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IN DEPTH HISTORY OF CEBU

In 1570, Legazpi “re-established” the Spanish settlement of San Miguel by bringing in 50 married couples newly arrived from Mexico and putting the settlement under the charge of Guido de Lavezaris. He also renamed the settlement under the charge of Guido de Lavezaris. He also renamed the settlement El Santisimo Nombre de Jesus in honor of the image of the Holy Child. The image, a present given by Magellan’s men to Humabon’s wife in 1521, was recovered by Legazpi’s entourage from one of the houses soon after they landed in 1565. This image, the country’s oldest and most venerated Catholic relic, is enthroned in today’s Santo Niño Church.

By the time Legazpi re-established the Spanish settlement in Cebu, he had already moved his headquarters to Panay, and later to Manila, presaging the subordination of Cebu to the new colonial capital. Cebu remained the Spanish base of operations in the southern islands, a key political, administrative, and military center in the south for the Spanish colony in-the-making. It was also an important ecclesiastical center, a staging area for the missionaries who spread the Gospel in the southern islands. Established as the seat of a diocese by a papal bull in 1595, Cebu encompassed within its jurisdiction the Visayas, northern Mindanao, and the distant Marianas Islands. Despite these titles, colonialism had sapped Cebu of its autonomy and vitality.

In the colonial system, Cebu lapsed into the backwaters. In the Spanish records, life in Cebu would be fitfully described in the two centuries that followed. Apart from being base and field for religious missionaries (the Augustinians, Jesuits, and Recollects, who arrived in Cebu in 1565,1595, and 1621, respectively), Spanish interest in Cebu was limited.

The Spaniards introduced a new political-administrative system. The colonial government awarded territories to Spaniards but these land grants or encomiendas never fully functioned because of a native hostility and lack of state support. In the first moves to rationalize a system of provincias (provinces in the 1580’s, Cebu was one of the first provinces to established, encompassing at one time the islands of Bohol and Leyte. Within the provincial of Cebu, native settlements called balangay (barangay) were placed under the headship of cabezas(heads) and grouped into pueblos(towns) headed by gobernadorcillos(mayors).

For a long time, the system remained skeletal. Factors like lack of personnel, native resistance, and difficulties of geography prevented the Spaniards from fully fleshing out a new political order. More important, the Spaniards had little interest in the full-scale economic exploitation of Cebu and the other islands. The Manila-Acapulco galleon trade in the 1590’s proved brief. Except for a few officials and the missionaries, Spaniards found little in Cebu to interest them in staying.

In the first two centuries of Spanish rule, the Spanish ciudad (city) Legazpi established was nothing but a “small village.” As late as the eighteenth century, the visiting French scientist Guillaume Le Gentil wrote that “the city of Cebu – which really should not be called a city – is an assemblage of a few miserable huts.” There were so few Spanish residents that, in 1755 the Spanish ayuntamiento(city council) of Cebu was abolished. The Englishman John Foreman wrote that it was abolished because there was only one Spaniard capable of being a city councilor, one alderman could neither read nor write, and the mayor himself had been deprived of office for having tried to extort money from a Chinaman by putting his head in the stocks.