An Inheritance Saga: Migration, Kinship, and Postcolonial Bureaucracy in the Llorente vs. Llorente Case of Nabua, Philippines

Abstract

The landmark Philippine Supreme Court case Llorente vs. Llorente illuminates the complex intersections of transnational migration, inheritance law, and colonial legacies in the Philippines. The case centers on Lorenzo Llorente, a Filipino US Navy serviceman whose estate became the subject of a fifteen-year legal battle between his first wife Paula and his second wife Alicia. Lorenzo returned from the battles of World War II to find his wife in Nabua living with his brother and pregnant with his brother’s child. Lorenzo obtained a divorce in California in 1952. He later returned to the Philippines and married Alicia, naming her and their three adopted children as heirs in his will. Upon his death in 1985, Paula challenged the validity of the US divorce and claimed rights to Lorenzo’s estate under Philippine succession laws. While lower courts initially favored Paula’s claims by rigidly applying Philippine laws that are rooted in the colonial era and privileged blood relations, the Supreme Court ultimately upheld Lorenzo’s will in 2000, recognizing his right to divorce as a US citizen. This case reveals how postcolonial Philippine legal frameworks, still heavily influenced by Spanish colonial law, often fail to accommodate the complex realities of transnational families and diverse kinship practices, instead imposing rigid interpretations that fracture rather than heal family relations. Inheritance, previously a highly shared and negotiated process mediated by the elders, can now escalate to family disputes which play out in the impersonal space of the courtroom.

1. Llorente vs. Llorente

An inheritance case from my hometown called Nabua in the Bicol Region, Philippines, reached the Philippine Supreme Court and became a landmark case on divorce (and thus also succession) between Philippine and foreign nationals. The case’s narrative sounds like it might have leapt out from the pages of a soap opera script.

The deceased whose estate was contested was named Lorenzo Llorente, a Filipino who served in the US Navy from 1927 to 1957. Under the American occupation, Filipinos could enlist as servicemen in the US Navy. Vacationing in Nabua during one of his holidays from service, Lorenzo met Paula and married her in 1937. During World War II, Lorenzo continued his service on a US Navy ship, while Paula stayed behind in Nabua. The war prevented Lorenzo from coming home for several years. He obtained US citizenship in 1943. Upon the liberation of the Philippines from Japanese rule, in 1945 he was finally granted a much-awaited leave. However, Lorenzo was met with a surprise upon his homecoming: Paula was now in a relationship with and living with his brother, and she was also pregnant with his brother’s child.

At the time, Philippine law did not allow divorce. In fact, divorce is not recognized under Philippine law until today (Beltran, 2024). However, being a US citizen, Lorenzo had the legal right to divorce under US law, and he initiated the proceedings in California in November 1951. In these, Paula was duly represented by a counsel. The divorce was finalized by the court of the State of California on 4 December 1952. Lorenzo retired in 1957 and moved back to Nabua. He married another Nabueña, Alicia, the following year. During their marriage, Lorenzo and Alicia adopted three children, all of them from Alicia’s lineage. The marriage lasted 27 years until Lorenzo passed away on 11 June 1985. Lorenzo’s Last Will and Testament named Alicia and their three children as heirs of his estate.

However, within less than three months of Lorenzo’s passing, Paula re-emerged to file a petition claiming sole rights to administer Lorenzo’s estate as his legal surviving spouse. Using succession laws in the Philippine Civil Code, her petition filed at the Regional Trial Court (RTC) in Iriga (the city right beside Nabua) claimed half of Lorenzo’s estate and argued that Alicia’s relationship with Lorenzo was adulterous. The inheritance case fought between Paula and Alicia Llorente would stretch for a total of fifteen years.

2. Significance and Scope

Filipino mobility has been central to the development of migration studies globally, as seen in the production of canonical works centering the Filipino experience (Anderson, 2006; Basch et al., 1993; Rodriguez, 2010). People’s practices change as they move about in the world. Yet, inheritance and the changing inheritance practices of migrants are not popular themes, as the literature has often focused on migrant assimilation and return and on the passing-on or loss of cultural heritage among the next generation. As relationships of many Filipino families increasingly occur in the transnational realm, due to overseas migration having become part of everyday life in the Philippines (Aguilar et al., 2009; Madianou & Miller, 2013), themes surrounding inheritance are bound to be richly complex. However, research on inheritance has been largely “contained within the nation-state context” with scholars focusing on macroissues and the legalities surrounding bequeathal (Doyle, 2022, p. 18). More specifically, while there is existing research on inheritance in the Philippines which has focused on its entanglement with gender (Estudillo et al., 2001), postcolonial aspirations (Cruz, 2019), and with intergenerational (Quisumbing, 1994) and indigenous practices (Prill-Brett, 2003; Wiber, 1993), there is a dearth of research on the intersection of inheritance and Filipino migration. Therefore, in this article, I contribute to the literature on the inheritance–migration nexus by focusing on the case Llorente vs. Llorente to shed light on the intimate and messy entanglements of a transnational Filipino family with a mechanism of the nation-state, namely, the law.

