Cagayan
Cagayan, officially the Province of Cagayan, is a province in the Philippines located in the Cagayan Valley region, covering the northeastern tip of Luzon. Its capital is Tuguegarao, the largest city of that province as well as the regional center of Region 2. It is about northwest of Manila, and includes the Babuyan Islands to the north. The province borders Ilocos Norte and Apayao to the west, and Kalinga and Isabela to the south.
Cagayan was one of the early provinces that existed during the Spanish colonial period. Called La Provincia de Cagayan, its borders essentially covered the entire Cagayan Valley, which included the present provinces of Isabela, Quirino, Nueva Vizcaya, Batanes and portions of Kalinga, Apayao, and Aurora. The former capital was Nueva Segovia, which also served as the seat of the Diocese of Nueva Segovia. Today, only remain of the former vastness of the province. The entire region, however, is still referred to as Cagayan Valley.
Etymology
A folk legend holds that the name was originally derived from the tagay, a plant that grows abundantly in the northern part of the province. The term Catagayan, "the place where the tagay grows" was shortened to Cagayan. Linguists, however, hold that cagayan comes from an ancient, lost word that means "river". Variations of this word—karayan, kayan, kahayan, kayayan, kagayan and kalayan—all mean river, referring to Cagayan River. It is said to have also shared etymology with Cagayan de Oro in Mindanao with the similar reference, also called Cagayan River.History
Early history
Cagayan has a prehistoric civilization with a rich and diverse culture. According to archaeologists, the earliest man in the Philippines probably lived in Cagayan thousands of years ago.In the classical era, Gattaran and Lal-lo was the home of hunter-gatherers who specialized in hunting mollusks. These hunter-gatherers have stockpiled their leftover mollusk shells in numerous sites in Gattaran and Lal-lo, until eventually, the shells formed into the largest stock of shell-midden sites in the entire Philippines.
The Atta or Negritos were the first people in valley. They were later moved to the uplands or variably assimilated by the Austronesians, from whom the Ibanags, Itawes, Yogads, Gaddangs, Irayas and Malawegs 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. 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.
Cagayan was a major site for the Maritime Jade Road, one of the most extensive sea-based trade networks of a single geological material in the prehistoric world, operating for 3,000 years from 2000 BCE to 1000 CE.
Even before the Spaniards came to Cagayan, the Cagayanos have already made contact with various civilizations like the Chinese, Japanese and even Indians, as evidenced by various artifacts and even the presence of minor to moderate foreign linguistic elements in the languages of the natives.
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.
The north coast was also the site of a Wokou state when the Japanese pirate-lord Tay Fusa set up his stronghold there before its destruction during the 1582 Cagayan battles.
Spanish colonial era
In 1581, Captain Juan Pablo Carreon arrived in Cagayan with a hundred fully equipped soldiers and their families by order of Gonzalo Ronquillo de Peñaloza, the fourth Spanish Governor-General of the Philippines. The expeditionary force was sent to explore the Cagayan Valley, to convert the natives to Catholicism, and to establish ecclesiastical missions and towns throughout the valley.On June 29, 1572, Spanish conquistador Juan de Salcedo traced the northern coastline of Luzon and set foot on the Massi, Tular, and Aparri areas.
La Provincia de Cagayan
In 1583, through a Spanish Royal Decree, the entire northeastern portion of Luzon including the islands in the Balintang Channel were organized into one large political unit called the La Provincia de Cagayán. The provincia's territorial delineation encompassed the present provinces of Batanes, Isabela, Quirino, Nueva Vizcaya, including portions of Kalinga, Apayao, Mountain Province, Ifugao, and Aurora. Its capital was Nueva Segovia. It was sometimes called Cagayán de Luzón to distinguish it from other places bearing the name Cagayan.The Spanish friars soon established mission posts in Camalaniugan and Lal-lo, which became the seat of the Diocese established by Pope Clement VIII on August 14, 1595.
A founding population of 200 Spanish citizens from Europe accompanied by 100 soldiers set up settlements across Cagayan Valley. These people were in turn supplemented by 155 Latin American soldiers recruited from Mexico By the end of the 1700s, Zambales had 9,888 native families.
The see was moved in 1758 to Vigan because of its relative distance. The Spanish influence can still be seen in the massive churches and other buildings.
In 1839, Nueva Vizcaya was established as a politico-military province and was separated from Cagayan. Later, Isabela was founded as a separate province on May 1, 1856, its areas carved from the southern Cagayan and eastern Nueva Vizcaya territories.
During the late 18th century, the New Spain government encouraged the expansion of trade and the development of commodity crops. Among these was tobacco, and lands in Cagayan became the center of a vertically integrated monopoly: tobacco was grown there and shipped to Manila, where it was processed and made into cigarettes and cigars. The development of the related bureaucracy and accounting systems was done under the leadership of José de Gálvez, who as visitor-general to Mexico from 1765 to 1772 developed the monopoly there and increased revenues to the Crown. He worked in the Philippines as Minister of the Indies from 1776 to 1787, constructing a similar monopoly there under Governor-General Basco y Vargas. The Spanish development of this industry affected all their economic gains in the Philippines.
