Place:Pampanga, Central Luzon, Philippines

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source: Family History Library Catalog

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Pampanga, officially the Province of Pampanga, is a province in the Central Luzon region of the Philippines. Lying on the northern shore of Manila Bay, Pampanga is bordered by Tarlac to the north, Nueva Ecija to the northeast, Bulacan to the east, the Manila Bay to the central-south, Bataan to the southwest and Zambales to the west. Its capital is the City of San Fernando. Angeles City is the largest LGU but while geographically within Pampanga, it is classified as a first-class, highly urbanized city and has been governed independently of the province since it received its charter in 1964.

The name La Pampanga was given by the Spaniards, who encountered natives living along the banks (pampáng) of the Pampanga River. Its creation in 1571 makes it the first Spanish province on Luzon Island (Cebu in Visayas is older as it was founded by the Spaniards in 1565). The town of Villa de Bacolor in the province briefly served as the Spanish colonial capital when Great Britain invaded Manila as part of the Seven Years' War. At the eve of the Philippine Revolution of 1896, Pampanga was one of eight provinces placed under martial law for rebellion against the Spanish Empire; it is thus represented on the Philippine national flag as one of the eight rays of the sun.

Pampanga is served by Clark International Airport (formerly Diosdado Macapagal International Airport), which is in Clark Freeport Zone, some north of the provincial capital. The province is home to two Philippine Air Force airbases: Basa Air Base in Floridablanca and the former United States Clark Air Base in Angeles. Due to its growing population and developments, the Clark Global City is now developed and is located in Clark Freeport Zone. In 2015, the province had 2,198,110 inhabitants, while it had 1,079,532 registered voters.

History

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Pampanga during the Philippine colonial era

Ancient Pampanga's Territorial area included portions of the modern provinces of Tarlac, Bataan, Zambales, Nueva Ecija and Bulacan. Pampanga was re-organized as a province by the Spaniards on December 11, 1571. For better administration and taxation purposes, the Spanish authorities subdivided Pampanga into pueblos, which were further subdivided into districts (barrios) and in some cases into royal and private estates (encomiendas).

Due to excessive abuses committed by some encomenderos, King Philip II of Spain in 1574 prohibited the further awarding of private estates, but this decree was not fully enforced until 1620. In a report of Philippine encomiendas on June 20, 1591, Governor-General Gómez Pérez Dasmariñas reported to the Crown that La Pampanga's encomiendas were Bataan, Betis y Lubao, Macabebe, Candaba, Apalit, Calumpit, Malolos, Binto, Guiguinto, Caluya, Bulacan and Mecabayan. The encomiendas of La Pampanga at that time had eighteen thousand six hundred and eighty whole tributes.

Pampanga, which is about in area and inhabited by more than 1.5 million people, had its present borders drawn in 1873. During the Spanish regime it was one of the richest Philippine provinces. Manila and its surrounding region were then primarily dependent on Kapampangan agricultural, fishery and forestry products as well as on the supply of skilled workers. As other Luzon provinces were created due to increases in population, some well-established Pampanga towns were lost to new emerging provinces in Central Luzon.

During the 17th century, The Dutch recruited men from Pampanga as mercenaries who served the Royal Netherlands East Indies Army, known as Papangers part of the larger Mardijkers community. Their legacy can be found in North Jakarta, however, there are few traces of their descendants, except for a small community in Kampung Tugu.

The historic province of Bataan which was founded in 1754 under the administration of Spanish Governor-General Pedro Manuel Arandia, absorbed from the province of Pampanga the municipalities of Abucay, Balanga (now a city), Dinalupihan, Llana Hermosa, Orani, Orion, Pilar, and Samal.

During the British occupation of Manila (1762–1764), Bacolor became the provisional Spanish colonial capital and military base.

The old Pampanga towns of Aliaga, Cabiao, Gapan, San Antonio and San Isidro were ceded to the province of Nueva Ecija in 1848 during the term of Spanish Governor-General Narciso Claveria y Zaldua. The municipality of San Miguel de Mayumo of Pampanga was yielded to the province of Bulacan in the same provincial boundary configuration in 1848.

In 1860, the northern towns of Bamban, Capas, Concepcion, Victoria, Tarlac, Mabalacat, Magalang, Porac and Floridablanca were separated from Pampanga and were placed under the jurisdiction of a military command called Comandancia Militar de Tarlac. However, in 1873, the four latter towns were returned to Pampanga and the other five became municipalities of the newly created Province of Tarlac.

