Distance, Disorder, Archives, and Enslavement, Pasay 1732

By Nicholas C. Sy

Blanco’s Flora Filipina, from Blas Sierra de la Calle’s. 2011. Grabados Filipinos (1592-1898). Cuadernos del Museo Oriental, N.10. Valladolid

Tagalogs and Chinese-Mestizos in Manila’s Outskirts

The file’s first leaf entitles it “In which the children of Mestizos should become monacillos [sacristans].”¹ The issue in contention was that the onus of church-service was unevenly spread across the Tagalog children of Malate and the Chinese-Mestizo children of Vetuz and Pasay. The three communities technically shared the same parish, but Malate’s principales complained that only their children were called to serve the church as monacillos (i.e. sacristans). The case lasted roughly for four months from April to early August of 1732. In the end, the Mestizos’ appeal to the “immemorial custom,”² based on practical considerations and enshrined in supposed exemptions, was denied. This file illustrates the harsh realities of travel even around Manila’s outskirts, at the supposed center of colonial life. One is forced to pause for thought and ask how effective colonial administration was, given these challenges to carrying out the key sacraments with which missionaries bookended colonial life. The manuscript is most interesting, however, in terms of the insight it gives readers into the practical strategies employed by non-European agents in the face of negotiation with colonial arbitration and in terms of the potential glimpse it provides us into the developing conceptualization of enslavement among the indigenous.

The file is comprised of six sets of documents. The first set envelopes the file—representing its first few pages as well as its last few pages. In early August 1732 Fray Pedro Orense, parish priest of Malate, requested for copies of the government’s decision about the case. The government responded in the positive on 14 August 1732 and, at the end of the file, they noted a record of their compliance by 19 September 1732. Orense’s request and the government’s responses comprise this first set. The sets that follow are the copies sent to Orense.

Petition page image — Petition page. View transcription and translation »

The next set of documents start with a petition addressed to the Augustinian provincial from the indigenous governor of the pueblo of Malate and signed also by his fellow principales. Undated, its originals were likely written in early April 1732. The Augustinian provincial’s subsequent response is dated 22 April 1732. Malate’s parish priest also provided an opinion in support of his parishioners. In sum, the documents of this set describe the exigencies that Tagalog children faced in accompanying their priests in conducting the last rites at whatever time of day and in whatever weather. The need for these exigencies is not questioned, but the principales complained about having to attend to the Mestizos who lived far from the church and who did not perform the same service. This one-sided burden was, to them, like enslavement and they argued that “we are not their slaves, nor are we obliged to serve them given that they do not serve us in the least.”³

First evidence page of the documents.
View the transcription and translation »

The third set of documents were the opinions, decisions, and confirmations of receipt of different government offices: the crown’s fiscal, the assessor, and the alcalde mayor of Tondo. They supported the petition from Malate.

The fourth set is comprised of one document: a counter-petition from Pasay appealing the above government decision. This appeal is undated but was likely written between 6 May and 16 July 1732. The Mestizos referred to two decrees: one from 1702 and another from 1711 and attached a copy of the 1711 decree. They framed these documents as enshrining “the immemorial custom”⁴ of not being obliged to render church service given that they were tenant farmers who paid a host of other things: rent to their unnamed landowners, tribute to the crown, corvee labor, and parish fees. Moreover, their children were needed at their farms. They thought that this matter had already been settled during the tenure of their previous parish priest Fray Juan Serrano.⁵

The fifth set of documents are consecutive responses from the aforementioned government-offices. The royal fiscal, in particular, pointed out that this second petition’s attachments were incomplete and improperly interpreted. The petitioners from Pasay had not sent the 1702 decree and the 1711 attachment was inadmissible due to a somewhat, in my opinion, opaque technicality (of being a decision about a decision rather than a decree in itself). The 1702 decree, the fiscal found in his own archive, but he said that while its text inhibited the passing of new obligations onto the Mestizos, their church service as monacillos was not an innovation but a basic responsibility. He denied the appeal.

Finally, the sixth set is comprised again of one document. In the month and a half between the time that Malate’s Fray Pedro Orense had requested for copies of the above decisions in early August and the time that the copies were produced for him on 19 September, the Mestizo farmers of Pasay had also made a request for copies of the official confirmation of the above decision as autos (judicial resolutions). This letter, dated 13 September, requested “that they be given [copies of] these autos to represent what their rights afforded them, without this in any way being in opposition to what is ordered.”⁶ A glance at the archival folder reveals the paperwork surrounding this request, a process that took at least another year to fulfill.⁷

From Gregorio Sanz’s 1856. Embriologia sagrada. Manila: Establecimiento Tipografico del Colegio de Santo Tomas.

