Iloilo: From textile
to sugar country

WHEN my teenage niece offers to prepare her father's coffee, I take note of the quantity of sugar and cream added to the steaming mug of brewed coffee, comparing this with the way my mother prepared coffee for my father -- two teaspoons freeze-dried imported instant coffee in boiling water, garnished with an eighth of a teaspoon of sugar. Descended from a long line of diabetics I understood my father's caution. Failing numerous times to get the right amount of sugar into father's coffee, I advised him to just take it black since the sugar seemed so negligible anyway.

Having grown up this way I was shocked, on my first trip to the sugar-producing province of Negros Occidental, to see my hosts dumped a dozen teaspoons of sugar in a cup of coffee, without stirring it. They explained that when I was old enough to take coffee I must contribute to the sugar economy by doing the same. Times have changed since then; now people prefer sugar substitutes in coffee and diet soft drinks. No wonder the sugar industry is a pale shadow of what it once was in the late 19th century.

Passing Muelle Loney last weekend made me re-read the personal correspondence of Nicholas Loney, who is credited with turning Iloilo City, in Panay Island, neighbor of Negros Island, from marshland to the second most important port in the Philippines. Iloilo used to be the "Queen City of the South" with direct trade to Britain but that is now history. To see how this happened, I read Alfred McCoy's revisionist essay "A Queen Dies Slowly: The Rise and Fall of Iloilo City." Loney's personal correspondence provided a glimpse into his lonely life in 19th-century Jaro while McCoy put everything in context showing how Loney killed a thriving textile industry by importing machine-made cloth from Manchester and encouraged sugar plantations to provide cargo for empty ships returning to Britain. Such is globalization for you.

Textile weaving in Iloilo goes back to pre-Spanish times, probably bartered with Chinese merchants for the 14th-century oriental ceramics that continue to be excavated in the islands of Panay and Negros to this day. Its peak began in the 18th century and ended in the 19th century as shown by trade and population figures. Writing to his family in 1856 Loney described:

"Some of the native textures [textiles?] made in this province are very beautiful, that is, as to quality. The designs, though in some instances good, are not as a rule in very good taste, but it is surprising what admirable articles the women turn out on these rude looms. I have heard the number of looms in this province estimated at 50,000, but I think this is rather over the mark. All the female population appears to be employed in weaving, and in almost every house there are three or four looms, in some as many as a dozen; but I am wasting all my available writing ground on something very like dry statistics."

In a Consular report of 1857, Loney observed that: "Considering that the Philippines are essentially an agricultural rather than a manufacturing region, the textile productions of Iloilo may be said to have reached a remarkable degree of development. Nothing strikes the attention at the weekly fairs held at the different towns more than the attendance of native-made goods offered for sale; and the number of looms at work in most of the towns and villages also affords matter for surprise. Almost every family possesses one or two of these primitive-looking machines, with a simple apparatus formed on pieces of bamboo. In the majority of the houses of the mestizos [of mixed Spanish-Filipino blood], and the more well-to-do Bisayans [natives of the Visayan region], from six to a dozen looms are kept at work. I have heard the total number in this province computed at 60,000 and though these figures may rather over-represent the actual quantity, they cannot be much beyond it. All the weaving is done by women whose wages usually amounted from 75 cents to 1.50 dollars per month. In general -- a practice unfortunately too prevalent among the natives in every branch of labor -- these wages are received for many months in advance, and the operatives frequently spend years -- become virtually slaves for a long period-before paying off an originally trifling debt. There are other workwomen employed at intervals to set up the pattern in the looms, who earn from 1.00 to 1.50 dollars per day in this manner. I should add that Capiz and Antique [provinces in Panay] produce in a lesser degree than Iloilo a proportion of manufactured goods."

It was an intricate business. Women were held in debt and traders from the towns of Molo and Jaro made all the money selling the cloth in Manila and returning with: Batangas cotton, Chinese silk and machine-made British cloth of a value that equaled Iloilo textile exports to Manila. Panay textiles were so popular as exports, generating a sale of one million Mexican dollars at one point. Then Loney had local designs manufactured in Manchester, then flooded the market with them, thus sending the local industry to extinction. Cloth exports from Panay dwindled from a high of 30, 673 piezas in 1864 to a mere 5,100 piezas in 1873. Sugar replaced woven textiles changing the urban landscape forever. Population moved to sugar plantations and the port of Iloilo filled with foreign trading houses. The once busy looms became obsolete. There was a new boom industry but the province and people did not profit. As in the experience in hemp production in the Bicol region, what occurred in Iloilo, to use historian Norman Owen's phrase, was simply "prosperity without progress."

Comments are welcome at aocampo@ateneo.edu