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Southeast Asia
Organized Panel Session
In 1935, as the Philippines began its ten-year transition to independence, leaders of the Commonwealth government expanded a “homesteading” program first begun in 1902. The program was designed to bring Christian Filipino settlers from “overpopulated” regions onto tracts of public land in majority non-Christian areas, mostly in Mindanao. Its extension confirmed the models of nation building and modernization that the American state had promoted since the beginning of its colonial rule. Undeveloped public land on sparsely populated islands, state leaders promised, would deliver millions of Filipino farmers from the dire poverty that shaped their lives.
This paper explores how these inter-island migration programs both shaped ideas about Philippine national identity and were shaped by existing tensions over who would have full access to citizenship in a postcolonial Philippine nation. State leaders offered a developmentalist solution to widespread insurgencies against rural inequality, debt peonage, and starvation wages in the Philippines’ agricultural sector. They argued that technocratic intervention and entrepreneurship in the form of family farming would help migrating Filipinos invent alternate rural terrains and allow them to help build the postcolonial nation. Communists and rural dissidents saw these programs as insufficient because they failed to alter the political economic system that kept poverty in place. People indigenous to targeted non-Christian areas, including Muslims and groups designated as “Pagan” by the state, had been occupying and cultivating the land in these regions for generations. Many fought back against these state-sponsored incursions, making claims about their rights to ownership, autonomy, and Philippine-ness.
Karen Miller
LaGuardia Community College