MOPPIYON KAHI DIID PATOY: Readings in Kidapawan History: Lino Madrid’s 1952 Essay
KIDAPAWAN CITY (MindaNews / 12 Feb) — Kidapawan celebrates its 27th anniversary as a city today. While preoccupations have prevented me from contributing to this column as much as I would have liked (I have just been appointed Consultant for Cultural Heritage of Davao Occidental), I could not let the anniversary pass without an article.
Cityhood was pushed in the years leading up to 1998 by banking on Kidapawan’s growth as a town. But dreaming big was by then already a Kidapawan tradition.
The earliest surviving published work explicitly featuring Kidapawan – the short essay on the town by Lino Madrid on the 1952 Cotabato Guidebook – already reflects this ambition.
For ease of accessibility, I had made Madrid’s essay available for free reading online some years ago, including it on the Annotated Bibliography I uploaded in 2019.
Until recently I have only ever gotten hold of photocopies of the essay (a relative by marriage, Zenaida Aballe, gave me her copy).
But then the artist Kublai Millan (whose grandfather Simeon F. Millan edited the 1952 Guidebook) held a homecoming exhibit at the Bangsamoro Museum in Cotabato City late last year, and the return to his city of birth prompted him to dig up his late father’s mountain of books and look for the family’s copy of this historically important reference.
He has lent me the copy (which is destined to be donated to the museum), and this allows me to share to the public clearer copies of the photos on the essay. You can view the photos of the whole essay in a single album in Kidapawan of the Past.
The images of the essay as printed in the 1952 Guidebook offer insight that would not be available if only the text was read – the essay is peppered with photographs, with ads by local businesses, and it ends with what is effectively Kidapawan’s first directory, listing down local officials, establishments, and professionals.
Perhaps the most palpable and evident reality that these extra-textual components of the essay as printed reflect is the big role the local Chinese community once played. Almost all the establishments with ads in the essay are Chinese-owned, and the list of establishment owners is dominated by Chinese names. There is even a photo of the Chinese Chamber of Commerce.
As I mentioned in a recent radio interview with Juander Radyo Kidapawan, the Kidapawan Chinese Community was once vibrant, and it served as the backbone of Kidapawan’s post-war economy. That presence is barely felt in Kidapawan now, but Madrid’s Guidebook offers a refreshing glimpse into the days when they were once so conspicuous.
Given the sheer amount of contemporary information it has recorded, I could be forgiven for only ever treating Madrid’s essay (a founding text in Kidapawan Historiography) as a source of historical information.
But a lecture invitation for the literature and cultural studies majors of the University of Southeastern Philippines on Settler Literature made me realize there was need to make a more in depth discourse analysis of the essay.
I share here and expand on the insights I included in the USEP talk.
For one, I underline the positionality of the text’s author:
Lino Madrid was a sitting Municipal Councillor (he had just been re-elected on the year the 1952 Cotabato Guidebook came out). His political affiliation is now lost to time, but his rather marginal mention of Gil Gadi and other local Nacionalista stalwarts (and given the political party of Duma Sinsuat, the Governor of Cotabato who sponsored the book), it can be speculated that Madrid was a member of the Liberal Party.
This politics may have played a part in who and which part of what was then a vast Kidapawan he chose to mention in this official text. We note that at the time the essay came out, Kidapawan still included what is today the towns of Makilala, Magpet, portions of Matalam, Antipas, President Roxas, and Arakan. But only those from Kidapawan, Makilala, and to a limited extent Magpet will find anything worth working with for their local histories, as the vast area north and west of Kidapawan is almost completely ignored. This reinforces what the likes of E. Arsenio Manuel observed that locals in such areas during the time barely felt that they were part of Kidapawan.
Born in Pasuquin, Ilocos Norte in 1900, Madrid was a teacher, deployed to Kidapawan in 1920. He was the pioneer settler of all the Madrids in the region, his arrival in the area paving the way for his relatives to follow him.
His position as teacher and as settler also explains a lot about the perspective he uses to write Kidapawan history. If one were to understand the emergence of the town with only Madrid as source, one would assume that there was no history in Kidapawan before the first settlers – who were teachers – had arrived.
Madrid completely ignores the indigenous political structure, implying that the area’s only semblance of government was the school. In truth, when he and his generation of settlers arrived in the area the locals were already being governed by tribal leaders under customary law. Other sources would later reveal the tension between this indigenous structure and the colonial governance introduced by the Americans, as local officials such as Datu Siawan Ingkal would continue enforcing customary law well until the 1940s (in the case of the Arakan area, E. Arsenio Manuel documents that as late as the 1960s, customary law was the only law enforced in the area under Datu Duyan Suhat’s domain).
Which is not to say that Madrid completely ignored the indigenous peoples. He did acknowledge that they were the first inhabitants, and he did attribute to “the friendliness of the Manobo datus” the success of settlement. But he still characterizes the role of Settlement as the “taming” of the area.
It is also very telling how little he mentions culture – anyone looking for insight into the already vast collective memory of the Monuvu transmitted during his time will find nothing in the essay. There is no mention of ways of living, no mention of oral literature, or even the indigenous economy.
Even the sole instance in which he mentions oral history is tellingly faulty. The essay is important in Kidapawan history for presenting the first proposed etymology of Kidapawan’s name. Madrid claims that Kidapawan is derived “from the Manobo words ‘kida,’ which means ‘to live near,’ and ‘pawan,’ which means ‘spring in the highland’.” Anyone who can speak Monuvu will know that the etymology is an invention and does not actually make sense in the language.
