Silencing Sacada Suffering with UNESCO Heritage Seals

According to the best scientific research, money is hard to come by if you’re a no-name wagie, for it is one wonderful fact of capitalism that poor labourers who do so much find it hard to get rich, but the rich who do little to nothing find it easier to get richer. But fear not, because there are means to score easy money, especially if you invest time and capital in the right industry. Take for example the poultry to POGO pipeline of mayor Alice Guo, which has catapulted her to showbiz stardom. However, the legal frenzy that can result from following the beloved mayor’s example may be too much to handle for aspiring introverts. So, for willing wallflowers, here’s a slam dunk tip from history: find a “heritage house” and make it your base of operations. It works best if it’s in Negros and previously belonged to a hacendero.

By operating in these “heritage houses”, no matter how inhumane, abusive, and downright degrading the activities are, no one will question your ways. Even better: people will nominate the place as a site of culture! How so? — you may ask. Well, behold for instance the well-known house of the very well-known hacendero Aniceto Lacson. When the Belgian Consul at Manila Édouard André visited the said house, he was treated to a cultural display that showcased the interesting parallels between Hispanic America and Asia. He writes on 29 August 1898 that:

“In the plantations belonging to the rich families of Mestizos or Indians, the workmen are treated very inhumanly. If they do not work quick enough they treat them exactly as slaves were treated in South America . . . I saw some receive 100 lashes in Negros Island, in the estate of Aniceto Lacson, an Indian [emphasis added].”

Ouch. A single lash is enough to make most of us curl and flail in agony. Multiply that until you reach a hundred, and not only do you casually mutilate the human anatomy, but you also humiliate the humanity within.

The Lacson estate was a venue for routine terror against poor plantation workers, who were mostly sacadas, brought to the island via debt-bondage to solve the island’s labour shortage woes. Sadly, these testimonies of torture are almost fully forgotten today, and their faint remnants in popular memory are also actively being erased by conscious efforts to sugarcoat the violence with asinine cultural overemphasis on art and architecture. As a result, actual history is replaced with class hortatory. And that class, composed of hacenderos and their scions, riding the support of unscrupulous “culture” advocates, have taken a significant step towards a total silencing of sacada suffering.

Aniceto Lacson’s house of pain is included in the so-called ‘Sugar Cultural Landscape of Negros and Panay Islands’, a set of structures nominated for UNESCO World Heritage recognition that includes, as written in the official rationale, “old sugarcane haciendas, active, and non-active sugar mills over a century-old, town centers that developed and architecturally distinct mansions.” What binds these structures together is their potency in “showcasing the wealth derived from sugarcane cultivation and trade”.

It is clear that this simply reflects a motive to depict the hacendero class as stewards of high culture and art, that it was because of and through them that structures equal to that of the Parthenon, The Great Wall of China, the Mexican metropolis of Teotihuacan, and others emerged from what was then considered a backwater island. And thus, Negros history is simply reduced to a litany of what the hacenderos had achieved economically, of how they got rich and enjoyed their wealth. Indeed, the hacenderos were and are still extremely rich, so what’s the problem? The problem is, the nomination is built on lies, which can be found in the document proponents of the nomination submitted. One glaring dishonesty pertains to the experiences of the sacadas, particularly on the alleged perks they enjoyed:

“While many sugar producing regions of the world relied heavily on slave labor – and not to detract from the gravity of the socio-economic circumstances (and debt bondage in particular) of farm workers – the workers in the Philippine sugar industry were not bound by race, were not classified as chattel, with the sacada in particular being free to travel from different communities to the haciendas and between different haciendas [emphasis added].”

The nominal justification for sacada suffering, that it wasn’t that bad because it wasn’t labelled “chattel”, is not only wrong, but it is downright despicable. Extreme abdominal pain is still extreme abdominal pain whether it be the result of internal problems or a casual collision with a moving vehicle. But that is to be expected from the sugar occultists. What’s more, the idea that the sacadas, who were bound to their hacienderos by debt, could simply move around is preposterous given that there was already the problem of labour shortage in the island, and that the hacenderos were wont to profit as much as they can. In other words, they wanted to minimise expenses at all costs. Would they just simply let the sacadas “freely travel” without them paying due service or their debt? Well, no. The hacenderos employed a range of means to force their workers to submit themselves to their will. Alton Hall, a school teacher who served in the island of Negros for six years, notes in a letter dated 1 September 1910 that they can be theatrical:

“To lend force to his words, he wears a lordly air, carries a revolver, flourishes a whip or cane, and occasionally when a workman breaks away or rebels, has him arrested and imprisoned for stealing.”¹

But their signature style is that of violence. We read from André a harrowing account of what actually happens when sacadas attempt to “freely travel” away from their terrible situation:

“At the end of the year . . . as long as he does not pay his debt he is considered a slave, and if he runs away he will be arrested and returned to his master and is awfully lashed [emphasis added].”²

When chance circumstances do unchain sacadas from their landlords, the conducts by which they are sent away are often deplorable. In one instance, Serge Cherniguin reports in The Sugar Workers of Negros, Philippines that:

“Once a worker is not among the hacienda’s working force, he is forced to live elsewhere. In one hacienda (La Carlota), during typhoons when it was raining, the overseer would order the removal of the roofs of the houses of the workers they wanted to drive away [emphasis added].”³

The iniquity was so widespread and pervasive, that in the 1950s, “[p]ractically 95% of the population” of Barangay Katingal-an in San Carlos, Negros Occidental, were working in haciendas. They were “so dependent on their landlord” and were “basking in debt”. Ironically, the Americans, who were creative savants in cruelty, were quite appalled at the endemic suffering of plantation workers and seeming indifference of the hacenderos. Michael Billig writes in The Rationality of Growing Sugar in Negros that “[t]he writings of American officials in this time are filled with reports of injustices perpetrated against the poor at a time when glittering luxury was the norm among the elite.”⁴

With privileged access to the lucrative American market, the hacenderos of Negros enjoyed steady and large profits, which necessitated the production of even more sugar, as it was the life blood of all their wealth. No wonder they could easily turn a blind eye to sacada suffering! They have simply become visually impaired due to diabetic retinopathy, as having high blood glucose levels can cause damage to the retinas. Whatever the case, the medical metaphor is apt: prolonged cultural sugarcoating through puerile advocacies and concerns for “heritage” leads to historical blindness.

Admittedly, many of the structures included in the aforementioned UNESCO nomination are aesthetically pleasing. But, is aesthetics alone a good argument to altogether disregard history? Or, perhaps it is time that we actually dissect what constitutes “heritage”? Because, whose heritage is it to brutally torture masses of labourers to force them to work harder in sugar plantations? Whose heritage is it to destroy the soil of an island with decades of nonstop monocropping just to profit over a crop? Whose heritage is it to destroy the forests of an island, thereby causing irreversible biodiversity damage, just so they could expand their haciendas?

Surely, not the sacadas and the workers.

If UNESCO should decide to abandon history, then it becomes easier for us to find the next big heritage site in the Philippines. After Alice Guo’s commercial connections, there’s a case to be made for Apollo Quiboloy’s religious compound. It has aesthetically nice structures, and for many heritage advocates, that’s all that matters.

This article is a shortened version of the author’s paper which was presented in the recently held Philippine Historical Association 2024 Conference, “Kasaysayan ng Kasaysayan: Mga Historiograpiya ng Kasaysayang Pilipino mula 1955”, held at the University of the Philippines - Los Baños.

Did you like what you read? Then consider subscribing to the Bibliotikal newsletter to get immediate alerts on new posts, local history news, and activity announcements.