Philippine Politics in Town, District, and Province: Bossism in Cavite and Cebu

Philippine Politics in Town, District, and Province: Bossism in Cavite and Cebu Author(s): John T. Sidel Philippine Politics in Town, District, and Province: Bossism in Cavite and Cebu

ACCOUNTS OF THE VARIOUS LOCAL, congressional, and national elections held in the Philippines since nineteen eighty-six have highlighted three enduring features of Philippine democracy in the post-Marcos era. First of all, large numbers of politicians who held office for many years in the Marcos and pre-Marcos periods have won reelection, as have numerous other members of long-entrenched political families. Secondly, most of these politicians and clans have been known to enjoy not only political longevity but also economic preeminence within their respective municipal, congressional, or provincial bailiwicks, through landownership, commercial networks, logging or mining concessions, transportation companies, or control over illegal economies. Finally, evidence that fraud, vote-buying, and violence have decisively shaped the conduct and outcome of these elections has led some commentators to conclude that the celebrated transition from "authoritarianism" to "democracy" in Manila has been less than complete in its local manifestations. With the revival of electoral politics in nineteen eighty-seven, analysts thus began to offer evocative descriptions of, and various explanations for, the distinctive nature of Philippine democracy, with references to political clans, dynasties, caciques, warlords, and bosses appearing with great frequency in journalistic and scholarly accounts, and terms like cacique democracy, mafia democracy, feudalism, warlordism, and bossism gaining considerable currency.

Conventional wisdom attributes this pattern to the central role of "patron-client relations" in social relations and electoral politics in the Philippines. Highly personalized, multifunctional, and affect-laden, patron-client ties are defined as dyadic bonds of reciprocity and mutual obligation linking individuals of unequal wealth and power through relationships based on exchange. Beginning in the early nineteen sixties, scholars have argued that such patron-client dyads provide the essential social adhesive in Philippine society, crosscutting and undermining potential cleavages based on class,

corporate, or ethnic solidarities through webs of particularistic alliances based on bonds of personal reciprocity. Electoral politics thus works through patron-client networks, stretching from tenants to landlords and barrio-level ward leaders to mayors, congressmen, provincial governors, senators, and presidents. Consistently bifactional competition between rival patron-client networks supposedly produces "unrestrictedness, closeness, and intensity of competition for elective office at all levels of government" and guarantees that politicians are "highly responsive" to their constituents, who exercise "substantial influence ... upon decision-making," albeit in very particularistic ways.

Although the original scholarship on which this patron-client portrait has rested dates back more than twenty years, much recent scholarship has tended to accept its premises unquestioningly. "Until now," Benedict Kerkvliet has noted, the patron-client framework "remains the most influential among academics and is widely adopted by journalists, diplomats and other observers of the Philippines." Thus today's perennial politicians are essentially seen as owing their longevity in office to success in satisfying the demands of their client-constituents.

More dynamic accounts of the putative transformation or breakdown of patron-client relations might also help to explain some features of the current political configuration. Since the nineteen seventies, for example, some scholars have argued that economic growth, industrialization, and urbanization have worked to "modernize" Philippine politics, allowing upwardly mobile "professional politicians"-"new men"-to replace the scions of traditional landowning families through the construction of "political machines." This account might help to explain both the success of politicians not rooted in landed élite families and the considerable extent and importance of more impersonal, non-clientelist features of electoral politics, such as violence, fraud, and vote-buying. Meanwhile, other scholars have claimed that the penetration of capitalism, commercialization of agriculture, and resultant trends of rising landlessness and inequalities in income distribution have narrowed the scope and effectiveness of clientelist exchanges, undermined patron-client bonds, and paved the way for intensifying factionalism, social unrest, and class conflict. Against this backdrop, the role of coercive and monetary pressures in electoral politics can be seen as a form of compensation for the ebbing power of patron-client bonds between candidates and voters.

Yet overall, from the vantage point of the post-Marcos nineteen nineties, the patron-client framework's descriptive and explanatory powers appear extremely limited. In terms of description, Philippine politicians clearly do cultivate followings along clientelist lines, but they also rely very heavily on a variety of impersonal and coercive mechanisms and resources to entrench themselves in power, as seen in the widespread pattern of electoral fraud, vote-buying, and violence noted above. In some localities, competition for elective office has been quite close and lively, suggesting conditions that keep patrons attentive to clients, but elsewhere conditions of virtually unchallenged long-term incumbency and monopoly by a single politician or political family may dictate terms of exchange far less favorable to what could meaningfully be construed as "reciprocity."

