LUBAO, Pampanga, is one of the oldest settlements in the country, the site of a massive 16th-century church, its dominant early economy, agricultural and feudal. Up to the third quarter of the previous century, only a handful of families still owned most of the town's agricultural lands devoted to sugar and rice production. Hundreds of sharecroppers worked for each of the major landowning families under iniquitous terms, befitting a feudal arrangement.

It is on record that the country's first organized agrarian strike took place in the early 1930s at the Hacienda del Prado in Lubao. Members of the Socialist Party with red headbands massed at the palatial grounds of the del Pardo family, then torched tens of hectares of standing sugar cane.