By You-Jin Kim and Moises Levi Orlino
The primary sources dealing with indigenous land ownership have always been present in the seventeenth century, although hindered by the challenges of the archives such as the transcription and later, translation of the primary source from Spanish to English. However, Filipino historians and archivists have taken on the challenge of publishing works relating to land ownership. For example, Regalado Trota Jose, the former archivist of the University of Santo Tomas published in 2016 the UST Baybayin Documents containing two deeds of sale written in the precolonial writing system of the Philippines, which deals with the selling irrigated lands by an indigenous elite of Tondo to an elite of Dilao. 1 In 2019, Jose published again important primary sources written in both Baybayin scripts and Romanized Tagalogs where it discusses an indigenous elite attempting to sell his lands in 1629. 2 Other work relating to the discourse is Grace Concepcion’s work on land donations and boundary disputes in seventeenth century Laguna. 3 With this established historiography, this introduction deals with the discovery of new primary sources relating to the similar theme of indigenous land ownership, with a particular focus on the discourse of land rights in the seventeenth century.
This new primary source is the Muntinlupa bundle or Títulos y recaudos de las tierras de Muntinlupa y Cupang, pertenecientes al Convento de Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe, y tanto de las medidas y diligencias hechas por dicho señor juez de indultos y composiciones de tierras, cuya sentencia está en el archivo de provincia (1665).4This bundle is a compilation of titles, petitions, inquiries, a map, and other documents relating to the purchase of lands of Muntinlupa and its surrounding agricultural lands. The content of the present bundle recounts a series of events related to land rights: inheritance, donation, acquisition, and purchase. There are three major transfers of ownership appearing in the documents: one pertaining to the year 1636, another in 1665, and the other to the year 1675. The primary purpose of putting together in a bundle a handful of documents, that seem distant to each other in chronological terms, remains less clear. The readings of each document, however, suggest that the bundle was produced due to a land dispute between two parties that claimed respectively the ownership of the lands adjacent to the rivers and estuaries of current-day city of Muntinlupa. Additionally, the front page of this bundle indicates that it was compiled at the archive of the Augustinian province (Image 1). We suppose that the bundle was created probably to gather relevant information for the petition made in 1675. As we will elaborate below, one of the land transfers was made on behalf of the Augustinian provincial, and the claims made by the indigenous petitioners challenge the legitimacy of the Augustinian order’s possession of the lands.
This bundle provides valuable insights into the contrasting concepts of ownership practiced by Philippine indigenous people and Spaniards, revealing how these clashed in colonial Philippines. The documents within the present bundle offer a detailed view of land ownership and sales, highlighting the challenges posed by Spanish notions of private property ownership and their associated documentary practices. Through a variety of documents–including titles, receipts, testimonies, and visual representations–we can trace the timeline of land transfers and the conflicting perspectives on land rights. We highlight one of the notable features of the bundle due to its significance in clearly visualizing the geographical extent of disputed lands and documenting them for discussion within the Spanish administrative sphere.
After a long document of testimonies, the bundle presents a folio on which a detailed visual description of the lands in dispute (Image 47). It is a pen drawing demarcating the estuaries and the lands in between those estuaries, with a designation of names. The illustration is not a mere supplement to the textual description of land demarcations, provided in the first few folios of the bundle; it is made and inserted with clear acknowledgment of people involved in the dispute because both the scribe and the petitioners themselves mention the existence of the map throughout the bundle. Furthermore, it states that the indigenous people of Meiboli produced the map with a clear purpose, explaining why they included it in the written petition: “we make this presentation with the necessary oath regarding this map, and the witnesses we will present shall be examined according to this petition, and the said map shall be shown to them” (Image 11). The distribution of lands and estuaries serves as a valuable visual historical source given its significant reliability that allows the topography to be accurately overlaid onto modern-day cartography.
Another feature we underscore from this bundle is the presence of indigenous voices in the production of the documents. In several instances, it is indicated that the indigenous petitioners from the town of Meiboli are presenting their claims in the Tagalog language, which was then translated into Spanish at the time of composing the manuscript. It is clearly mentioned that the petitioners, represented by Doña María Banay, are speaking through the interpreter, of Chinese descent (mestizo de sangley). Additionally, each individual testifying signed their testimonies twice–once in Tagalog followed by in Spanish, if they knew how to write–before the presence of interpreters (e.g. Image 17: “aquí están dos firmas: la una en letra y lengua tagala y el otro en letra castellana”). It is noteworthy that they signed in both languages, demonstrating their literacy and competence in presenting their case in a Spanish setting, while also manifesting their indigenous identity by incorporating their own language and letters. Furthermore, this document is likely a copy of the original, as indicated by phrases such as, “here are three characters in Tagalog language” (e.g. Image 12), which are mentioned without the actual characters. This suggests that the scribe was copying from the original manuscript containing those characters. Although we do not know about the original manuscript today, this observation supports the idea that the indigenous elites, who were the grantees in 1636, sought to express their agency using their own language.