We must note, as we mention these shortcomings, that Madrid was not only a teacher, but that he was head teacher of Kidapawan’s public education system for decades. His position as teacher, I speculate, contributed in no small way to his colonial perspective and his failure to do proper research: the education system was an important ideological state apparatus for the American and subsequent Commonwealth, Second Republic, and Third Republic governments to erase indigenous identity (which was prone to rebellion). Against that colonial model, it is inevitable for the teacher – who has received a great degree of coloniality – to proceed things with a sense of cultural superiority, by which they have historically taken liberties in their production of what are some of our earliest works of ethnography. Why should someone who studied Robert Frost deign to do fieldwork and gather information from these savage natives?
This failure becomes even more glaring when we note that Madrid’s own wife, Remedios Ambuang, was a Monuvu, and he lived near many of the oldest Monuvu families, not least Datu Siawan Ingkal, who was there in Kidapawan’s earliest days.
Madrid’s historical invention was the first of what would be an unfortunate tradition of making stuff up in Kidapawan historiography (about which I have written here before).
While the Monuvu may have received a few mentions in the essay, there is complete erasure of the town’s Moro history. This is surprising, given the big role Kidapawan’s Moro community played in liberating Kidapawan during the Second World War. Of the three great Moro leaders in Kidapawan history – the war heroes Patadon Tungao, Abubakar Guiama, and Paidu Dumacon – only Patadon is mentioned (and simply as a “barrio leader”). Like Siawan Ingkal, Patadon was still alive when Madrid wrote the essay, and would have provided him a great amount of information that today is lost to Kidapawan history.
This settler-centric bias, rather paradoxically, is where the real historical value of the essay lies: save for its documenting of contemporary and near contemporary facts, it reveals the complex role of the settler in the shaping and telling of Kidapawan (and Mindanao) history.
In Madrid’s case, it is these limits that offer to the keen reader an insight into the actual dynamics of the time.
Most intriguing perhaps is his own position as both settler and government official, a duality whose contradictions are foregrounded when his attitude towards land ownership is interrogated.
Madrid notes a boom in population as a result of the Second World War, with many settlers from the neighboring Davao region displaced by the Japanese conquest and moving west into Kidapawan. He characterizes these settlers (who remained in the area even after the War) as “squatters,” occupying land which already had “owners.”
This “ownership” is revealed to mean one granted by Philippine law when he also makes reference to “the spurious selling of public lands by native datus.” This one line reveals the ambiguity of settler attitudes towards indigenous land ownership.
On the one hand, it documents at the very least that the datus had some form of ownership over the land which allow them to sell it (a view he had already hinted when he made reference to the “friendliness of the Manobo datus,” to which he attributes the success of Settlement). Little surprise here given that he himself had acquired his lands in Kidapawan by indigenous right, having received them as a result of his marriage to his Monuvu wife.
But on the other hand, he characterizes such lands as “public,” whose sale is described as “spurious,” effectively dismissing indigenous land ownership. Given that he was a government official – and that there is little incentive for him to reflect on it – this dismissal is unsurprising.
The question on whether it is the Philippine state – of which Madrid in Kidapawan was both early bringer and contemporary representative – or the indigenous leaders who are the ultimate sovereigns of the land remains unanswered. Madrid illustrates how settlers navigated this ambiguity, dealing with the conflicting realities of pre-existing indigenous control and the hegemony of the state by first acquiring land through bona fide transactions with the indigenous owners (in Madrid’s case by marrying a Monuvu, but for many others also by buying the land) before formally having the land titled (either by homesteading it or by entering into subsequent transactions with the owners of the land as designated by Manila, although for the latter scenario I have yet to document any cases).
But it would not be fair to Madrid if we did not note the more affirmative views he reflected in the essay, some of the earliest articulations of such views.
A full 30 years before a Department of Tourism was established by the national government, Madrid was already positioning Kidapawan as a destination, giving it the unsuccessful monicker “Southern Summer Resort of the Archipelago.” The minutes of the Municipal Council sessions before, during, and years after his time suggest that he was alone in Kidapawan when he pushed this agenda, as tourism as a concern of governance would not come up until the 1970s. He would be only the second advocate for tourism in Kidapawan after Datu Ingkal Ugok, who directed the Monuvu of what is today the MADADMA ancestral domain (led by Datu Apan) to make the earliest tourist trails up Mt. Apo during the American era.
It can be argued that Madrid’s dream of a “summer resort” town was inherited and realized by Arakan, then part of Kidapawan and today fast becoming a major tourism hub specially along the Bukidnon-Davao road.
But that area may well learn too from the other great view that Madrid pioneers in his essay – environmentalism. The primary concern for him when he discusses the problem of squatting is in the encroachment of settlers into the National Park, which he counts among the town’s assets. Although he does not elaborate on this, he calls for the protection of the forest reserves, revealing an early awareness of the importance of conserving the environment.
(MindaViews is the opinion section of MindaNews. Karlo Antonio G. David has been writing the history of Kidapawan City for the past thirteen years. He has documented seven previously unrecorded civilian massacres, the lives of many local historical figures, and the details of dozens of forgotten historical incidents in Kidapawan. He was invested by the Obo Monuvu of Kidapawan as “Datu Pontivug,” with the Gaa (traditional epithet) of “Piyak nod Pobpohangon nod Kotuwig don od Ukaa” (Hatchling with a large Cockscomb, Already Gifted at Crowing). The Don Carlos Palanca and Nick Joaquin Literary Awardee has seen print in Mindanao, Cebu, Dumaguete, Manila, Hong Kong, Bangkok, Singapore, and Tokyo. His first collection of short stories, “Proclivities: Stories from Kidapawan,” came out in 2022.)
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