Sugarlandia: Debt bondage and labor among the sacadas of Negros Occidental
The hacienda stirred to life as the sun climbed higher. A mirage began to form where a group of people had gathered, and the fields awaited a full day’s labor. I raised my hand to shield my eyes, yet light still seeped through my fingers. With my other hand, I gripped the handlebar as our tricycle navigated a patchy concrete road where grass grew through every fissure. The usual humid air in Negros Occidental carried the sweet scent of freshly-cut sugarcane and damp earth. It was February, and the harvest season was drawing to a close.
Farther away, the outline of Mt. Silay blurred beneath a veil of mist. The air thickened as we passed rows of shacks lining the dirt road, until a man came into view, waiting for us at the end. “Sir Errol?” I called as we approached. He nodded and welcomed us into his home.
We sat in a small space walled by concrete hollow blocks. From where I sat, I could see the bamboo shafts supporting the metal roof and wooden beams connecting the woven bamboo walls. A makeshift rod stretched from the doorframe to the back wall, where uniforms of Errol’s children hung neatly.
Errol was born to Antique migrants drawn to Negros Occidental by the promise of work. The small plots of land tilled by Antique’s rice farmers were rarely enough to support an entire household year-round, so many crossed the sea to become transient sugar farmers. To the Negrense, however, they would always be pangayaw or outsiders.
“Being a sacada was not part of my plan,” Errol said. At 16, he had a job in Manila as a single-stroke designer in a figurine factory. But when his father and uncle died, he returned to Negros. For two years, he labored in the fields as a sacada.
“I once asked my father what sacada really means,” he recalled. “He said it came from the word sacar —‚ to extract. Like the way a sacada slices through the base of the stalk. You were sacar-ed. Taken. Pulled from your land. Brought somewhere else to work.” His words came in sharp staccato, like the rhythm of the blade through cane.
I’ve come to learn that the sacada system is inherently paternalistic. It fosters a deep sense of indebtedness, reinforced by the cash advances given by the hacenderos. Over time, these financial dependencies warped into binding ties, solidifying the paternal-like relationship throughout generations.
Negros Occidental had been an avenue for the germinal seeds of the hacienda structure. The hacenderos directed the labor and immortalized themselves through portraits hung beneath carved calado traceries. The first time I saw these ornate air vents in Balay Negrense, I stared long enough for the wooden patterns to sway like sugarcane leaves in the wind. The grandiosity of it all was deliberate. It was to assert power above the flimsy bamboo barracks that lined the edges of the green horizon.
The sugar industry’s toil is etched into the lives of its workers. And so,I opted for interview-conversations with them that serve as an opportunity to narrate their own experiences.
By noon, I met Errol again. He called out to a figure from afar, a man who approached barefoot, shifting his weight with each step. He had a receding hairline with streaks of gray threading through his dull black hair. “This is Rom,” Errol gestured. “He oversees the cuartel.”
Inside the cuartel, wooden slat beds lined both sides of the woven bamboo walls. About 30 sacadas occupied the space. Pieces of clothing hung from the rafters. The kitchen stood only a few steps away with a single shelf holding tin cans and discolored bowls, and a metal grate balanced on stones served as a makeshift stove. A dog meandered through the space, its ribs faintly visible beneath its dusty coat.
Rom sat beside me as I began to ask questions. “My dream as a parent,” he said, “is for my children to have a better life. But that’s the same dream my parents had for me.” Fifty years later, he tills the same land his father once did.
Without a diploma, Rom knew his options were few. By first grade, he had dropped out to help his mother. When she remarried, her new husband kept an espading, or a curved blade, always within reach. Since then, his life had followed the rhythm of sugarcane: planting, cutting, hauling. The only pause came during the tigpuraot or the dry season.
Rom spoke of the suma-heneral who was supposed to tally each harvest, though payday often came as an illusion. “There were no records. No list. No proof,” Rom said. “You stay quiet to stay alive.” Those who complained were held at gunpoint. He showed me his crumpled pay slips of handwritten figures, deductions for rice and cash advances, and a net pay of a few hundred pesos. His family of 11 survived on P8,000 a month. Despite the passing of time, little had changed. They toiled to feed an industry that could barely feed their own.
Like Rom’s son Jun, many children of sacadas have never set foot in school. Faced with the contrast between their reality and their hopes, many drop out, repeating the cycle that traps their families in debt bondage. Rom feared that the land would claim his son as it had claimed him, his father, and his grandfather before him.
As I prepared to bind my research a month later, a line from my transcript notes caught my eye: Paano ka maghandum kun pigado? (How can you dream when you are poor?) Rom had asked me this when I last visited their home in Antique. While unpacking my things after the visit, I realized I had left my pen with Jun. Strangely, the idea of having left something behind brought me a quiet sense of comfort. It was as if the pen, still resting in that place, tethered a part of me to where I’d just come from. Perhaps, for Jun, that pen might one day write something his father never had the chance to. And perhaps that, too, is how they dream — in small ways, in quiet revolutions.
I looked out the window and saw the fields beyond. The horizon blurred into a golden haze as the sun sank slowly into the earth’s cradle. The last light filtered through the cracks of bundled stalks carried by the sacadas on their shoulders and into the truck.
The cycle will begin again tomorrow. – Rappler.com
Rachel Lois Gella is an aspiring lawyer with a nationally recognized dissertation on artificial intelligence. Some of her writings are available on her Substack page.
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