One of the major protagonists appearing in this bundle regarding the land dispute was Doña María Banay, an indigenous woman from the elite and the leading petitioner of the present case of 1665. She was from the town of Meiboli and had conceded the lands of Alabang, Anojan, Balingbing, Muntinlupa, and Bayubai in 1636 to Don Juan Sarmiento, Don Diego de Mercado, and the Capitán Don Martín de Aduna. The transfer of the ownership was attested by the petition made in 1636 by the mentioned grantees. The primary motive behind Doña María Banay’s petition in 1665 was to regain ownership of her lands. Banay requests that the lands in question be re-sold, asserting that they should return to the possession of her and her fellow indigenous elites in the community. The argument of Banay is based on indigenous concepts of land ownership which recognize customary rights and common property. Despite having transferred her lands to Mercado and Sarmiento around thirty years earlier, and having sold some to Aduna, Banay argues that she now retrieves the ownership since all these grantees are deceased.
Therefore, the petitioners of 1665, led by Doña María Banay, argued the legitimacy of owning the land, the town of Meiboli, as well as the right to sell it, by which they would sell it to Colegio de Santo Domingo. In addition to this petition, they further claim for their right to receive a copy of the document that proves their ownership of the land, thus a title, and additional copies that record the deeds of transfer.
The petition made in 1675 was probably the primary reason for compiling the previous documents found in the present bundle. This petition was submitted by the Licenciado Don Antonio Quijano Bustamante, who requested formal documents to confirm the legitimacy of the land purchase that occurred in 1650. He argues that the purchase was made on behalf of the Augustinian provincial, Alonso Quijano, deceased, and there was nothing contradictory to justice in the procedure. At the moment of the petition, he requests that formal documents be made for the agreement of sale and purchase.
In summary, Quijano’s petition, which asserts his legitimate acquisition through purchase, conflicts with Banay’s petition and the communal claims made by her fellow indigenous community members. Although no direct dispute occurred between them, the presence of the petition documents related to Banay and her fellow petitioners suggests that Quijano’s purchase can be contested because Banay and her associates already held ownership. Since there was no specific mention of the individuals who sold lands to Quijano, only referencing some “naturales y principales de la jurisdicción de Tondo,” in addition to the delay which took him twenty five years to officially register his possession from an undocumented purchase, it is possible that Quijano’s acquisition was illegitimate.
The documents in the present bundle are not arranged in chronological order; instead, they are organized based on their relevance to the petition in 1675. The part we transcribe and translate corresponds to Banay’s petition. This document provides a picture of the land dispute and the transfer of ownership over time, showing how ownership moved from one person or community to another.
The rhetoric implemented by the indigenous petitioners in arguing for the right to possess the lands in question demonstrates their proficiency in upholding indigenous land ownership and their ability to adapt to the Spanish colonial system of property rights. In arguing that the ownership should return to the community, they argue that they are the legitimate successors of their ancestors who have inhabited the land before the arrival of Spaniards. In the same vein, as they assert that they have actually occupied and used the land “from time immemorial,” they want their customary land rights to be attested by Spanish colonial laws. 5 It is noteworthy that the indigenous petitioners, when presenting a case over land rights, adopt a format that corresponds with the colonial land registers for the sake of leaving records on the matter, as they make it clear in a Latin phrase, “ad perpetuam rei memoriam” (for a perpetual record of the matter).
Additionally, it is notable that the petitioners claim to own the lands in a communal manner. This collective appeal to claim the ownership of lands distinguishes itself from the Spanish approach to property rights, which typically emphasizes private and exclusive ownership by individuals. 6 The difference in approaches is exemplified by one of the petitioners in the present document, made by a Spaniard, Antonio Quijano Bustamante. He requests official titles and related documentary registrations to confirm his legitimate acquisition of lands. In contrast to Quijano’s understanding of ownership, the petitioners led by Doña María Banay underscore the plurality of owners, or in other words, they argue for the right to possess the lands as properties of the community. Therefore, the logic in defending ancestral lands leads them to adopt a rhetoric centered on genealogy, narrating the history of ownership within the community over generations. The testimonies provided by the community members of Meiboli, including some principales, which were included alongside Banay’s petition to support the claim of land ownership, show how Filipino indigenous people recognized territorial property rights.