In terms of explanation, moreover, today's abundance of politicians and "political clans" who have remained in office for several decades underscores the implausibility of accounts heralding the arrival of "new men" and the fading of "traditional politicians" on the electoral horizon, and scotches predictions that the continuation of secular socioeconomic and demographic trends first observed in the nineteen sixties would lead to the unravelling of elite democracy. Finally, new scholarly research on the American colonial era and the postwar, pre-martial law period (nineteen forty-six to seventy-two) has effectively debunked the nostalgia-driven myth that the unseemly features of contemporary Philippine democracy today represent a kind of 'fall from grace' or decline from a lost yesteryear of benign paternalism. The electoral fraud, skulduggery, vote-buying, and violence disparaged today were very much in evidence in pre-martial law-and even prewar-years, and legislators and local officials (and their families) have entrenched themselves in various municipalities, districts, and provinces throughout the twentieth century. In short, the notion that patron-client relationships ever provided the essential 'social cement' in Philippine life has been shown to ignore the persistence of coercive pressures and local monopolies in electoral politics and social relations.

Impressed by these apparent continuities and frustrated by the limitations of the patron-client model, scholars have in recent years counterposed an alternative portrait of the Philippines largely couched in terms of class and state. In the view of these observers, the outcomes of post-Marcos elections have highlighted the persistence or reassertion of direct class rule by a landed élite or oligarchy, which, unique in Southeast Asia, first emerged in the nineteenth century as a nascent bourgeoisie with an economic base independent of the state. Economically entrenched, this dominant class has easily "captured" the state, as seen in the evident predominance of the oligarchy's representatives among the congressional and local officials elected over the years. Such scholarship neatly sidesteps the question of the mechanisms-clientelism, coercion, the dull compulsion of economic relations-by which this oligarchy has achieved and maintained its position vis-à-vis both subordinate classes and the state, as the brute fact of enduring class rule leaves the issue of the mode of domination apparently overdetermined. In this view, violence, like patronage, is simply yet another of many available instruments of class rule. The Philippines thus appears to offer a classic case of what Joel Migdal describes as a postcolonial "weak state" confronting a "strong society" dominated by "traditional élites" and "local strongmen."

This depiction of the Philippines in terms of a "weak state" dominated by an oligarchy based in large landholdings, while more historically grounded than the patron-client model, is nonetheless in some ways descriptively overdrawn and analytically misleading. Revisionist historical scholarship, for example, has highlighted the limitations of the Spanish-era élite's wealth, landholdings, and geographical distribution, and recast the timing of its emergence as a "national oligarchy" to the twentieth century. In addition, newly published studies examining the contributions of forest, mineral, and marine resource exploitation (and public land) to the process of capital accumulation in the Philippines have cast considerable doubt on the centrality of private landownership in the generation of wealth in the richly endowed archipelago. Careful research on the role of the Philippine state in the acquisition and maintenance of property and the processing and export of agricultural produce has likewise called into question the extent to which landownership has ever provided a truly independent economic base for the exercise of political power, while documentation of massive environmental degradation in the coral reefs, forests, and mineral-rich mountain ridges of the archipelago has highlighted the role of the state as an instrument-rather than simply an object-of patrimonial plunder. Close analysis of election results and corporation directorates in the nineteen eighties, moreover, has suggested that many of the entrenched politicians and magnates in the country derive their power and wealth not from private landownership but from state resources and foreign (mostly immigrant Chinese) commercial capital. Finally, well-documented case studies of entrenched politicians and established "landed élites" have revealed that the accumulation of large landholdings has often followed from, rather than preceded, the assumption of elected office and that control over both the coercive apparatuses of the state and lucrative illegal economies has been a crucial resource for the accumulation of capital and political power.

