Peasantry

In our typology of the “peasantry” as a class, the term can now be used to refer to small and medium-
sized rural producers who are either share tenants, leaseholders, owner-cultivators, or any other similar
type as well as to rural wage workers or rural semi-proletariat who either still maintain their
smallholdings or their ties (kinship or otherwise) with small scale rural production units or a rural
community in general.

Land ownership

During Spanish colonization, Spaniards brought a system of pueblo agriculture, where rural
communities, often dispersed and scattered in nature, were organized into a pueblo and given hand to
cultivate.

Pueblo Agriculture - a system wherein native rural communities were organized into pueblo and each
Christianized native family is given four (4) to five (5) hectares of land to cultivate. Pueblo agriculture
practiced no sharecropper class or landless class.

CABESANG TALES - Rizal’s story on Cabesang Tales and his findings on the agrarian conflict in Calamba in
1887 brought to the fore the exploitative agrarian set-up created by the vast friar estates. The friar
haciendas became the source of oppression, poverty, and peasant discontentment that led to an armed
revolt that challenged the Spanish colonial structures. Rizal fully understood that the agrarian problems
that surfaced during his time were socio-economic problem because it affected not only the farmers or
peasants including their families, but their impact also generated serious circumstances like economic
dislocation, poverty, and revolt. Thus, Rizal knew very well that agrarian conflict could ignite a national
revolution.

LALIGA FILIPINA - Rizal knew very well that the development of agriculture in the country is
fundamentally vital to its social and economic progress. The society he formed, La Liga Filipina, sought
for the unity of the whole archipelago as one nation, encouraged education for all, and observance
of justice but such aspirations, if achieved, may not be completely meaningful to the nation’s life
majority of its people remains poor and economically unproductive. Thus, La Liga’s fourth aim was the
encouragement of agriculture and commerce. On the one hand, an article he wrote emphasized
the role of the government in the development of agriculture. Instead of pressing the issues of
landlessness and unreasonable increases of rents by big landowners, Rizal delved into equally urgent
matter related to the obligation of the government in giving protection to the beleaguered
farmers against the abuses committed by civil guards and bandits.

LEY HIPOTECARIA/MORTGAGE LAW -