Doña María Banay and her fellow petitioners, however, were not unusual in the seventeenth century Philippines in attempting to document their land rights in accordance with the Spanish land registration system. Indigenous elites sought ways to secure their land rights through documented forms authorized by the Spanish regime, while emphasizing their long-standing occupation and cultivation of the area. 7 The indigenous elites’ effort to utilize the Spanish system of land ownership was in response to colonial imposition of principles of the Regalian Doctrine, also known as Jura Regalia, which called for documentary registration of indigenous lands. 8 According to this colonial policy, Philippine lands, after conquest, would go under the possession of the Spanish Crown otherwise titled by indigenous individuals. In other words, Banay and her fellow petitioners strategically defend their land ownership working along and against colonial policy which implied denying indigenous customs of land use and ownership.
While Muntinlupa in the seventeenth-century map seemed like a specific parcel of land, in 1901 it became a district of Morong, but would later be incorporated as part of Laguna province under the jurisdiction of Biñan in 1904, However, in 1917, its people petitioned to be separated, and it was granted the status of Municipality, and later became a city in 1995 with the signing of Republic Act 7926 by President Fidel Ramos. 9 Today, Muntinlupa stands as a highly urbanized city which covers all the mentioned lands in the map from Tunasan in the South and Sucat in the North. Alabang, its most developed land; Cupang, and Buli are all barangays of the city.
Alcina, Francisco Ignacio. Historia de Las Islas E Indios de Bisayas, 1668 . Manila: University of Santo Tomas Publishing House, 2002.
City Government of Muntinlupa. “HISTORY – City Government of Muntinlupa,” 2022. https://muntinlupacity.gov.ph/history/.
Concepcion, Grace Liza . “Negotiating Land in the Spanish Philippines: Cases of Land Donations and Boundary Disputes in Laguna, Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries.” Philippine Studies: Historical and Ethnographic Viewpoints 67, no. 3-4 (2019): 285–313. https://doi.org/10.1353/phs.2019.0018.
Jose, Regalado Trota. “Don Luis Castilla Offers to Sell Land in Manila (1629).” In The Spanish Pacific, 1521-1815: A Reader of Primary Sources , edited by Christina Lee and Ricardo Padrón, 91–113. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020.
———. “Transcribing the UST Baybayin Documents: Shedding Light on Early 17th-Century Philippine Writing.” The Journal of History 62, no. 1 (2016): 162–85.
Herzog, Tamar (2013), Colonial Law and “Native Customs”: Indigenous Land Rights in Colonial Spanish America, The Americas, Vol. 69, No. 3, pp. 303-321.
Lynch, Owen J. “Land Rights, Land Laws and Land Usurpation: The Spanish Sea (1565-1898).” The Philippine Law Journal 63 (1988): 82–111.
Mendoza, S. Lily (2023), The Regalian Doctrine: The Philippine Case, Doctrine of Discovery Project , April 24, 2023, URL: https://doctrineofdiscovery.org/blog/philippine-doctrine-discovery/ .
Molintas, Jose Mencio (2004), The Philippine Indigenous Peoples’ Struggle for Land and Life: Challenging Legal Texts, Arizona Journal of International and Comparative Law , 269, pp. 269-306.
Plasencia, Juan de. Doctrina Christiana En Lengua Española Y Tagala Corregida Por Los Religiosos de Las Ordenes . Manila, 1593.
Real Academia Española, Diccionario panhispánico del español jurídico (DPEJ) , en línea, 2023, URL: https://dpej.rae.es/ , Fecha de consulta: 07/05/2024.
Recopilación de leyes de los reinos de Indias: mandadas imprimir y publicar por la Majestad Católica Don Carlos II, Tomo segundo , Alicante: Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes, 2017, URL: https://www.cervantesvirtual.com/nd/ark:/59851/bmc738s8 .
Unam.mx. “Diccionario de Abreviaturas Novohispanas Ak’ab Ts’ib - Inicio,” 2013. https://www.iifilologicas.unam.mx/dicabenovo/.
1Two years prior to the publication of Jose’s article, the National Archives of the Philippines declared the Baybayin Documents of UST as a National Cultural Treasures. Regalado Trota Jose, “Transcribing the UST Baybayin Documents: Shedding Light on Early 17th-Century Philippine Writing,” The Journal of History 62, no. 1 (2016): 162–85. Baybayin was the pre-colonial writing system that the Tagalogs and the Bisayans used prior to the introduction of the Latin alphabet. Juan de Plasencia used the said writing system in translating and transliterating the Catholic prayers. See: Juan de Plasencia, Doctrina Christiana En Lengua Española Y Tagala Corregida Por Los Religiosos de Las Ordenes (Manila, 1593). Francisco Ignacio Alcina devoted a whole chapter discussing this writing system in his Historia.See: Francisco Ignacio Alcina, Historia de Las Islas E Indios de Bisayas, 1668 (Manila: University of Santo Tomas Publishing House, 2002).
