Once upon a time, when most of the country’s income came from one island, Negros was the richest, craziest place on Earth. Cowboys and hacienderos ruled the land, and had dozens of children with multiple wives who were usually their cousins, forming the famously eccentric families of Negros and the barons, warlords, politicians, artists, and expats that represent them. Talking with everyone from Monte Carlo money man Nene Lacson to the feared mayor of Pulupandan, Magsi Peña, Jose Mari Ugarte surveys the legends of Bacolod’s golden past, the characters that define its colorful present, and the reasons why sugar never became its future

“The thing about Bacolod is that, no matter what, everything, everything, everything is connected to sugar. I know it’s a stupid thing to say but when you talk about art or politics or anything, it’s all about sugar.” —Peque Gallaga

My first serious conversation about Negros was over warm tapas at a Spanish restaurant with the Ilonggo congressman from Makati, Teddy Boy Locsin, and he said, “If Iloilo were Atlanta, then Negros would be like Arkansas, Tennessee, Missouri, Alabama—you know, guys with shotguns who will fucking kill you if you step one square-foot into their hacienda.” His description went on to compare the Negrense upper class to Ozark hillbillies, Texas fun-hogs, and Rhodesian Settlers. “For the cover you’d have to have a young girl and an older man, so as to show the incest, you know?” he says as a band of toothless retards playing banjos strobe-flashes through my mind. “Because you’ve got plenty of those types in Negros.”

Tracing the vast sugar families of Negros is an impossible task because most of the men had several children with several women and they all carried the same name. The older generation was modern in the sense that they understood their sons’ biological needs and addressed them accordingly by providing mistresses and acknowledging their offspring, while espousing some of the most advanced political and social reforms of their time—like injecting the social justice provision in the 1935 Constitution when the rest of the world, like us, thought that was Marxism. From these closet liberals grew a dense forest of family trees in Negros, their branches wrangling and tangling together and their fruits bumping. Some trees stood tall and with a quiet elegance, while others lurched with savage wildness, but they were all interconnected by sex and sugar and they were all disturbingly rich.

Warm sunshine, open breeze, blue sky, and sugarcane fields and rolling hills as far as the eye can see in any direction. It was on this tower that I came to fully realize and understand the true beauty of living on a farm in Negros.

The jokes commence: “You notice none of the cousins finish their sentences? They don’t need to because another one will finish it for them!” Laughter, followed by a crystalline but absurd understanding of why a man and his wife would encourage their torpe son to marry his first cousin because a Manila girl just might eat him alive. You know, she may not be that exciting, hijo, but she’s right next-door. She already has your last name.

Most families from Negros will justify the in-breeding as a way to keep the family jewels within—but if money was really the issue, why not just double-up and marry into another rich family? Or perhaps Lino Brocka was on to something when he made a film in Negros many years ago and spoke to historian Modesto Sa-onoy about mejorar la rasa (improving the race). It appears much more plausible, though, that incest was practiced religiously in the old days because it was safe and convenient—and because, frankly, more marriages and families stuck together and stayed happier that way. But speculation on how it affects the bloodline cannot be avoided, because if you play with the same test tubes for too long without washing them, you’re going to end up with something weird.

The Gaston family cooling off in the fountain outside their ancestral home

Locsin’s own mother, he says, was quirk personified. “She had this strange habit of cutting out the backgrounds of all her photographs so that you could never tell where the pictures were taken. She hated context.” He also had a distant spinster aunt who lived as a recluse in “a mansion that was always in mint condition. Every nook and cranny was polished to perfection. She refused to talk to anyone but her cousin next door after her parents stopped her from marrying someone ‘beneath them,’ although he, too, was from an old family. She locked herself in her room and then in the entire house after her parents died. Every once in a while, she would take the bus to the pier, get on the Negros Navigation boat to Manila, have a gown made by Pitoy Moreno, and then go right back to Negros. She would just wear it in the house and nobody would see her.” This is the same aunt that Locsin later tells us hired laborers to physically cut her mansion in half, just so she could live in a “bungalow”—a trendy new architectural design her cousin next door had picked up in Manila.

When I ask him what the men were like, he says they were all part of a very insular society that managed to pass on many of their kinks, values, and rituals from one generation to the next. “When my grandfather died,” he says, “he wasn’t allowed to be buried. A Mason. So, many years later, when Marcos was President and Benedicto came to power, my uncle teamed up with Benedicto because they were related. They put a gun to the bishop’s head and said, ‘We’re going to have a funeral.’ They exhumed my grandfather’s body and had all the masses, the novenas, the works. The only thing they didn’t do was canonize him. That’s Negros.”

A few months later I meet film director and Bacolod’s longstanding godfather of the arts, Peque Gallaga, on the set of his new film with Cherie Gil, written by Negrense novelist Vicente Groyon; and over a simple lunch in between takes he tells me, “The lifestyle in Negros is eating and drinking—it’s almost Arabian.” Providing the mundo mystico angle of this story, Gallaga then proceeds to spin the tale of a man his uncle knew in the 60s, who crawled into a cave in Kabangkalan one morning and didn’t come out for three years. He developed a cult following of NPA-killing eco-warriors called the “Green, White, and Red Ants” who would drop by his cave and give him bananas every night. “After three years, he’d had enough,” says Gallaga, looking like the overgrown love-baby of Orson Welles and Stanley Kubrick, “and they decided to climb the mountain and cross the Guimaras Strait underground. Seven hours into his walk, he realized where he was and freaked out and went into a Total Panic. He said, ‘I’m sorry, I can’t do this,’ and turned around and walked back.” So Negros and Panay are connected via wide underground tunnels? “Yes, and Cebu, too, apparently.”

“You’ll find a lot of cuckoo-head characters in Negros,” says another active Ilonggo I met on the same day, Prandy Yulo. “All you had was land and lots of it, so you had hacienderos building their own pelota courts, their own cockfight arenas, their own polo fields.” But Negrenses were true cowboys in the sense that they cared more about their own pride than money. “Whether they had land or not,” says Locsin, “they just didn’t give a shit. They had pride in who they were and not what they owned.” And if they did have land, they would rule it as any czar would his own fiefdom, reaping its rewards but also taking care of its people and dealing with their problems.
We dig into the warm Kadyos served at Richie Gamboa’s chic Lacson Street eatery, 21, and steer the conversation towards the main truth-point here, which is that the story of Negros is really the story of sugar.

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