirez 1991, 68-74).
When Father Jose Burgos was a young boy in Vigan, he must have heard stories about the revolts in the early 1800s. It may have been inevitable that he would become a leader of the widespread clerical nationalism or secularization movement of the clergy at the end of the 1800s. When the Katipunan-led revolution spread outside of the Tagalog region, many Ilocanos joined the armed fight for independence. Some of them, like Director of War Antonio Luna, rose to the top of the Revolutionary Government. During the Philippine-American War, Katipunero like Isabelo Abaya of Candon and Eleuteria Florentino-Reyes of Vigan organized the townspeople to keep fighting for independence even after many generals close to General Emilio Aguinaldo had surrendered (Scott 1986, 23-27). Aguinaldo sought refuge in the Ilocos hinterlands before crossing the Cordillera on his way to his last stand in Palanan. He did this because the Ilocano defenders were fighting on many guerrilla fronts, from the Cordillera hinterlands like the Amburayan and Abra Valleys to the southernmost tip of Ilocos Norte.
During the centuries that Spain ruled the Ilocanos, and even after, they were known for moving around a lot. Most of the old towns in Ilocos, Philippines, have grown into nearby areas because there aren’t enough places to farm or live. Around the middle of the 18th century, people moved steadily from the coast to the midlands. At the same time, people moved from the uplands to some uninhabited coastal areas, especially in the northern parts of the Ilocos. Folk stories in the towns of Ilocos Norte say that the first people to live there were Tinguian clans from the highlands who came down to trade but then stayed and started farming and fishing villages.
At the end of the 18th century, there wasn’t enough land and there were too many people, so more Ilocano families moved to the Cagayan Valley, which is on the other side of the Cordillera, and to places where people from different places mixed, like Tarlac, Zambales, and Pangasinan. The friars also forced whole Ilocano families to move to the pioneer settlements in Mindanao and Palawan, both in the south of the country.
The Filipino revolutionary army already controlled most of northern Luzon, including the Ilocos region, when the Treaty of Paris was signed, giving the country to the young imperial nation, the United States. The Americans took longer to get into the Ilocos because the Filipinos fought in and around Manila. In November 1899, the American army and navy fought against the Ilocos forces, which were led by 23-year-old General Manuel Tinio of Nueva Ecija. Tinio and his generals Blas and Juan Villamor of Abra and Estanislao Reyes of Vigan used guerrilla warfare. Father Gregorio Aglipay, who was a military vicar general, led a separate campaign in Ilocos Norte. The Americans got rid of the guerrillas by starving them out. They did this by destroying their food sources and cutting off local support by hamleting and stockading towns and barrios. Ilocano resistance ended in April 1901 (Scott 1986, ix-xii).
In the first 10 years of the 20th century, when plantations in Hawaii and on the west coast of the United States needed contract workers, most of the daring cane cutters and fruit pickers who answered the call were Ilocano peasants. In 1906 and 1907, about 200 Ilocano people came to Hawaii to work on sugar plantations. By 1929, there were 71,594 people from Ilocos who had moved to Hawaii. Between 1906 and 1935, most of the 175,000 Filipinos who moved to Hawaii were single Ilocano men (Foronda 1976, 25; Pertierra 1994, 58).
Ilocano people also worked in Alaskan canneries as laborers. In his book America Is in the Heart, Carlos Bulosan, an Ilocano migrant from Pangasinan, wrote about how hard it was for Ilocanos in the United States to achieve their dreams. He thought that the exploitative system of the time was even worse and more uncertain than the conditions on the Ilocos farms. Many of these Ilocano migrant workers went to college in the United States and then went back to teach in the Philippines. Some of the hard workers stayed long enough to earn a pension, which they sent to their families in the Ilocos or used to buy a house and some land in their hometown in the Ilocos. Many of the new concrete houses that have been built on farms in the Ilocos recently, from Pangasinan to the tip of Ilocos Norte, were built by these Ilocano adventurers who came back home or their children.
When the Japanese invaders landed on the Ilocos coast in December 1941, the area’s hidden coves and valleys became a guerrilla zone. Following the strategy of political control set up by the American colonists, the Japanese Imperial Army got some local officials to work with them while they hunted the defiant leaders in their upland guerrilla bases. The Ilocano guerrillas were not working together because their operations were in different places and their American and Filipino commanders did not get along.
The bays in Bangui, Ilocos Norte, and the coves in Santiago, Ilocos Sur were where supplies from the Allies landed in secret. The guerrillas, on the other hand, couldn’t do much because the coast was crowded and the land was small. Because of this, there were not a lot of wartime battles or damage during the Japanese occupation. Also, the Society of the Divine Word, whose main missionaries were Germans, was in charge of the Ilocos at the time. Because Germany and Japan were both Axis powers, the missionaries worked together to teach discipline to the Japanese soldiers, who respected the priests.