In terms of explanatory power, the 'strong oligarchy, weak state' thesis also fails to account for variation and change in the course of Philippine history. Concentrations of landownership have not in fact correlated closely with the political longevity of elected officials, and some of the most enduring and notorious politicians and "political clans" in the archipelago have emerged and prospered in rural bailiwicks notable for an absence of large landholdings as well as in highly urbanized areas. In addition, Ferdinand Marcos, who as three-term congressman (nineteen forty-nine-fifty-nine), senator (nineteen fifty-nine-sixty-five), and the Philippines' longest-reigning president (nineteen sixty-six-eighty-six) accumulated more power and wealth than any other politician in the nation's history, owed none of his unsurpassed political and economic success to landownership.

Viewed in cross-national comparative perspective, moreover, a portrait of the Philippine state as weak and emasculated by a landed oligarchy fails to illuminate similarities and differences with its counterparts in Southeast Asia and elsewhere in the postcolonial world. Among postcolonial plantocracies, for example, the Philippines stands strangely alone in the absence of a period of military rule in its history, while in the context of Southeast Asia, its notoriously weak postcolonial state curiously most resembles that of contemporary Thailand, whose nineteenth-century history saw a monarchical state strong enough to avoid direct colonial subjugation. In short, a depiction of the Philippines in terms of a dominant class of landed oligarchs and an emasculated weak state clearly leaves a number of important questions unanswered.

In contrast with studies stressing clientelism and class domination, this essay takes as its point of departure an analysis of state formation in the Philippines, following the lead of scholars who have highlighted the enduring institutional legacies of American colonial rule and the patrimonial nature of state-oligarchy relations in the archipelago. The myriad manifestations of what is defined and described below as "bossism," this essay argues, reflect neither the strength (or decline) of patron-client relations nor the resilience and rule of a landed oligarchy, but rather the distinctive institutional structures of the Philippine state, most notably those established during the crucial decades of American colonial rule.

American colonial rule in the Philippines from nineteen o one until the eve of World War Two essentially expanded the Spanish-era structure of private control over the state's local coercive and extractive agencies 'upwards' through the subordination of a national state apparatus to provincial- and national-level elected officials. Elections to municipal office, based on highly restricted suffrage and freed from the intervention of ecclesiastical authorities, were first held in nineteen o one, followed by those for provincial governors (nineteen o two), representatives to the national Philippine Assembly (nineteen o seven), an American-style bicameral legislature (nineteen sixteen), and finally the Commonwealth presidency (nineteen thirty-five). Elected municipal presidentes (mayors) retained their Spanish-era discretionary powers over local law-enforcement, public works, and taxation, winning complete independence from parish priests and full authority to appoint municipal police forces. While elected governors enjoyed somewhat similar law-enforcement and taxation powers at the provincial level, representatives to the legislature gained control over a hastily constructed and rapidly 'Filipinized' national state apparatus. Within their own districts, legislators exercised effective discretion over the disbursement of 'pork barrel' funds for public works and the appointment of constabulary commanders, district engineers, and superintendents of schools; provincial fiscals, treasurers, and assessors; judges of the court of first instance; and local agents of the Bureau of Lands. In Manila, meanwhile, these legislators likewise exerted influence over the awarding of contracts, concessions, and monopoly franchises, the appointment of ranking officials in national government agencies, and the allocation of loans by the Philippine National Bank. Finally, with the election of a Commonwealth president in nineteen thirty-five, a (directly elected) national executive took office, assuming powers in domestic affairs far greater than those of his U.S. counterpart, including authority to reject individual items in appropriations bills, discretion over the disbursement of budgeted funds, and supervisory control over local government units. This distinctly American form of late colonial administration contrasted sharply with the processes of state expansion, bureaucratization, and centralization ongoing in this period elsewhere in Southeast Asia.

The subordination of municipal, provincial, and national agencies of the state apparatus to elected officials combined with the onset of primitive capital accumulation and the expanding role of the colonial state in the economy to facilitate the emergence and entrenchment of colonial-era proto-bosses in a variety of localities and at different levels of state power. American officials complained, for example, that in "a large majority of cases," municipal police forces served as "the political henchmen, and in too many instances the personal muchachos of the presidentes and local bosses." In Nueva Ecija, provincial boss Manuel Tinio used his influence with the Bureau of Lands and his control over the local government machinery- including police forces, justices of the peace, the Court of First Instance, and the Court of Land Registration-to acquire large landholdings and to construct a province-wide political machine. In Negros Occidental, sugar planters seated as congressmen and senators in the legislature similarly expanded their landholdings many times over and, with generous loans from the Philippine National Bank, constructed centrifugal sugar mills to process their cane. In the late nineteen thirties, moreover, Commonwealth President Manuel Quezon gained what one historian has described as "near total control" of the legislature and judiciary, and, through government corporations and a coterie of business cronies, exercised considerable control over the national economy.