The establishment of the civil government of Cagayan through the 1583 Spanish Royal Decree is commemorated in the annual Aggao Nac Cagayan celebrations of the Provincial Government of Cagayan and its people.
American era
When the Treaty of Paris was signed in 1898, ending the Spanish–American War, the United States took over the Philippines. It influenced the culture, most notably in agriculture and education, as well as in public works and communications. A naval base also increased interaction between local Filipinos and American sailors and administrators. At the close of the 18th century, there were 29 municipalities in the province of Cagayan. After the Philippines came under American sovereignty in 1902, more municipalities were founded. Since then, due to centralization and shifting of populations, the number of municipalities is back to 29. A new wave of immigration began in the late 19th and 20th centuries with the arrival of another group of the Ilocano settlers who came in large numbers. They now constitute the largest group in the province, and it was only in this large-scale Ilocano immigration & settlement that made Ilocano language replaced Ibanag as the lingua franca of the province.Japanese occupation
During the Second World War, with air raids by Japanese fighters and bombers, the province of Cagayan suffered much destruction by bombing and later invasion. Japanese Imperial forces entered Cagayan in 1942. While under the Japanese Occupation, several pre-war infantry divisions and regular units of the Philippine Commonwealth Army were re-established during the period on January 3, 1942, to June 30, 1946. They established general headquarters, camps and garrisoned troops in the province of Cagayan, and began operations against the Japanese Occupation forces in the Cagayan Valley. This included sending troops to the provinces of Cagayan and Isabela, and helping the local soldiers of the 11th and 14th Infantry Regiment of the USAFIP-NL, the local guerrilla fighters and the U.S. liberation forces. They fought against the Japanese Imperial forces from 1942 to 1945.The Battle off Cape Engaño on October 26, 1944, was held off Cape Engaño. At that time American carrier forces attacked the Japanese Northern Force. This became the concluding action of the Battle of Leyte Gulf. The Japanese lost 4 carriers, 3 light cruisers and 9 destroyers.
In 1945, the combined United States and Philippine troops, together with the recognized guerrillas, took Cagayan. Part of the action were the Filipino soldiers of the 11th and 14th Infantry Regiment, Philippine Commonwealth Army, USAFIP-NL liberated the province of Cagayan during the Second World War.
Postwar Era
After World War II Baldomero Perez of Tuguegarao was temporarily appointed as Governor of Cagayan by the Philippine Civil Affairs Unit, serving until he was replaced by Peregrino R. Quinto in 1946.During the Marcos dictatorship
Beginning in the 1970s, Cagayan became known as a bailiwick of Juan Ponce Enrile of Gonzaga, who as Secretary and later Minister of National Defense became one of the most powerful figures during the Martial Law period under President Ferdinand Marcos. His influence enabled the construction of Port Irene, a modernized international harbor facility in Santa Ana that was named after Marcos' daughter Irene, which later formed the basis for the creation of the Cagayan Special Economic Zone and Freeport, whose enabling law was authored by Enrile as a Senator in 1995 and now includes Santa Ana and parts of Aparri.Loan-funded government spending to promote Ferdinand Marcos’ 1969 reelection campaign caused the Philippine economy to take a sudden downwards turn in the last months of the 1960s. Known as the 1969 Philippine balance of payments crisis, this led to social unrest throughout the country beginning with the First Quarter Storm protests of 1970, and incidents of violence like the Plaza Miranda bombing. Marcos responded by vilifying his critics as "communists" and suspending the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus through Proclamation No. 889 in August 1971, but this pushed moderate student protesters towards the radical left, and causing many of them to go home to their home provinces like Cagayan. Marcos' actions thus lead the Marxist–Leninist–Maoist Communist Party of the Philippines to gain a significant presence in many Cagayan municipalities, although not as much in Tuguegarao itself.
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 Tuguegarao, Camp Marcelo Adduru became the province's main detention center for "political detainees", who were often never formally charged with a crime, and thus technically not counted by Marcos as "prisoners." Others disappeared without the trace for daring to speak against Marcos, such as Romeo Crismo, a teacher at Cagayan Teacher's College and St. Louis College in Tuguegarao, who criticized the 1973 Philippine constitutional plebiscite as a sham election. He disappeared without a trace in August 1980 after unknown men tried to capture him in front of his students the day before. He was later honored by having his name inscribed on the wall of remembrance of the Philippines' Bantayog ng mga Bayani, in recognition of his martyrdom while resisting authoritarianism.
During that time, logging concessions were awarded in the province by the Marcoses to Enrile and other cronies, leading to the severe degradation of forest cover in the province that contributed to widespread flooding and other environmental issues that persist today.