Negotiating Land in the Spanish Philippines: Cases of Land Donations and Boundary Disputes in Laguna, Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

Abstract

Using archival documents, this article analyzes two types of negotiations involving land in Laguna province. The first deals with donations that native leaders made to the Franciscans for the establishment of a hospital in Los Baños in the early 1600s. The second type consists of native claims to land in a dispute on town borders in the eighteenth century. These cases evince alternative ideas of land ownership and depict how the people negotiated the colonial structure to prove their tenure. They also illustrate overlapping practices of land tenure during the transition from precolonial to colonial forms.

KEYWORDS: PRECOLONIAL LAND PRACTICES • SPANISH COLONIALISM • LAND TENURE • LAGUNA PROVINCE