2 Regalado Trota Jose, “Don Luis Castilla Offers to Sell Land in Manila (1629),” in The Spanish Pacific, 1521-1815: A Reader of Primary Sources , ed. Christina Lee and Ricardo Padrón (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020), 91–113.
3 Grace Liza Concepcion, “Negotiating Land in the Spanish Philippines: Cases of Land Donations and Boundary Disputes in Laguna, Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” Philippine Studies: Historical and Ethnographic Viewpoints 67, no. 3-4 (2019): 285–313,https://doi.org/10.1353/phs.2019.0018.
4 At the Lilly Library. Philippine Mss, 1750-1968. VAD6896-U-00010-000010
5 They provide a detailed genealogy of land transfers by inheritance to demonstrate their continuous occupancy over generations. See transcription and translation of Image 10 and 11, for example. An interesting side note is the mention of a Chinese uprising in Manila. The petitioners refer to this incident in order to emphasize that their continuous occupancy of the lands was only interrupted by the Chinese uprising.
6 Owen J. Lynch, “Land Rights, Land Laws and Land Usurpation: The Spanish Sea (1565-1898),” The Philippine Law Journal 63 (1988): 82.
7 Lynch, “Land Rights, Land Laws and Land Usurpation,” 90.
8 Molintas, p. 283. Additionally see, Recopilación de leyes de los reinos de Indias, Book 4, Title 12: Law 14 proclaims for the Spanish Crown that “it is our will that all lands which are held without proper and true deeds of grant be restored to us as they belong to us,” which undermines indigenous customary concept of land properties. Translation acquired from: The LawPhil Project: Philippine Laws and Jurisprudence Databank, G.R. No. 247866, September 15, 2020. URL: https://lawphil.net/judjuris/juri2020/sep2020/gr_247866_caguioa.html . Spanish original law consulted in the Recopilación de leyes de los reinos de Indias : “conviene que toda la tierra, que se posee sin justos y verdaderos títulos, se nos restituya, según y como nos pertenece, [...] Por todo lo cual ordenamos y mandamos a los virreyes y presidentes de audiencias pretoriales, que cuando les pareciere señalen término competente para que los poseedores exhiban ante ellos, y los ministros de sus audiencias, que nombraren, los títulos de tierras, estancias, chacras, y caballerías; y amparando a los que con buenos títulos y recaudos, o justa prescripción poseyeren, se nos vuelvan y restituyan las demás, para disponer de ellas a nuestra voluntad.”
9 “HISTORY – City Government of Muntinlupa,” City Government of Muntinlupa, 2022, https://muntinlupacity.gov.ph/history/.
10 We retain all the titles and positions in the original Spanish term in our translation, as they bear a lot of historical and cultural context within the words. Juez here refers to a judge.
11 Escribano refers to a public notary or a scribe.
12 The description of how the lands are geographically distributed alongside the estuaries are substantially corresponding to the illustration of pen drawing on the image 47. We have attached this illustration to the Introduction (page 4).
13 Sargento mayor is a military rank below maestre de campo in the Spanish military system.
14 Alcalde ordinario refers to a Spanish official who exercised jurisdiction over both civil and criminal cases in the Spanish overseas local government.
15 Licenciado is a title given to a person graduated from an educational institution equivalent to universities.
16 Fiscal refers to a prosecutor of the Royal Court.
17 Protector general is a position in the Spanish Indies government, whose main function is to take care of the administrative issues among the indigenous populations.
18 Justicia ordinaria refers to the local judge.
19 Alcalde mayor refers to a chief administrator in the local government who has judicial, administrative, military and legislative authority. He is appointed by the Spanish Crown.
20 Principal refers to an indigenous leader or elite of a given community.
21 Ganta, or gantang, is a unit of measurement used in the Philippines. A ganta is approximately equivalent to 3 liters.
22 Almirante is a title given to a navy officer.
23 Procurador , in this context,is a position in the Society of Jesus whose main function is to represent and defend a party in a dispute. In this document, the procurador refers to a priest in charge of attending to such issues in the province.
24 Escribano del número is an official position in the city council. He is called “del número” because the number of people in this position was limited to a certain number in each locality. One of their primary roles was to communicate real estate transactions to facilitate the tax or tribute collection.
25 The content from Image 13 onwards includes a couple of petitions, depositions by indigenous individuals supporting Banay and her fellow petitioners’ ownership claims, an order, an illustration of disputed lands, and documents related to Quijano’s petition at the end of the bundle. In our group project, we focused on transcribing and translating Banay’s 1665 petition and its related documents from 1636.