Cagayan Valley
Cagayan Valley, designated as Region II, is an administrative region in the Philippines. Located in the northeastern section of Luzon, it is composed of five Philippine provinces: Batanes, Cagayan, Isabela, Nueva Vizcaya, and Quirino. The region hosts four chartered cities: Cauayan, Ilagan, Santiago, and Tuguegarao.
Most of its land area lies in the valley between the Cordilleras and the Sierra Madre mountain ranges. The eponymous Cagayan River, the country's largest and longest, runs through the region, flows from the Caraballo Mountains, and ends in Aparri. Cagayan Valley is the second-largest Philippine administrative region by land area. According to a literacy survey in 2019, 93% of Cagayan Valley's citizens are functionally literate, which is 5th out of the 17 regions of the Philippines.
History
Spanish colonial era
During the Spanish era, Cagayan Valley had a larger territory than today, then named Provincia de Cagayan. Then it included the territories of the above-mentioned provinces and the eastern parts of the Cordillera provinces of Apayao, Kalinga, Mountain Province, Ifugao and Benguet, and the north part of Aurora. Historian and missionary Jose Burgues said, "The old Cagayan Valley comprises the province of Cagayan, Isabela and Nueva Vizcaya as well as the military Districts of Apayao, Itaves, Quiangan, Cayapa and Bintangan, plus the area of the Sierra Madre to the Pacific Ocean in the said trajectory." The exception is Palanan, which was established in 1625 by Spanish forces who arrived by ship from the Pacific coastal town of Baler in Tayabas province. Thus, Palanan was originally a part of Pampanga, then to Laguna, Tayabas, and Nueva Ecija, before being transferred to Nueva Vizcaya and finally Isabela. Also, unlike the rest of Cagayan Valley, it was served by Franciscan missionaries from Baler rather than the Dominicans. The population of the town was natively Paranan, then subsequently augmented by local Negritos, migrants from Baler who are Tagalogs and outlaws from Cagayan Valley, with the lingua franca of the settlement being Tagalog as opposed to Ilocano or Ibanag. The Atta or Negritos, the first people in valley, were later moved to the uplands or variably assimilated by the Austronesians, from whom the Ibanags, Itawes, Yogads, Gaddangs, Irayas, Malawegs, and Paranans descended – who actually came from one ethnicity. These are the people found by the Spaniards in the different villages along the rivers all over Cagayan Valley. The Spaniards rightly judged that these various villagers came from a single racial stock and decided to make the Ibanag language the lingua franca, both civilly and ecclesiastically for the entire people of Cagayan which they called collectively as the Cagayanes which later was transliterated to become Cagayanos. Various other peoples, mainly the Ilocanos, Pangasinenses, Kapampangans and Tagalogs, as well as Visayans, Moros, Ivatans, and even foreigners like the Chinese, Indians, Arabs, Spaniards and others were further infused to the native Cagayanes to become the modern Cagayano that we know today.In 1818, Nueva Ecija annexed the towns of Palanan from Isabela, as well as Cagayan, Nueva Vizcaya, Quirino, Baler, Casiguran, Infanta and Polillo Islands from Tayabas, and part of Rizal. In the nineteenth and 20th centuries, the prosperity found in tobacco cultivation caused many Ilokano people to settle here, it was only in this large-scale Ilocano settlement that made Ilocano language replace Ibanag as the lingua franca of the region. Ilocano settlers already migrated to Nueva Vizcaya earlier in 1700s also to work on the tobacco plantations, and later immigrants with skills construct churches and other structures needed for development, as the native Igorot tribes rejected labor imposed by the Spaniards. Tobacco is still a major factor in the economy of Cagayan, though a special economic zone and free port has been created to strengthen and diversify the provincial economy.