Under American colonial rule, Lorenzo was eligible to work in the US Navy due to being a citizen of the Philippines and a colonial subject. In 1940, the US Congress passed the Nationality Act making foreign nationals (including Filipinos) who have served in the US military for at least three years eligible for US citizenship (Gavilan, 2022). Working in the US Navy, Lorenzo obtained US citizenship in 1943 and was thus able to file for and obtain a divorce with US courts when he chose to dissolve his union with Paula. Many years later, US laws under which the divorce was granted would clash with the colonially inherited Philippine succession laws. The Llorente vs. Llorente case highlights how Philippine law carries on the strict and narrow logic of Spanish colonial-era laws on succession, while failing to take account of familial practices beyond consanguinity. Finally, I conclude with a discussion of the intimate stakes of people’s engagement with very long inheritance sagas. People’s commitment of resources, time, and energy to inheritance sagas links with aspirations to honor their ancestors’ free will and to protect kinship systems, which often go beyond the normative notion of the nuclear family, which is at the heart of the Philippine legal system. In short, the Llorente vs. Llorente case reveals how postcolonial Philippine legal frameworks, still heavily influenced by Spanish colonial law, often fail to accommodate the complex realities of transnational families and diverse kinship practices that are locally practiced, instead imposing rigid interpretations that fracture rather than heal family relations.

Below, I continue building context by providing a brief introduction of Lorenzo’s hometown Nabua, to illustrate the politico-economic milieu in which Lorenzo’s migration to join the US Navy and subsequent marriages and divorce occurred. This is followed by a brief review of inheritance laws in the Philippines as a relic of colonial history, and then I zoom into the details of the court case drama that are relevant to this article. One of the materials that I draw upon is the Philippine Supreme Court’s decision on the case, which is publicly available at https://elibrary.judiciary.gov.ph/thebookshelf/showdocs/1/38202 (accessed on 1 March 2025). The Philippine Supreme Court’s decision provides a wealth of information including details on Lorenzo’s enlistment into and service in the US Navy, marriages, divorce, adoptions, Last Will and Testament, proceedings in the lower courts, and so forth. I acknowledge that the data recorded in the Supreme Court’s decision do not cover all the minutiae of the story given the length and volume of the proceedings spanning fifteen years, thereby limiting my analysis. Another limitation of this paper is my lack of access to original documents, such as the Regalian Doctrine and the Laws of the Indies, which are written in Spanish. Future scholars might be interested in tracing more carefully the genealogy of colonially descended laws in their work. However, my observations and insights in this article are additionally informed and enriched by my larger anthropological ethnography in Nabua, which includes many US Navy retirees as primary informants (D. Docot, 2017; M. L. B. Docot, 2018). My initial fieldwork in Nabua was conducted from March 2013 to December 2015. In this article, I also refer to a recorded interview conducted via an internet call on 17 May 2014 and correspondence over the years with Beverly Llorente (Lorenzo and Alicia’s youngest child). All quotations from Beverly that I highlight below are from this interview. Finally, an analysis of the case by Manila-based lawyer Allan Lardizabal (legal consultation in July 2024) is also among the sources that I use.

3. Setting: Lorenzo’s Hometown and US Naval Enlistment

Nabua is a landlocked agricultural town in Luzon Island, Philippines. It is known in the Bicol region as the “Town of Dollars”, a moniker it received due to the numerous Nabua-born enlistees in the US Navy, who refer to themselves as the town’s first Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs).

Filipinos began to be recruited to the US Navy in 1901, after US President William McKinley signed an executive order allowing the enlistment of the first 500 Filipinos as part of the insular force, a recruitment that occurred during the height of the Philippine–American War and which followed the handover of the country from Spain to the US, after more than 300 years of Spanish rule. By 1917, the number of Filipinos in the US Navy had increased to about 6000 (Watts, 2010). In 1919, after the surge in the demand for manpower in World War I had waned, the US Navy restricted the enlistment of Filipinos to the steward rank, replacing African Americans who once filled these positions. Filipino enlistees were not eligible to be promoted to an officer rank until 1946. As stewards or “mess boys”, their duties included shining white officers’ boots, mopping the ship’s decks and galleys, cooking, and other tasks assigned only to racialized members of the Navy (M. L. B. Docot, 2018). Due to the racially segregated nature of their job, with service that “added a touch of luxury and class” to the US Navy, a critic once described American naval ships of the time as a “floating plantation” (Ingram, 1970). The US Navy continued to recruit Filipinos, with the number of Filipinos at about 4000, or five percent of the personnel, in the 1920s to 1930s (Watts, 2010).

