Read How Barangay Came to Be. Use Main Idea and Detail Chart
to illustrate the text. How Barangay Came to Be
An interesting discovery made in Butuan in the early seventies
was that of a fossilized balangay, which was a long sailing vessel in
common use throughout the Southeast Asian region in the pre-
Spanish era. The barangay as a form of government was believed to
have originated from the balangay.
A balangay had a hundred households at the most. It was led by
a chieftain,
called a Datu. Migrants from the Malaysian and
Indonesian Islands came to our shores using the balangay. Once
here, they formed their own settlements, a cluster of which formed a
single town ruled by a lakan or a sultan. A confederacy of several
settlements would join forces in case of aggression.
When the Spaniards came, they instituted the barangay as form
of local government headed by a cabeza. The change from balangay
to barangay seemed to have been made but the Spaniards who
could not pronounce the nasal nga of the Filipinos and preferred the
r to 1. If the balangays of old were meant to preserve the peaceful
and harmonious relationships between neighboring settlements, the
Spanish barangay was used as a local instrument of the central
government to pursue its colonial goals