Upon the restoration of the Commonwealth with Liberation in nineteen forty-five and the inauguration of the Republic with Independence in nineteen forty-six, the essentially reconstructed institutional legacies of American colonial rule facilitated the entrenchment of bossism in the Philippines in the postwar era. Thus, more than the emergence of a landed élite in the nineteenth century, the distinct pattern of American-sponsored colonial state formation facilitated the emergence of small-town bosses, provincial "warlords," and authoritarian presidents, by providing mechanisms for private monopolization of the resources and prerogatives of the state.

By "bossism" and "bosses," this essay refers to the prevalence of local power brokers who achieve sustained monopolistic control over both coercive and economic resources within given territorial jurisdictions or bailiwicks. Bosses, moreover, as James C. Scott has noted, must be distinguished from patrons insofar as a degree of monopoly is achieved, "coercion is a main pillar of power," and authority rests "more on inducements and sanctions than on affection or status": "the boss is a secular leader par excellence who depends almost entirely on palpable inducements and threats to move people." Bosses, finally, are not simply large landowners who have won elective offices through mobilization of tenants and other dependents, control over local economies of scale, and deployment of private coercive and monetary resources at their disposal. Rather, as detailed below, the postwar Philippines has witnessed the emergence and entrenchment of several different kinds of bosses in municipalities, congressional districts, and provinces throughout the archipelago.

Against the backdrop of a state apparatus whose extractive and coercive agencies are subordinated to several tiers of elected officials, geographic and temporal variation in the longevity of individual bosses has corresponded closely with patterned diversity in the political economy of various localities in the archipelago. In short, bosses have emerged and succeeded in entrenching themselves when and where the so-called 'commanding heights' of the local economy have lent themselves to monopolistic control. Insofar as these 'commanding heights' have entailed privately owned economies of scale and secure property rights (landholdings; agricultural processing, credit and marketing networks; transportation facilities; industrial plants), a solid base in proprietary wealth invulnerable to state intervention has allowed capital- intensive and relatively paternalistic bosses to withstand the hostile machinations of superordinate power brokers and pass on their bailiwicks to successive generations in classic "dynasty" form. However, insofar as control over the 'commanding heights' of the local economy has hinged on state-based derivative and discretionary powers (as in the case of illegal activities, nodal commercial/transportation chokepoints, public lands, and heavily regulated crops and industries), coercion-intensive and gangster- style bosses have depended heavily upon superordinate power brokers, whose backing has underpinned their emergence, entrenchment, and survival, and whose hostility has spelled their downfall or death. However, where such state-based prerogatives and resources can be converted into a solid base of proprietary wealth, bosses have proved capable of passing on their bailiwicks to successive generations and thus establishing a local dynasty.

The remainder of this essay focuses on these diverging manifestations of bossism at the municipal, congressional district, and provincial levels in the two provinces of Cavite and Cebu. A study of these two provinces, while hardly representative of the Philippines as a whole, nonetheless may offer new insights for the understanding of boss rule throughout the archipelago. Neither Cavite nor Cebu possesses sizeable plantation belts or other large concentrations of landownership, yet both provinces offer numerous examples of protracted boss and dynastic rule at the municipal, district, and provincial levels. Moreover, the contrast between the entrenchment of single-generation bosses in Cavite and the longevity of multigeneration dynasties in Cebu suggests the relevance of the study for comparison of so-called "warlords" and "political clans" elsewhere in the Philippines.