Lorenzo joined the US Navy in 1927, when it was heavily racialized. Just a year prior, California had adopted anti-miscegenation laws, which barred Filipinos and other people of color from marrying white people (Volpp, 1999). Like other Nabueño men who entered the racialized spaces of the US Navy and US society (M. L. B. Docot, 2018), Lorenzo sought to marry a woman from Nabua. Nabueño Navy men searched for prospective partners during their annual leave in the Philippines. During my fieldwork, the people of Nabua often said that the Navy men were known to be among the most eligible bachelors locally, because their USD income was very high by local standards. While only serving as “mess boys” tasked to perform menial jobs (as the retirees in my ethnography themselves said), the pay of Filipinos in the US Navy ranked in the top twenty-five percent of all wages in the Philippines at that time (Watts, 2010, p. 298). Many of my informants upheld the commonly told story that joining the US Navy was considered a path to becoming a part of the new elite in Nabua, where the huge majority of families had no other option but to farm, like their parents and grandparents. Lorenzo married Paula ten years after joining the US Navy. Paula moved to Lorenzo’s family home and started living with his family members who, according to Beverly in an interview, all benefited from the remittances that Lorenzo was sending. The US Navy men of Nabua were renowned for their generosity—they did not only support their wives and extended families but also sponsored feasts and donated money for building public infrastructure (Capa, 1997; M. L. B. Docot, 2018), which was severely lacking in the town. As an example, among the most generous US Navy men in Nabua was Cleto Descalso who donated funds to build the town’s public library (Capa, 1997).

As observed during my fieldwork, to this day, the impact of the historical US Navy recruitment on everyday life in Nabua is profound. The local branch of the US Fleet Reserve Association (FRA) was accredited by the Washington home office in 1949. At the very center of the town is a mini-replica of the Washington monument that stands at about six feet tall, built with funds from US Navy veterans in commemoration of the intertwined US–Philippine histories. At the FRA building in Nabua, retirees raise the American flag on the fourth of July and on War Heroes Memorial Day, among other American national holidays. However, while the moniker “Town of Dollars” may evoke an image of Nabua overflowing with wealth, its everyday reality could perhaps be best described as “crisis ordinariness” (Berlant, 2011). Nabua is located in Camarines Sur, arguably the poorest province in the Bicol region (Onsay & Rabajante, 2024). The town’s agricultural output is impacted by frequent flooding (Sotto, 2022) and its extensive deforestation due to the mono-cultural production (with rice as the main product) set in place during 300 years of Spanish colonial rule. The experience of poverty in Nabua is an enduring one. The retired Navy men whom I have interviewed over the years (M. L. B. Docot, 2018) refer to their experience of intergenerational poverty as the main motivation for “escaping” Nabua to join the US Navy. In my larger ethnography in the hometown, many of my informants, such as agricultural workers, frequently state that their families have been poor for generations. They view landlessness and a lack of savings as a major hurdle to escaping poverty. Thus, seeing the success of former US Navy men, many Nabueños view accumulating and passing on property as an aspiration that can possibly lift the next generation out of the cycle of poverty that has impacted the town for centuries.1

4. Inheritance, Kinship, and Postcolonial Bureaucracy

Many examples from all over the world show the enduring impact of colonization on formerly colonized places. John R. Schmidhauser (1992) calls “legal imperialism” the European project of imposing the law of the conqueror on subjugated indigenous peoples. In the process of colonization, colonizers utilized law as a “handmaiden for processes of domination” (Merry, 1991, p. 917) as they sought to impose new systems of control and regulation on the colonized who were treated as subordinate and inferior. In Africa, “customary law” or the “law of colonized peoples recognized by colonial governments” and “native courts” that are in use to this day are not simply relics of a precolonial past but were forged during the colonial period to enable collaboration between colonizers and local elites to solidify control over the colonized masses (Merry, 1991, p. 897). In the Philippines, colonially introduced laws continue to impact land reform (Martin, 1999), politics (Hedman & Sidel, 2000), legal procedures (Rossabi, 1997), peace-building (Makol-Abdul, 1997), and public health (D. Docot & Go, 2024), among other facets of daily life. Beyond law, Frantz Fanon (2004) shows the impact of colonization on the psychology of the colonized, while Ngugi Wa Thiong’o (1986, p. 3) writes about the “cultural bomb” planted in the minds of the colonized that pervasively annihilates a “people’s belief in their names, in their languages, in their environment, in their heritage of struggle, in their unity, in their capacities and ultimately in themselves”.

Given its history of almost 400 years of colonization (by Spain, the US, and Japan), laws governing the Philippines today are still mostly colonial in origin (Balane, 1979). Legal frameworks in the Philippines, from the outset of the colonization of the archipelago, were founded on the Regalian Doctrine, which states that upon conquest, all lands become the property of the Spanish Crown. Under this colonial doctrine, the Crown held royal rights or the possession over all land and natural resources and could grant rights to its subjects to use those. Anthropologist June Prill-Brett (2003, p. 4) summarizes the transitions after the Spanish colonial period as follows: “The American colonial government adopted the Regalian Doctrine from Colonial Spain. However, instead of the King as owner of all natural resources, the State was substituted… After independence in 1946, the Philippine Republic adopted the natural resource laws introduced by the colonial governments, primarily the Regalian Doctrine as basis for the State ownership and control of all natural resources in the Philippine archipelago”.

