BAGUIO CITY, Philippines - One of the persistent myths about the Marcoses is that they were responsible for bringing Ilocanos to the Philippines' so-called frontier areas. These were the sparsely populated areas with lush natural resources, like Mindanao, Apayao, Kalinga, and Palawan. 

"Si Don Mariano po ang nagturo mag-farming ang mga taga-Mindanao at nagbigay po s'ya ng Libreng Lupa sa mga taga Mindanao," a certain E. Marcos wrote in a glowing and inaccurate Facebook post on the life of Mariano Marcos, the father of the late president Ferdinand E. Marcos. (Don Mariano taught Mindanaoans to farm and gave them free land.)

The post came out in May 2014, two years before the late dictator's son and namesake failed in his bid for the vice presidency, and eight years before he achieved a majority victory in the 2022 presidential election.

Mariano was a supervising teacher in Laoag, Ilocos Norte. He did not teach nor farm in Mindanao.

When we went to Narra in Palawan to cover the administration of contraceptive implants among the women there, a barangay official told us that it was Ferdinand Marcos who brought the Ilocanos to that town. 

Narra was not named after the indigenous hardwood but after the National Resettlement Rehabilitation Administration, a program started in 1954 to resettle landless Luzonians in Palawan. The municipality of Narra was indeed created in 1969 by then-president Marcos, but the Ilocanos had by then already long settled in Palawan. 

Ilocanos, in fact, started migrating to other parts of the country centuries ago.