During World War II
During World War II, at Balete Pass in Nueva Vizcaya, the retreating Japanese Imperial Army under General Tomoyuki Yamashita dug in and held on for three months against the American and Filipino forces who eventually drove them out; the pass is now called Dalton Pass in honor of General Dalton, USA, who was killed in the fighting.During the Marcos dictatorship
Loan-funded government spending to promote Ferdinand Marcos' 1969 reelection campaign caused the Philippine economy to take a sudden downwards turn in the form of the 1969 Philippine balance of payments crisis, which in turn led to social unrest throughout the country. Cagayan Valley became one of the flashpoints of conflict, with many previously-moderate young people joining the armed resistance against Marcos after being radicalized by various crackdowns.With only a year left in his last constitutionally allowed term as president, Ferdinand Marcos placed the Philippines under Martial Law in September 1972 and thus retained the position for fourteen more years. This period in Philippine history is remembered for the Marcos administration's record of human rights abuses, particularly targeting political opponents, student activists, journalists, religious workers, farmers, and others who fought against the Marcos dictatorship.
In Isabela, protests erupted when Marcos crony Danding Cojuangco managed to block a Spanish-era grant which was supposed to see the return of Hacienda San Antonio and Hacienda Santa Isabel in Ilagan to local farmers, displacing tens of thousands of farmers who were supposed to get those lands back a hundred years after the Spanish accosted them. The Roman Catholic Diocese of Ilagan led efforts to support the farmers in their cause, succeeding in forcing the Marcos administration to finally concede land titles to 4,000 farmers, but earning the ire of the dicatatorship against leading church figures such as Ilagan Bishop Miguel Purugganan, Diocesan Social Action Center researcher Sabino "Abe" Padilla, and the various nuns and lay workers of the Diocese.
Also during that time, logging concessions were awarded to Juan Ponce Enrile, Herminio Disini, and other cronies, leading to the severe degradation of forest cover in the region, which contributed to widespread flooding and other environmental issues that persist today.
Integration of new provinces
Kalinga-Apayao and Ifugao were transferred to the Cagayan Valley region in 1972, and afterwards Ferdinand Marcos imposed a migration policy for Ilokanos into those provinces; the natives of Apayao called Isnag become minority there.Later 20th Century
After the People Power Revolution in 1986, many of the activists who had joined the underground movement against Marcos decided to "surface", as the new administration of Corazon Aquino released political prisoners and initiated peace talks. However, anti-left sentiment in her new cabinet, which included individuals who had aligned themselves with the Reform the Armed Forces Movement, made the peace process difficult. Negotiations eventually collapsed, and unrest in Cagayan valley persisted.When the Cordillera Administrative Region was formed in 1987 under Corazon Aquino, the indigenous provinces of Ifugao and Kalinga-Apayao were transferred into the newly formed region.
Contemporary history
COVID-19 pandemic
During the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic, the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 virus reached Cagayan Valley on March 21, 2020, when the first case of the disease was confirmed in Tuguegarao. All provinces have confirmed at least one COVID-19 case, with Batanes being the last province to confirm a COVID-19 case on September 28, 2020.Extreme climate events
In November 2020, Typhoon Vamco crossed the island of Luzon, causing dam operators from all around the island to release large amounts of water into their impounds as they neared their spilling points. All seven of Magat Dam's gates were opened to prevent dam failure, but the overflow into the Cagayan River and caused widespread floods in Cagayan and Isabela. This event was worsened by the information gap that had developed as a result of the recent shutdown of the ABS-CBN broadcast network, because those areas had previously gotten weather updates primarily from the said network.Geography
Cagayan Valley is the large mass of land in the northeastern region of Luzon, comprising the provinces of Cagayan, Isabela, Nueva Vizcaya, Quirino, and the Batanes group of islands. It is bordered to the west by the Cordillera mountain range, to the east by the Sierra Madre, to the south by the Caraballo Mountains, and to the north by the Luzon Strait. Politically, it is bordered by the Cordillera Administrative Region to the west, the Ilocos Region to the northwest and southwest, Central Luzon to the south, and Taiwan to the north which shares maritime border from Bashi Channel.The region contains two landlocked provinces, Quirino and Nueva Vizcaya, which are ruggedly mountainous and heavily forested. Nueva Vizcaya is the remnant of the southern province created when Cagayan Province was divided in two in 1839. They are ethnically and linguistically diverse, with a substrate of Agtas, Negritos who are food-gatherers with no fixed abodes, overlaid by Ilongots and others in a number of tribes, some of whom were fierce head-hunters, with the latest but largest element of the population being the Ilocanos, closely followed by the Ibanags.