Another legal remnant of colonization in the Philippines is its Civil Code. The Spanish Civil Code was applied to the Philippines by royal decree and took effect in December 1889 (Balane, 1983). The Code, “being of a non-political nature, continued to be in force” during the American colonial period which began in 1898 (Balane, 1979, p. 43). Post-World War II, the Philippine Civil Code was altered in 1949, but the changes were not substantial enough to fix the “defective organizational structure of the Spanish Civil Code” (Reyes, 1975, p. 277). The majority or 57% of the revised Civil Code is “derived—either by verbatim translation or by adaptation—from the Spanish Civil Code” (Balane, 1979, p. 43). Thus, the “skeleton” of the Philippine Civil Code that is in use until today is “substantially that of its Spanish predecessor” (Reyes, 1975, p. 277). Scholars of Philippine law have commented that the Philippine Civil Code “resembles the Spanish Code so closely” that it seems to be a mere “English version” of its antecedent (Balane, 2018, p. 28).

The inheritance of land and other assets is governed by the Philippine Civil Code. Spanish professor of law Jose Manuel de Torres Perea (2019) writes in his piece “Forced Shares in Spanish and Philippine Succession” that the Philippine Civil Code draws heavily from Spanish laws that were initially implemented in the Philippines in 1889. Like other scholars, de Torres Perea points out that the vast portion of the Philippine Civil Code is an exact copy of old Spanish laws, while the remaining portion has undergone only minor edits. The “basic rules” of succession “remain the same” in the Philippine Civil Code, “as in that of Spain” from the 19th century (Reyes, 1975, p. 284). For de Torres Perea, two notions from the Spanish Civil Code have troubled Philippine inheritance practices until today, the first being “forced share” and the second being “reserva troncal”. The former refers to the compulsory bequeathal of a portion of a person’s properties to compulsory heirs—the person’s spouse and children. Meanwhile, reserva troncal states that in the case of no issue, the property is reserved to be distributed to family members within the third degree in order to keep the property within the genealogy which it came from originally. Legal scholars of the Philippines have critiqued this Spanish-descended succession law as antiquated. Reserva troncal, for example, for Ruben F. Balane (1983, p. 417) “has its origins in the feudal system of the Middle Ages, a system in which it was essential to keep estates intact…” Balane (1983, p. 417) comments that such laws no longer satisfy the needs of the modern world as there is “hardly any crying need… to keep property intact within one family; on the contrary, the need is for diffusion rather than concentration”.

Pertinent to this article is de Torres Perea’s (2019, p. 2) identification of the most important difference in the succession laws of the two countries: “the Spanish law abolished the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate children in 1981, while the Philippine law keeps it”. Article 165 of the Family Code of the Philippines (1987) defines illegitimate children as those “conceived and born outside a valid marriage”. In Article 189, the Code states that duly adopted children are treated as legitimate children. De Torres Perea also points out that Article 739 of the Civil Code of the Philippines (1949), which prohibits succession by a partner who was in an adulterous relationship with the deceased, no longer exists in the current Spanish law, leading him to conclude that the Philippines’ succession law “maintains(s) criteria from the nineteenth century” (de Torres Perea, 2019, p. 3).

de Torres Perea (2019, p. 4) reasons that the laws of succession in the Spanish-written Civil Code in the Philippines—which, through the forced share provision, allocates a large mandatory share of the hereditary estate to descendants—were justified during its implementation in the 19th century due to, first, the average life expectancy being around forty-five years at that time. Second, the Spanish colonial government in the Philippines did not guarantee the protection of minors and the elderly upon the untimely death of their guardians (de Torres Perea, 2019, p. 4). Thus, de Torres Perea (2019, p. 4) argues that the Spanish-descended laws were “a matter of prioritizing these vulnerable family members against the arbitrariness of a testator who could try to ignore them and transfer his assets to a non-family member”. De Torres Perea points out that the times have changed, especially with the increase in life expectancy and the protection of citizens, including minors, already written into the current Philippine Constitution. With these changes, he writes, earlier succession laws have become outdated, and he recommends revisions for the law to adapt to current realities. The latest figures from the Philippine Statistics Authority (2025) show that the average life expectancy in the country is 71.26 for men and 77.54 for women.

