Taxes and tax collection in the time of Rizal

Rereading the correspondence of Rizal with his family recently, I was struck by the exchange between Jose and his elder brother Paciano. In the past I was more focused on the delightful correspondence with his sisters, which reminds mwany of us that Rizal was human. Francisco Mercado and Teodora Alonso were very productive and had 11 children; Rizal was the seventh, the second son in a large brood of nine sisters. With Rizal’s father seemingly always in the shadows, it seems that Paciano took the responsibility of being more than a big brother to Jose. It is a pity that we know little about Paciano because he was “the Other Rizal” who helped form Rizal from boy to national hero.

The Rizals were not an ordinary 19th-century family. They were upper class, educated, well-read and had a view of the world outside Calamba. Paciano was far from the stereotype country bumpkin. In their correspondence, Paciano asked Rizal to comment on the global price of sugar in the New York commodities market and how competition from the US beet sugar would affect his crop in Laguna. In a letter dated May 26, 1883, he remarked: “The country that is most burdened with taxes, in the opinion of various persons, is the Philippines.”

Paciano complained of the poll tax and the cedula that everyone had to carry on their person as a form of identification. So burdensome had the poll tax become such that Andres Bonifacio, when he began the Philippine Revolution against Spain, inspired his men to battle by tearing his cedula. I presume that when the Katipuneros tore their cedula, the feeling must have been similar to the feeling of those who participated in Edsa 1986 and shouted “Sobra na! Tama na! Palitan na!”

Rizal’s brother-in-law “Maneng” Herbosa,

husband of his sister Lucia, said this about taxes on Aug. 29, 1886:

“The tax! With regard to your question on this, the answer is very long, as it is the cause of the prevailing misery here. What I can write you will be only one-half of the story and even Dumas,

senior, cannot exhaust the subject. Nevertheless, I’ll try to write what I can, though I may not be able to give a complete story, you may at least know half of it.

“Here, there are many kinds of taxes. What they call irrigated rice land, even if it has no water, must pay a tax of 50 cavanes of palay (unhusked rice), and land with six cavanes of seed pay 5 pesos in cash. The land they call dry land that is planted to sugar cane, maize, and others pay different rates. Even if the agreed amount is 30 pesos for land with six cavanes of seed, if they see that the harvest is good, they increase the tax, but they don’t decrease it, if the harvest is poor. There is land whose tax is 25 pesos or 20 pesos, according to custom.

“The most troublesome are the residential lots in the town. There is no fixed rule that is followed, only their whim. Hence, even if it is only one span in size, if a stone wall is added, 50 pesos must be paid, the lowest being 20 pesos. But a

nipa or cogon house pays only one peso for an area of ten fathoms square. Another feature of this system is that on the day you accept the conditions, the contract will be written which cannot be changed for four years, but the tax is increased every year. For these reasons, for two years now the payment of tax is confused and little by little the fear of the residents here of the word “vacant” is being dispelled, which our ancestors had feared so much. The result is bargaining, like they do in buying fish. It is advisable to offer a low

figure and payment can be postponed, unlike

before when people were very much afraid to

pay after May.

“I’m looking for a receipt to send you, but I cannot find any, because we don’t get a receipt every time we pay. Anyway it is value-less as it does not state the amount paid; it only says that the tax for that year was paid, without stating whether it is five centavos, twenty-five centavos, one hundred, or one thousand pesos. The residents who ask or get the said receipt accept it with closed eyes. The receipt has no signature in the place where the amount paid ought to be, although it bears their name. Until now I cannot comprehend why some are signed and others are not. This is more or less what is happening here in the payment of the land tax and it has been so for many years since I can remember.

“Besides this, the taxes on the plants in the fields that are far from the town, like the land in Pansol, are various. The tax on the palay is separate from the tax on maize, mongo, or garlic. There is no limit to this tax, for they fix it themselves. Since July no one buys sugar and since June locusts are all over the town and they are destroying palay and sugar cane, which is what we regret here. The governor gave 50 pesos to pay the catchers of locusts, but when they took them to the town hall they were paid only 25 cents a

cavan and a half; and it seems that the locusts are not decreasing. According to the guess of the residents here only 300 cavanes of locusts have been caught in this town. Many still remain. Though the governor has not sent any more money, the people have not stopped catching them.”

While it is true that the only things certain in life are death and taxes, reading about these from primary sources is more lively and relevant than reading about them in textbooks.

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