During the 1930s and 1940s, a number of men and women left the overpopulated island of Cuyo in the Philippines to homestead a hitherto unpopulated region on the island of Palawan. Poor, uneducated, and of humble birth, these migrants soon differentiated themselves into haves and have-nots. Moreover, once this differentiation developed, it stabilized, and it is now being transmitted to a second and third generation of Cuyonons on Palawan. This book analyzes the origins of social inequality in terms of particular individuals, in a particular time and place, and the conditions under which it is maintained. Few topics have a more perennial concern for social scientists, philosophers, and men of practical affairs. Hence this study, although focused on a small community in the Philippines, illuminates larger problems: Why do developing communities embark upon trajectories of growing social inequality, and where do such trajectories ultimately lead? Must they necessarily terminate, as Marx envisioned, in a class polarization between the privileged few and the impoverished many, or can the “benefits of development” be more broadly shared?

I first went to the Philippines in 1965, a Peace Corps volunteer assigned to teach biology at Palawan National High School in Puerto Princesa City. Later I moved to a rural community, remote but otherwise not unlike San Jose, the community on which this book is based. Here I taught adult Tagalog literacy and the rudiments of vegetable gardening, working as an activist with people and problems that would later interest me as a scholar.