The Dynasties of Cebu Province

A Central Visayan island province noted for its dry, mountainous interior, Cebu features a major regional port, entrepôt, and manufacturing center, Cebu City. Unique in the Philippines in its long dependence upon corn as the local staple crop, Cebu is also known for its scattered coconut and nipa groves, a small sugar plantation belt, and extensive mining, poultry, and fishing industries. In some parts of the province, medium-sized sugar plantations and coconut groves are in evidence, but even smaller farms have predominated, with share tenancy rising over the years up to the nineteen seventies, when Marcos-era agrarian reform encouraged conversion to cash tenancy and greater reliance on farm workers. Since nineteen hundred, Cebu's population has grown dramatically, from roughly six hundred thousand at the turn of the century to nearly three million today, even as agricultural involution and environmental degradation have led to declining corn yields and depleted mangroves and coral reefs around the island province. Since the nineteen seventies, a steady inflow of foreign and domestic capital into Cebu has transformed the regional entrepôt and agricultural processing center of the Visayas and Mindanao into a major location for tourism and manufacturing, but today provides low-wage employment for only a small fraction of the rural and urban poor.

At the municipal level, politics in Cebu has been dominated by local families-"clans" or "dynasties"-whose roots can often be traced to the emergence of a largely Chinese mestizo commercial-landowning élite in the province in the nineteenth century. Owning sizeable corn fields, coconut groves, and sugar plantations, and controlling the links (corn mills, copra trading networks, rural banks, bus companies) between their municipalities and Cebu City, these local élite families have in recent years moved into more capital-intensive ventures, including aquaculture, tourism, real estate, and construction. By activating networks of dependents and vote brokers, manipulating alliances with other local notables and Cebu City-based politicians, and dispensing private and public funds, these families have over the years engineered the election of their scions as municipal councilors, vice-mayors, and mayors in various municipalities of Cebu Province. Although clientelist bonds have no doubt served as resources for electoral competition in Cebu over the years, election-related violence, fraud, and vote-buying have also been in abundant evidence in the province since well before World War Two.

While enjoying solid bases in proprietary wealth largely outside the realm of state regulation, these local families have rarely commanded sufficient resources to establish a monopolistic position in the local economy and dynastic self-perpetuation and hegemony in municipal politics. In politics, shifting alliances and factional rivalries between local clans have prevailed in most towns, with closely contested municipal elections and high turnover rates for mayors persisting against the backdrop of continuity in municipal council membership. In the economy, a similar pattern of cartels and oligopoly has likewise obtained. Perquisites of office notwithstanding, incumbent mayors have fallen prey to local rivals enjoying the support of town notables and provincial politicians.

In several municipalities, however, small-town dynasties have succeeded in entrenching themselves for decades, consistently winning the mayorship and largely dictating the membership of the municipal council. Combining their proprietary wealth with the discretionary powers of the mayor's office and the state patronage made available by congressional and provincial allies, they have seized control of the commanding heights of the local economy. In most cases, these families' preeminence stems largely from the sheer size and centrality of their landholdings, trade and credit networks, and other business operations (e.g., bus companies). Yet state-based resources and prerogatives, rather than landownership, have undergirded the unparalleled longevity of the Escarios of Bantayan, who have ruled their municipality with only one brief interruption (nineteen eighty-six to eighty-eight) from nineteen thirty-seven to date. Isidro Escario, the clan's founder, was in fact a small-town political operator of relatively modest means who first won the mayorship in nineteen thirty-seven, thanks to the benefactions of established local notables and provincial politicians, the manipulation of state prerogatives and resources (as municipal tax clerk prior to his election), and an unprecedented use of electoral violence. Once in office, Escario succeeded in using the mayor's powers to assume regulatory and proprietary control over the commanding heights of Bantayan's local economy, and subsequently to pass on this small-town empire to his family in "dynasty" form.

Located on an island off the northwest coast of Cebu, Bantayan has provided-through its insular location, rich fishing grounds, and close seaborne linkages to other nearby Visayan provinces-a local political economy highly susceptible to certain forms of monopoly. Thanks to Escario control over the town police, selective enforcement of regulations prohibiting dynamite and purse-seine trawl fishing in municipal waters has proven a useful mechanism for extortion and patronage and allowed Escario cronies to monopolize the sale of explosive materials in the town. Moreover, for many years, the family has served as the sole labor broker and recruiter of seasonal migrant workers in Bantayan for sugar plantations on nearby Negros Occidental. Finally, the family has seized Bantayan's key commercial bottlenecks, securing the lucrative stevedoring and launch contract for the town's ferry service and constructing the sole private port in the municipality. Alongside landholdings inherited from the maternal side of the clan, these forms of state-based monopoly have underpinned the Escarios' alliances with local élite families and networks of personal dependents, thus helping to ensure continued electoral success in a mutually reinforcing nexus of political and economic power. The Escarios' reputation as a family of generous patrons, while considerable, has not sufficed to guarantee electoral victories, but their long-standing preeminence has underwritten the machinery, vote-buying, intimidation, violence, and fraud necessary to win local office.