On December 8, 1941, Japanese planes bombed Clark Air Base marking the beginning of the invasion of Pampanga. Between 1941 and 1942, occupying Japanese forces began entering Pampanga.

During the counter-insurgencies under the Japanese occupation from 1942 to 1944, Kapampangan guerrilla fighters and the Hukbalahap Communist guerrillas fought side by side in the province of Pampanga, attacking and retreating the Japanese Imperial forces for over three years of fighting and invasion.

The establishment of the military general headquarters and military camp bases of the Philippine Commonwealth Army was active from 1935 to 1946. The Philippine Constabulary was active from 1935 to 1942 and 1944 to 1946 in the province of Pampanga. During the military engagements of the anti-Japanese Imperial military operations in central Luzon from 1942 to 1945 in the province of Bataan, Bulacan, Northern Tayabas (now Aurora), Nueva Ecija, Pampanga, Tarlac, and Zambales, the local guerrilla resistance fighters and Hukbalahap Communist guerrillas, helped the U.S. military forces fight the Imperial Japanese armed forces.

In the 1945 liberation of Pampanga, Kapampangan guerrilla fighters and the Hukbalahap Communist guerrillas supported combat forces from Filipino and American ground troops in attacking Japanese Imperial forces during the Battle of Pampanga until the end of the Second World War. Local military operations soldiers and officers of the Philippine Commonwealth Army 2nd, 26th, 3rd, 32nd, 33rd, 35th, 36th and 37th Infantry Division and the Philippine Constabulary 3rd Constabulary Regiment recaptured and liberated the province of Pampanga and fought against the Japanese Imperial forces during the Battle of Pampanga.

Pampanga during the Postwar era

After the Second World War, operations in the main province of Pampanga was downfall insurgencies and conflicts between the Philippine Government forces and the Hukbalahap Communist rebels on 1946 to 1954 during the Hukbalahap Rebellion.

Pampanga during the Marcos martial law era

During the Marcos dictatorship, thousands of Kapampangans were tortured and murdered by the Marcos regime through various means such as rape, forced stripping, electric shocks, beatings, and genital mutilations, among many others. Kapampangan religious leaders rose up against Marcos until the People Power Revolution occurred, where a Kapampangan, Corazon Aquino, became president.

Among the most prominent of these victims were the Sapang Bato martyrs - Claro Cabrera, Rolando Castro and Pepito Deheran - who were victims of ‘salvaging’ - the term used as a time for summary executions. The three were members of the Concerned Citizens of Pampanga, a cause-oriented group that denounced the human rights abuses of the martial law regime, and had campaigned for a boycott of the 1984 Batasang Pambansa election, which the opposition regarded as a Marcos ploy to pacify the Philippines' growing protest movement. The three were abducted by Marcos' soldiers shortly after the elections, and brought to a military camp where they were interrogated, beaten and stabbed. The three were left for dead on the banks of the Apalit river, where Castro and Cabrera's bodies were discovered later. However, Deheran survived, and was able to name two of their attackers before he was attacked again and killed at the hospital where he had been brought to recuperate.

Another prominent early case was that of Holy Angel College instructor and former Jesuit seminarian Teresito "Terry" Sison, whose founding of the Salaginto Dramatic Guild and performance of socially relevant plays led to his being attacked by a local private army who called themselves the Monkees, and for his eventual capture by Marcos' soldiers in 1971, when Marcos had suspended the Writ of Habeas Corpus as a test-run for Martial Law in 1971. Terry, a diabetic, was tortured at Camp Crame using methods including the burning of the soles of his feet using a hot iron. Sustaining liver damage due to his torture, he died on National Heroes day, on November 30, 1980.^[1]

Cabrera, Castro, Deheran, and Sison are all honored at the Philippines' Bantayog ng mga Bayani, which honors the martyrs and heroes who fought against Marcos' authoritarian regime.

Contemporary history

The June 15, 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo displaced a large number of people with the submersion of whole towns and villages by massive lahar floods. This led to a large-scale advancement in disaster preparation in government. In 2010, a Kapampangan, Benigno Aquino III, son of former president Corazon Aquino, was elected as president.

On April 22, 2019, the province suffered severe damage due to 6.1 magnitude earthquake which originated from Zambales and was the most affected area by the earthquake due to province sitting on soft sediment and alluvial soil. Several structures in the province were damaged by the quake, including a 4-story supermarket in Porac, the Bataan-Pampanga boundary arch and the main terminal of Clark International Airport, as well as old churches in Lubao and Porac, where the stone bell tower of the 19th-century Santa Catalina de Alejandria Church collapsed.

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