De Torres Perea’s analysis of the Spanish-descended laws on succession in the Philippines is useful as another example that the Philippines is yet to repair the failings caused by its colonial legacy, including its laws concerning the family that are founded on nuclearity, rigidity, and heteronormativity. Laws of inheritance also appear to presume a “clean” kinship line where members are all consanguineally (blood) related. For example, illegitimate children are entitled to only one-half of the shares of a legitimate child. While children who are legally adopted have the same inheritance rights as legitimate children; children who are taken in but not legally adopted are in a precarious situation. Their rights of inheritance could be contested by consanguineal family members through the reserva troncal doctrine, even if the deceased’s Last Will and Testament explicitly mentions the child as an heir. In legal notions such as forced share and reserva troncal, the law shows its bias toward a kinship based on blood and imposed procedures for obtaining “legitimacy”. In contrast, it snubs customary non-consanguineal kinship systems, which continue to be practiced today in various forms in many ethnolinguistic communities throughout the Philippines.

Many scholars have established that Philippine kinship systems are more complex than the Euro-American concept of the nuclear family. Anthropologist Prospero Covar (1998) writes of the Philippines as composed of various batis (streams) of culture that operate according to their internal mechanisms, while F. Landa Jocano (1998) similarly argues that social practices appear in various configurations all over the country. Jocano (1969) points out the usefulness of the notion of the “household” to signal the extendability of the family whose members consider reciprocity and the fulfillment of obligations and duties as essential to qualifying people as part of the family. For example, the elderly or children, even if non-consanguineal, may be taken into the household out of a sense of duty. In Nabua, those who live in the same house sharing resources, such as food, and caregiving duties are called magkakaiba sa baloy (literally, living in the same house), which signifies the centrality of place in the ways that some ethnolinguistic groups in the Philippines may define the scope of the family. Scholars have also pointed out the ways in which the Filipino family is transforming in the age of transnational migration, due to care being distributed in a complex web of relations beyond the nuclear and consanguineal family (Francisco-Menchavez, 2018).

Given these variations in the composition of the family as practiced, which markedly differs from the legal definition, it can be said that various groups maintain diverse practices for passing on inheritance. It is said in Nabua that writing up one’s will is a paligsok (bad omen). Thus, it is common for parents to depart without a formal will and to merely leave behind verbal guidance on how to divide the estate. In cases where a written will or verbal guidance is lacking, the eldest sibling customarily holds the jural rights in dividing the inheritance among the rest of the family. This is a common practice in many groups throughout the Philippine islands, as discussed by Melanie Wiber (1993) in her work documenting the upland Ibaloi’s property rights. In Nabua, unmarried adult children or widowed children without an heir also often hold power to negotiate their share of the estate, as those with a living spouse and/or children are seen to have more options for accessing resources in times of need. Thus, inheritance was formerly a highly shared and negotiated affair in Nabua, which is now being constrained by the provisions of the Civil Code.

5. Details: Case Proceedings

Returning to the case introduced at the start of the article, in 1945 when the war concluded, Lorenzo went home to Nabua and found his wife pregnant with his brother’s child. The story, however, was not simply that of adultery, and as Beverly explained in our interview, “It was the World War, and the allotment (remittances) from my father to the first wife (Paula) had stopped, and because of that, they assumed that my dad was dead already”. Still, returning to the family home, where his wife and brother lived together with the seeming consent of the rest of the family, Lorenzo was “outraged in madness”. Unable to forgive Paula, he began planning how he could terminate his marriage with her, but this was going to be complicated due to the absence of divorce as a concept in the colonial-era (and also contemporary) laws of the heavily Catholic-influenced Philippines.

Paula gave birth to a boy in December of the same year, and Lorenzo’s name did not appear on the birth certificate of the baby; the certificate explicitly noted that the baby was illegitimate as Lorenzo began to disentangle himself from Paula and her son.

As a next step, Lorenzo followed local dispute resolution practices. In Nabua, negotiations are held in front of one’s elders who give advice and serve as witnesses to the final agreement. For example, pamalayi is a pre-marriage negotiation ritual during which elders from the sides of both the groom and the bride discuss wedding expenses as well as the properties, goods, and resources that will be exchanged or given by both parties as part of the union not only of the couple, but effectively, of their families too. Lorenzo activated the same type of practice for their “divorce”. As laid out in the Supreme Court decision, on 2 February 1946, in front of their family members, Lorenzo and Paula convened and signed a written agreement stating four main points:

• All family allowances granted to US Navy beneficiaries would be suspended;
• They would dissolve their marriage following legal proceedings, as Lorenzo had acquired US citizenship two years prior, and divorce was an option under US laws;
• They would discuss their conjugal property acquired during the years of marriage on a separate occasion;
• Lorenzo would not file a case of adultery against Paula as she had already admitted her transgression and agreed to their peaceful separation.

Paula’s father and stepmother were among the witnesses to the negotiation between Lorenzo and Paula, which, based on the customary practice at that time, effectively “divorced” them in front of their family members. Beverly said in the interview that all properties (house, land, et cetera.) acquired during her father’s first marriage were given to Paula. The act of giving all the properties to Paula, for Beverly, was evidence that “talagang uda na sira” (they were indeed ending their relationship for good). The signed document between Lorenzo and Paula’s family would later be notarized (Supreme Court of the Philippines, 2000), adding to the list of documentary evidence of the end of the relationship.