During the Japanese occupation, the Ilocano were split on who they should be loyal to. This was also true during the American rule. Some leaders got the people to agree to Japanese rule, just like Mena Crisologo of Vigan and Claro Caluya of Piddig did earlier in the century when they got the people to show loyalty to the American flag. Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, which was backed by Japan, was promoted by pro-Japanese leaders at public events all over the region. At the same time, some leaders, like Floro Crisologo of Ilocos Sur and Roque Ablan of Ilocos Norte, went to the hills to organize guerrilla forces. But the guerrilla groups were not working together, so they couldn’t do much damage to the invading troops. Worse, their lack of unity sometimes led to fake guerrilla leaders or groups that caused more trouble for the people than they did for the Kempeitai forces. When the American forces came back, the Japanese Imperial Army ran away to the Cordillera. This gave the Ilocano guerrillas more freedom to act. They showed bravery by working with the Americans to take Bessang Pass in Cervantes. This is where the Japanese gathered their troops so that General Tomoyuki Yamashita could get his command staff back together on the other side of the Cordillera. After the battle, a lot of Ilocanos were given medals and citations, but some of them turned out to be fake because they aren’t in the records of the US Armed Forces in the Far East (USAFFE).
Right after the Japanese Imperial Army was defeated, the social and political situation in the Ilocos was not stable. This was because the war had caused a clash of loyalty and rifts in the community, and some leaders had done things that were against the law. The general amnesty program after the war got rid of many charges and countercharges that came from killings and retaliations during the war.
Because of the Rescission Act, which was passed by the US Congress in 1946, most of the wartime benefits of the Ilocano soldiers in the USAFFE and other Filipino soldiers across the country were taken away. In 1991, the US Congress said yes to the veterans of the USAFFE who wanted to become American citizens. However, a new law does not allow for the restoration of financial and other benefits that were legal during World War II.
The Marcos family is most powerful in the Ilocos region. Even though Marcos Sr. was removed from power in 1986, his wife Imelda and two of his children, Marcos Jr. and Imee Marcos, have been elected to national and provincial offices (Associated Press 2010). So, the Marcos dynasty is one reason why the Ilocos region is sometimes called the “solid north.” But Ilocano people with strong morals have fought hard against Marcos’s martial law and its lingering effects, even though it cost them either their freedom or their lives. Jose Maria Sison was born in Cabugao, Ilocos Sur, in 1939. In 1964, he started the left-leaning youth group Kabataang Makabayan (KM). In 1968, he brought back the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP), and in 1969, he set up the New People’s Army. When martial law was declared in 1972, he went into hiding. He was caught in 1977, tortured, and kept mostly alone until 1986, when the newly elected president, Corazon Aquino, freed all political prisoners (Toledo 2012).
Antero Guerrero Santos, from Laoag, Ilocos Norte, lived from 1948 to 1971. In the years before the First Quarter Storm of 1970, he was a student leader. By 1971, he had taken his political beliefs to the remote mountain villages of Isabela. There, he learned how to organize farmers and grow the resistance movement against the Marcos dictatorship, which had just started. As they ran away from heavily armed government soldiers in Barrio Dipogo, Isabela, Santos and three other activists were swept away by a river. They still haven’t been seen since (Bantayog 2015).
Alan Jazmines was born in 1944 in Ilocos Norte. In 1974 and 1982, both during martial law, he was arrested. In 1978, his torture by the military and that of other political prisoners brought the brutality of the Marcos dictatorship to the attention of the whole world. Even though the Philippine government gave him immunity as a consultant for peace talks between the government and the National Democratic Front (“Alan,” 2015), he is still in political detention after being arrested for the third time in 2011.
Things went wrong in the Virginia tobacco industry in Ilocos Sur, which led to the EDSA Revolt of 2000, which got rid of President Joseph Estrada and led to his conviction for theft in 2007. Republic Act (RA) 7171, also called “An Act to Promote the Development of the Farmers Producing in the Virginia Tobacco-Producing Provinces,” was passed in 1992, thanks mainly to the work of Luis “Chavit” Singson, who was the Ilocos Sur Rep at the time. It set up a “tobacco excise tax fund,” which meant that 15% of the tobacco tax collected by the national government would be given back to the four tobacco-growing regions: Abra, Ilocos Norte, Ilocos Sur, and La Union. In 1999, Singson, who had been governor of Ilocos Sur since 1992, accused Estrada in public of taking kickbacks of 130 million pesos from Ilocos Sur’s 200 million tobacco excise tax fund (Rufo 2013; Associated Press 2000; Sandiganbayan 2007).