At the congressional district and provincial level in Cebu, family dynasties have likewise constructed enduring political machines and economic empires in a two-tiered pattern reflecting the distinct political economy of town and countryside in the island province. In the six rural congressional districts, supramunicipal dynasties have emerged and flourished where they have achieved domination over large population centers, control of nodal commercial and transportation chokepoints, and/or command over concentrations of private capital in the local economy. In the pre-martial law fourth District, for example, the Argao-based Kintanar clan, the dominant political force in the district's most populous town, held the congressional seat from nineteen thirty-eight through nineteen sixty-nine. The Cuenco family, proprietor of the bus company linking the small and impoverished towns of the southern coast to Cebu City, represented the fifth District in the legislature for over fifty years. Since the restoration of Congress in nineteen eighty-seven, moreover, this pattern has been replicated in several re-gerrymandered rural districts. On the southern end of the province, for example, the Abines family, which controls the ferry route to nearby Negros Oriental, the bus franchise to Cebu City, and the local fishing industry, has entrenched its scions and allies in several town mayorships and claimed the second District congressional seat. In the northern sugar plantation belt, the Martinez clan, through large landholdings and alliances with other major hacendado clans, has occupied the new fourth District seat and a score of other local offices. Finally, in what was the first District bailiwick of longtime congressman Ramon Durano, seniors, heirs to the coal mines, sugar lands, and business empire accumulated by the family patriarch today hold the fifth District seat and control populous Danao City.

Like municipal-level boss Isidro Escario in Bantayan town, Congressman Durano began his career as a small-time political operator of relatively modest means, who used the resources and prerogatives at his disposal once in office to amass a districtwide empire that he succeeded in preserving and passing on to his children in classic "dynasty" form. Promoted in the nineteen thirties and nineteen forties by the Cuenco clan through coal mining concessions and government appointments and contracts, Durano won as the Cuenquista candidate for the first District congressional seat in the notoriously bloody and fraudulent elections of nineteen forty-nine. Once elected, moreover, he used behest loans, rigged government contracts and concessions, and control over local law enforcement agencies to acquire enormous landholdings and coal mining claims, build a cement plant and sugar mill, and establish a local ice plant and electric company. In addition, Durano's Manila connections facilitate protection to Danao's internationally renowned cottage industry in homemade firearms, through discretionary law enforcement and the creation of an official port and customs entry point in the chartered city under Congressman Durano's aegis. This vise-like regulatory and proprietary hold over the district's legal and illegal economies combined with Durano's domination over the local government machinery, mobilization of armed followers, and repeated use of violence and intimidation to guarantee infamously huge election-day margins in the old first District for the congressman and his favorite local, provincial, and national candidates. Despite Durano companies' financial troubles and family feuds following the patriarch's death in nineteen eighty-eight, the longtime congressman's son Nito has succeeded in claiming the lion's share of his father's estate and the congressional seat for a remodeled fifth District, while other Durano family members have entrenched themselves in various local executive posts.

Meanwhile, at the provincial level, a single dynasty based in Cebu City has retained preeminence throughout most of the twentieth century by maintaining alliances with urban commercial interests and by building a political machine centered in the provincial capital but radiating out into the province as well. Over the past ninety years, as Cebu City evolved from an island entrepôt into a major manufacturing center, and as the provincial electorate expanded from less than five hundred voters in nineteen oh six to more than five hundred thousand in nineteen ninety-two, the Osmeña clan has remained at the center of politics in both Cebu City and Cebu Province. In the prewar period, Sergio Osmeña, seniors, represented Cebu City for five terms in the national legislature, won a Senate seat for five subsequent terms, and served as Vice-President nineteen thirty-five to nineteen forty-four and later President nineteen forty-four to nineteen forty-six of the Commonwealth. For most of the postwar, pre-martial law period, his son, Sergio "Serging" Osmeña, juniors, served variously as Cebu Provincial Governor, Cebu City Mayor, Cebu second District Representative, and Senator. In the post-Marcos era, moreover, a revival of Osmeña family fortunes has seen a third generation take power, with Serging's son Tomas winning successive terms as Cebu City Mayor and a second son and two nephews occupying the provincial governorship and congressional and senatorial seats.