Negotiating Roles, Deploying Documents

Taken together, these documents present a vision of Manila’s outskirts as understaffed with communities separated by spaces of environmental and social disorder. To reach the average villager for the last rites, a basic Catholic sacrament, the local missionary and his assistants set out at a hurried pace whether under “the extreme waves of heat from the sun or of coldness from the rain.”⁸ And as they battled the weather, they also had to walk through “thickets and mangrove forests” that hid “thieves” and “people with bad intentions.”⁹ At least part of their goal here was to make themselves available to, as the Jesuit Francisco Alcina says for the Visayas, “stop, at the moment of death or near it, their relatives from practicing superstitious imprecations and even/their/pag-anitos [i.e. animistic rites] as they were wont to perform in their past.”¹⁰ In our document, the Malate priest described the estimated duration of travel as almost an hour one-way. One imagines that just three such round trips could absorb an entire day. The strain was enough that the parish priest estimated that the monacillos could only take the role in stretches of a week and required a month’s rest afterwards. Monacillos, in the plural, reportedly “fainted on the road.”¹¹ They also fell sick. This point is probably no surprise to the modern reader, given the child’s exposure not just to the elements but to the dying’s infectious diseases.

The unspoken reality in this document is that the Philippine archipelago was, at the time, sparsely populated with scattered clusters of houses and had treacherously high levels of mortality due to the strain of colonial requisitions. By the seventeen-century’s end the Northern and Central island-groups of Luzon and the Visayas had dropped from a pre-conquest total population of one-and-a-half million to roughly three-quarters of a million inhabitants.¹² In a sense, less and less people were serving more and more dying. At the time of our featured document’s writing, that demographic trend was only beginning to reverse.

From C. W. Andrews. 1860. Ilustracion Filipina. Ano 2, No. 2, 15 January. https://prensahistorica.mcu.es/es/publicaciones/numeros_por_mes.do?idPublicacion=1002948&anyo=1860

These phenomena described in this manuscript manifested in other times and other texts. In the present manuscript, what we see are that the simple and practical realities of weather and where people choose to live presented hurdles to the execution of Catholic rites of death. Moreover, the petitions above, show that even in Manila’s outskirts which the Spanish considered successfully colonized, non-European communities actively negotiated their role in colonial society. And this negotiation was the result not merely of momentary sparks of resistance but also of long-term strategic maneuvers. Only one of the five Pasay appellants was literate (only one of five knew how to sign his name). Nevertheless, their deployment of documents and later request for copies of the government’s decision suggest that, just like Orense, the principales of Pasay knew the power of building a colonial archive.

From page 5 of the document’s translation “recognizing that we are not their slaves, nor have we obliged ourselves to serve them given that they do not serve us in the least.” View the Page

Finally, the Malate Tagalogs’ allusion to enslavement is interesting. One should note that the statement “we are not their slaves”¹³ is not in itself a statement rejecting enslavement as a social practice, nor is it a claim that their children were not in fact enslaved by someone else. All it says explicitly, is that their children were not the slaves of the Mestizos. That said, one wonders if this word “esclav[o]”¹⁴ was charged with new meaning in the early-eighteenth century now that, as William Henry Scott (1991) and Tatiana Seijas (2014, 244-245) tell us, enslavement among the indigenous had been effectively prohibited by 1692 and the category was now limited to slaves taken from overseas. At the same time, one catches a glimpse of the backbreaking work that Tagalogs of this period associated with enslavement. And their complaint that—outside a relationship of enslavement—they had not “obliged [themselves] to serve them given that they do not serve us in the least”¹⁵ further emphasizes enslavement’s asymmetry, which are in other earlier texts described with a great emphasis on reciprocity. Such dimensions of dependency are not, of course, mutually exclusive. Nevertheless, one wonders, after over a century of interactions with Spanish interlocutors how much the concept of enslavement and now its afterlife had adapted to colonial constraints.

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Bibliography

Alcina, Francisco, S.J. 1981. Alcina’s Report on the Celebration of Feasts and Administration of the Sacraments in XVIIth Century Samar and Leyte, Pablo Fernandez and Cantius Kobak, O.F.M. (eds). Philippiniana Sacra 16(47): 286–337.

Lilly Library (LL). 1732. Monacillos que lo sean los hijos de los Mestizos, 439r-449r (img1-21). Accessed online, October 2023, https://data.1762archive.org/s/texts/item-set/36516

_____. 1733. Confirmación de la sentencia sobre que los Mestizos de Sangleyes del Pueblo de Malate sean sacristanes, 450r-457r (img1005-1019). Accessed online, November 2023, https://digitalcollections.iu.edu/concern/archival_materials/sq87c6073?locale=en.

Newson, Linda. 2011. Conquest and pestilence in the early Spanish Philippines. Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press.

Philippine Atmospheric, Geophysical and Astronomical Services Administration (PAG-ASA). n.d. “Climate of the Philippines.” Webpage: https://www.pagasa.dost.gov.ph/information/climate-philippines, accessed 3 October 2023.

Scott, William Henry. 1991. Slavery in the Spanish Philippines. De La Salle University Press.

Seijas, Tatiana. Asian slaves in colonial Mexico: from chinos to Indians. Vol. 100. Cambridge University Press, 2014.

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