Barangays in Mindanao

WHAT IS BARANGAY?

A barangay (Filipino: baranggay, [bara???aj]), also known by its former Spanish adopted name, the barrio, is the smallest administrative division in the Philippines  and is the native Filipino term for a village, district  or ward. Barangays are further subdivided into smaller areas called Puroks (English: Zone). A sitio is a territorial enclave inside a barangay, especially in rural areas. Municipalities and cities are composed of barangays. In place names barangay is sometimes abbreviated as "Brgy." or "Bgy.". As of December 31, 2006 there are a total of 41,995 barangays throughout the Philippines.

Type of early Filipino settlement. The term was derived from balangay, the sailboats that brought Malay settlers to the Philippines from Borneo. Each boat carried a family group that established a village. These villages, which sometimes grew to include 30 – 100 families, remained isolated from one another; the fact that no larger political grouping emerged (except on Mindanao) facilitated the 16th-century Spanish conquest. The Spanish retained the barangay as a unit of local administration.

HISTORY

When the first Spaniards arrived in the 16th century, they found the Filipinos having a civilization of their own and living in well-organized independent villages called barangays. The name barangay  originated from balangay, a Malay word meaning "sailboat"

The term barangay was adopted and barangay structure defined in the modern context during the administration of President Ferdinand Marcos, replacing the old barrios and municipal councils. The barangays were eventually codified under the 1991 Local Government Code.

Historically, a barangay is a relatively small community of around 50 to 100 families. Most villages have only thirty to one hundred houses and the population varies from one hundred to five hundred persons. According to Legazpi, he found communities with twenty to thirty people only. Many coastal villages in the Visayan region consisted of no more than eight to ten houses.[citation needed]The word itself is derived from an ancient Malayo-Polynesian boat called a balangay. It is commonly believed that in pre-colonial Philippines, each original coastal “barangay” formed as a result of settlers arriving by boat from other places in Southeast Asia.