“He [Lorenzo] went back to the service, to the States… he buried himself in work”, Beverly narrated. Five years later, Lorenzo filed for divorce in California. The following year, in 1952, their divorce became final as granted by the Superior Court of California, County of San Diego.

Beverly emphasized in our interview that her father spent a total of 30 years in US military service, suggesting that those long years of service reflected the impact of the happenings between himself, his brother, and Paula. In 1957, at age 55, he finally retired from the service and settled down back in Nabua. He met and fell in love with 23-year-old Alicia, whom he married in 1958. On her parents’ courtship, Beverly said “Papa would go all the way to (the village of) Aro-aldow from the centro to court mama… He was really in love with mom”.

Inheritance, according to Finch and Mason (2013, p. 11), “allows individuals to use the act of bequeathing property to define the contours of their own kin relationships, to confirm who ‘counts’ and what value is placed on each relationship”. Lorenzo had cut off contact with Paula, but he anticipated that Paula and his relatives might contest his assets, so he executed a last will in March 1981 (Supreme Court of the Philippines, 2000). In it, Lorenzo wanted Alicia to be the sole heir of their house and lot in Nabua and all of the items within it. All his other real estate properties were to be split into four equal shares among his wife and three children. In item five of the will, Lorenzo designated Alicia as the sole executor of his will and thereafter their three children, in order of age, should Alicia lose the capacity to act. The eighth and final item in his will clearly states that his decisions regarding his property are final and incontestable:

It is my final wish and desire that if I die, no relatives of mine in any degree in the Llorente’s side should ever bother and disturb in any manner whatsoever my wife Alicia R. Fortuno and my children with respect to any real or personal properties I gave and bequeathed respectively to each one of them by virtue of this Last Will and Testament.

Lorenzo’s last will names the people that mattered to him the most: his wife Alicia and their three children. He also names family members (“in any degree”, as he wrote) on the Llorente side as potentially disputing his final wishes. In his will, he anticipated his family members might disturb his wife and children due to the properties he chose to bequeath to them. Hoping to ensure that his property would be passed on as he wished, Lorenzo additionally filed a petition in December 1983 to appoint Alicia as the Special Administratrix of his assets, but this was rejected by the RTC as an administratrix could not be appointed while Lorenzo was still alive. Upon the rejection of the petition, Lorenzo submitted his Last Will and Testament for the court’s examination, which it found was duly executed. When Lorenzo passed away, Alicia “needed to file a new petition of request for an appointment as administratrix, but she did not file any, until it was already too late”.2

As mentioned above, Paula re-emerged to file with the RTC a claim that, according to the Civil Code, she had legal rights to one-half of the left-behind assets as Lorenzo’s compulsory heir, and in addition that she should be the administrator of Lorenzo’s assets during the anticipated court battle. With no competing petition to be the administratrix of Lorenzo’s estate submitted by Alicia yet, within three weeks the RTC supported Paula’s petition, even if they were aware of the proceedings in favor of Alicia initiated by Lorenzo before his death. In the subsequent court battle, the RTC declared Lorenzo’s divorce from Paula as “void and inapplicable in the Philippines”, which then not only rendered Lorenzo and Alicia’s marriage void, but also made Alicia a presumed adulterer—a label that could leave a mark on a person, especially in a small town where people know each other. The RTC declared that Alicia “is not entitled to receive any share from the estate even if the will especially said so…” citing Article 739 (1) of the Civil Code of the Philippines, which states that donations made “between persons who were guilty of adultery or concubinage at the time of the donation” are invalid.

Furthermore, on 14 September 1987, the RTC rejected Alicia’s motion for reconsideration, but also added a modification to their earlier decision—that two of Lorenzo’s adoptees, Raul and Luz, were not “legal children or otherwise” as they were not legally adopted like Beverly (Supreme Court of the Philippines, 2000). This amendment declared Beverly “the only illegitimate child of Lorenzo”.3 With the divorce between Lorenzo and Paula nullified, Beverly and her siblings’ reality was suddenly ripped apart by the court, with the kinship they knew and grew up with suddenly put into question. Beverly’s portion of the inheritance was reduced considerably given the lesser rights of illegitimate children under Philippine law.

Alicia filed an appeal with the Court of Appeals but, disheartened by the court ordeals, let the case rest. “I remember how they broke my mom’s heart…”, Beverly said about her mother’s feelings toward Paula and members of the Llorente family who pursued the case against Alicia and her children.