Beginning with family patriarch Sergio seniors, the Osmeñas have used their close ties to the urban commercial élite of Cebu City, office-based discretionary powers over the local state apparatus, and linkages to national-level patrons in Manila to maintain their preeminent position in Cebu. A scion of one of Cebu City's most prominent and wealthy Chinese mestizo families who won prominence as a journalist and lawyer, Sergio Osmeña, seniors, enjoyed the support of the local commercial élite, the incumbent governor, and American colonial officials when he first won election as Governor in nineteen oh six and as Assemblyman in nineteen oh seven.

Subsequently, the installation of successive Osmeña protégés and clan members as Mayor of Cebu City facilitated the construction of an urban political machine. Broad discretionary powers over property taxes and zoning ordinances, municipal licenses and permits, personnel appointments and salaries, and public works contracts and monopoly franchises has combined with selective law enforcement to allow the family to exercise considerable regulatory powers over the city's economy. With thousands of ward leaders throughout populous Cebu City, the Osmeñas have also used this political machine to muster majorities for the family's candidates in local, congressional, provincial, and national elections, delivering large blocs of votes to allies among candidates for the Senate and presidency. Beyond Cebu City, moreover, the family has expanded its influence throughout Cebu Province, using discretion over national state patronage to build up a network of small-town notables loyal to the city-based clan.

Over the generations, the Osmeñas have used their access to state patronage and control over the local state apparatus to enhance and enlarge their family's considerable properties in Cebu, yet the family has remained at best a primus inter pares among Cebu City's commercial élite. An entourage of political lieutenants, lawyers, contractors, fixers, ward heelers, and assorted hangers-on has always surrounded the Osmeña family, linking local law firms, construction companies, and a host of small businesses to the family's political machine. Moreover, the predominance throughout the twentieth century of Chinese immigrants in business in Cebu City has served to strengthen the leverage of those entrenched in City Hall over a preponderantly 'pariah' local capitalist class. Yet the Osmeñas could never simply parcel out the commanding heights of the thriving Visayan port economy among family and friends. Instead, a close-knit local oligarchy, comprising a handful of merchant dynasties of Chinese, Spanish, and mestizo lineage, has operated a virtual cartel of agricultural processing centers and shipping companies in the city that has dominated the copra and corn trade throughout the Visayas and Mindanao and the interisland shipping industry of the entire archipelago. Over the years, these dynasties have by and large supported, befriended, and on occasion intermarried with the Osmeña clan, while refraining from entering Cebu politics themselves. In exchange, the Osmeñas have provided these dynasties access to government financing and contracts and guaranteed friendly regulation of their business operations.

As the Osmeñas' success in maintaining their urban political machine and servicing local business interests has partly depended upon the cooperation of presidential patrons eager to reward and reinforce the Osmeñas' election-day vote delivery services, the dynasty has experienced the greatest difficulties when in conflict with hostile presidents. Following Serging Osmeña's failed nineteen sixty-nine bid to dislodge incumbent president Ferdinand Marcos, for example, Osmeña fortunes waned. With Serging and other leading Osmeña family members in exile, Marcos used his martial law powers after nineteen seventy-two to gain a foothold in Cebu, forging a close alliance with a Cebu-based labor federation and awarding government appointments, state bank behest loans, and key public works contracts and franchises for business in Cebu to presidential family friends and cronies. Yet against the backdrop of this heavy-handed

Marcos intervention in the local economy, Cebu's opposition politicians and disaffected élite families alike rallied around the Osmeña family as the Marcos regime unravelled in the mid-nineteen eighties, helping a third generation of the dynasty to resurrect its urban political machine and its preeminence among the leading Chinese and Spanish mestizo merchant families of Cebu City.