These Brothers of Ours': Poblete's Obreros and the Road to Baguio 1903-1905‪.‬

On July 21, 1903, some two hundred laborers recruited to construct the Benguet Road linking the Americans' erstwhile summer capital of the Philippines at Baguio with the railhead to Manila refused to report for work and peremptorily marched out of camp. They were dissatisfied with conditions, treatment, and wages. While the incident is barely if at all remembered, it became something of a cause celebre at the time. The affair was made much of by a nationalist press owned by Manila-based literati involved in non-military confrontation with the new colonial administration and eager to cast Americans in the worst of lights. The Americans were anxious to be prove themselves blameless and to distance their actions from those of other colonial regimes. The workers, of course, the obreros, simply fade once more into the historical twilight but not before leaving behind them a glimpse at the nature of the changes taking place in the local labor market. To all three, however, the episode proved noteworthy even if its significance was transitory. As part of a wider campaign of religious nationalism, "seditious" theatre, political coalitions and labor organizing, radical journalism proved an increasingly effective tool in wringing concessions out of reluctant colonial authorities and in discrediting the Partido Federal whose members were largely supportive of the new regime. Americans were forced to find solutions to the problems of labor management in the local context and to discover something about how to fashion workable colonial practices. The voices are too few and muffled to hear what individual workers said about these events but within a few years Filipinos began to migrate overseas to work on the sugar plantations of Hawaii as new opportunities expanded mental horizons, encouraged labor mobility, and raised life expectations. Of course, making overly much macro history from micro happenings is fraught with its own dangers. Yet without these fragments of the past, much of nonwestern history would remain hidden and the present would be less well understood. The situation in the Philippines is made more acute by historians' pre-occupation with the momentous political events at the beginning of the twentieth century. Intense debates about the nature of an "unfinished revolution" have reverberated down the ensuing century, influencing the direction that historiography has taken and largely obscuring appreciation of the important social changes taking place within the archipelago. (1) Attention is drawn more to the surface politics of the nation rather than to the dynamics of social change within Filipino society. As explanation for this fixation, Reynaldo Ileto points to the legacy of American colonialism and to scholars interpreting history more through the prism of patron-client relationships rather than class. (2) While it may be premature to talk about the dawning of such a consciousness as yet, there were socio-economic developments in Filipino society at this time that were just as significant as the political ones. The creation of a labor market, the introduction of new management techniques, more widespread migration in search of employment, the first flexing of industrial muscle, and changes in gender roles that took place between 1899 and 1908, between the end of Spanish colonialism and the creation of a Bureau of Labor, are milestones in the growth of the nation previously largely overlooked. (3)