Beverly recalls that their lawyer, Augusto Pardalis, returned to the case sometime in the 1990s, and the cogwheels of the judicial system started turning again. In August 1995, the Court of Appeals applied Article 144 of the Civil Code on cohabitation without marriage and decided that Alicia would be entitled to half of the assets Lorenzo and Alicia acquired during the years that they were together (Supreme Court of the Philippines, 2000). Paula filed a motion for reconsideration, but the Court of Appeals denied it in March 1996. Paula then filed a petition with the Supreme Court of the Philippines.

In November 2000, the Supreme Court ruled on the validity of Lorenzo and Paula’s divorce in the US, as well as the validity of Lorenzo’s will. The decision was based on the premise that Lorenzo’s US citizenship was valid, and therefore, he had the right to divorce as an American citizen.4 The published decision also includes the following comment: “The hasty application of Philippine law and the complete disregard of the will, already probated as duly executed in accordance with the formalities of Philippine law, is fatal, especially in light of the factual and legal circumstances here obtaining” (emphasis in original). After fifteen years of legal wrangling, the case concluded with Alicia and her children finally emerging victorious. Alicia passed away in 2022 in their family home in Nabua.

6. The Inflexibility of the Law

In our interview, Beverly remembers her childhood spent mainly in the Philippines as a “beautiful, abundant life, a typical navy life”. By that, she meant that Lorenzo and his family had access to various benefits and were also allowed to visit the US naval bases in the Philippines to purchase imported goods. They would travel to the US for family visits and errands. The court case changed all that and impacted their lives for many years. The messiness in the courtroom suddenly also made their private lives very public as gossip about this case circulates in Nabua even today. Beverly remembers with a mix of bitterness, sadness, and anger the day they were driven out of their home in Nabua by police officers who came to implement the court’s ruling in favor of Paula, “I was in 4th grade. It was 23 December 1988, and my mom was in the States to accompany my older sister when suddenly, our house in Nabua was sheriffed! I remember vividly how it was and it was one of the worst moments of my life. I was only 10 years old, can you imagine? The only stuff that we could get was our clothes, and we put them in a cart, and we did not know where to go… It was public humiliation! People were looking at us while we pushed our cart as if there was a parade!”

Lorenzo’s final wish concerning the bequeathal of his property was complicated by the legal discourses enshrined in the Civil Code that were reflected in the RTC’s unceremonious ruling. The RTC completely disregarded Lorenzo’s will and the various steps that he had taken to distance himself from Paula, including the customary negotiation of separation and the California divorce. It begs to be asked: Is the RTC supposed to be this rigid in its judgments? Does the RTC have the capacity to demonstrate cultural sensitivity in its interpretation of the law, for example, by considering the negotiation that happened between Lorenzo and Paula back in February 1946, which was a proper customary separation process of that time? Lardizabal writes at length in his interpretation of the case, “In the Philippines, courts of law are also courts of equity. This means that they are authorized to render judgments that are not strictly based on the law, in order to attain substantial justice… However, the Supreme Court has flip-flopped in the interpretation of this mandate… As a result, in their decisions, trial courts have tended to take the conservative route by strictly applying the law, instead of taking risks by setting aside the law for the sake of equity”. Lardizabal points out that in some cases, the Supreme Court has held that what is called equity jurisdiction “may be invoked despite applicable relevant laws, if their inflexibility would inflict injustice in the process”,5 while in other cases, “[e]quity is applied only in the absence, never in contravention, of statutory law”.6 The Supreme Court appears to be a champion of justice and common sense in the conclusion of the Llorente vs. Llorente case, but its tendency to “flip-flop”, in Lardizabal’s words, when it comes to decisions based on equity, rigidifies the decision-making processes in the lower courts, forcing them to follow the letter of the law even when that may cause an obvious injustice.

In their ruling, the RTC showed very little sensitivity in their interpretation of the law and decision-making, despite their cultural proximity to the disputing parties. Lardizabal highlights the 2022 ruling in the Office of the Court Administrator vs. Judge Hermes Montero, “A judge who disregards basic rules and settled jurisprudence may be held administratively liable for gross ignorance of the law or procedure”. Due to such punitive logic, lower courts such as the RTC are pressured to take on a conservative bias, arguably leading to decisions that the Supreme Court called in the Llorente vs. Llorente case “fatal”. Treating the absence of divorce in the Philippines as an absolute given and as the single most important legal situation in the case, the RTC disregarded considerations stemming from both customary practice and the internationalization of relationships in the Philippines due to changing migration practices. The RTC was too quick in recognizing Paula as a supposed compulsory heir, overlooking customary practices concerning undoing kinship (i.e., customary separation and negotiation of terms in front of witnesses) and making kinship (i.e., taking children into the family). It also failed to properly consider Lorenzo’s complicated civil status which was impacted by the war, the acquisition of US citizenship, and the divorce that he filed as a US citizen. It even rendered decisions made by the RTC itself just a few years prior meaningless when Lorenzo’s Last Will and Testament were found to be valid.

Both the RTC and the Court of Appeals (although the latter to a lesser extent) imposed on Lorenzo, Alicia, and their children the colonial logics of rigidity and nuclearity of the family despite the principle of equity jurisdiction that may be applied when necessary—because of the possible punitive effect that culturally informed decisions in favor of equity may bring to the judges. During my research among Navy men retirees in Nabua, I came to learn about two other well-known inheritance cases involving retirees and their heirs. Interestingly, these two cases also involved the Navy men’s adoptive kin as heirs of their estate. These too were protracted sagas, one of them stretching over 25 years. Thus, it seems common for the consanguineal kin of various degrees to contest the last will of departed Navy men whose estates were left with the adoptive kin who cared for them in their elderly years. While I focus on only one case in this article, the involvement of adopted/chosen kin in inheritance cases is not exceptional as Navy men retirees, who were away from their hometown for many years, often marry later in life when they are financially secure and ready to commit to staying in Nabua for good. In their older years, some of them did not feel the pressure to have biological children of their own. Instead, some Navy men adopted non-consanguineal kin into their family as carers in their old age. These adopted kin are then chosen to be their heirs, which means that the provision of care, rather than the proximity of blood, can be an important factor in people’s decisions in defining their relationships and bequeathing property. Forms of kin-making outside nuclearity and consanguineal rigidity break down in the face of the law when the relatives of the deceased use forced share and reserva troncal—which are based on consanguinity—to lay claim on the assets of their blood-related kin, against the final wish of the departed himself.

Consanguinity, however, is not the only way that people have organized and continue to organize kinships in Nabua and, arguably, beyond. The ways that people make and cut off kin are influenced by other factors, such as resource distribution. As Beverly recalls, “We were often in the courtroom, and Papa’s side of the family was even sitting with them (Paula and her family)”. Beverly explained that her father’s extended family might have harbored anger at Alicia after Lorenzo cut off support to Paula and the Llorente side. “The tendency was, they were mad at mom”, Beverly explained. Alicia and the three heirs did not share the same “blood” as the Llorentes and were therefore thought to be questionable or unworthy heirs. “They were really after us. They were really after the properties. Our properties”, Beverly narrated. Everyone involved in the inheritance saga sought the legal validation of their kinship with the deceased, while also claiming the fruit of his labor—resources that he worked hard for, amid a world war and racialization at his workplace. Beverly stresses that her father worked for a very long time, “I think he is the only Nabueño… who served the country (US) for 30 years, in the military service”, until he finally found peace and his second love upon his retirement in Nabua.

The RTC’s decision in favor of Paula to nullify Lorenzo’s divorce from her, as well as the contradictory interpretations of the Supreme Court on the courts of law’s equity jurisdiction, highlights the ways in which national mechanisms such as the law and its implementing bodies neglect the histories and needs of the people whose lives are entangled in the broad and complex context of the Philippine nation. The Llorente vs. Llorente case also powerfully illustrates how multiple colonial legacies intersect in Philippine law and society. The case emerged from Lorenzo’s position as a Filipino who served in the US Navy during the American colonial period, when Filipinos could enlist as colonial subjects. Through his service, Lorenzo gained US citizenship, which later enabled him to obtain a divorce in California—an option unavailable under Philippine law due to the persistence of Spanish colonial legal frameworks. When the case reached the Philippine courts after Lorenzo’s death, these colonial legacies clashed dramatically. The Regional Trial Court rigidly applied Spanish-descended succession laws that privileged blood relations and the nuclear family model, disregarding both Lorenzo’s US divorce and customary kinship practices that recognize non-consanguineal relationships. The court’s strict adherence to colonial-era legal principles—particularly around marriage, divorce, and inheritance—reveals how postcolonial Philippine institutions continue to impose rigid 19th-century colonial concepts of family and property rather than acknowledging diverse local understandings of kinship and the realities of transnational Filipino families. In this case, we see the ways in which colonial legal frameworks persist in fracturing rather than healing family relations.

7. Case Closed

The Llorente vs. Llorente inheritance case shows only some of the ways in which inheritance practices can transform in this increasingly transnational era characterized by migration, family separation, and estrangement, but also resource accumulation. Family inheritance in rural Philippines is increasingly no longer verbally negotiated among immediate and extended kin, but is becoming legally documented (despite the various limitations of the current law) in order to keep in check the possible claims against the deceased’s estate. Locally, expandable kinship practices that can include non-consanguineal kin lose legitimacy in the face of restrictive succession laws. As seen in the Llorente vs. Llorente case, family disputes over inheritance now often play out in the impersonal space of public court trials, rather than being settled by the elders.

By analyzing this landmark case and placing it alongside my anthropological ethnography among US Navy retirees and their families in their hometown, I illustrated some of the ways in which a family in Nabua came to be intimately entangled with multiple colonial histories and postcolonial bureaucracy working within a framework of colonially descended laws. In this article, inheritance served as a lens through which we saw how a member of Nabua’s first overseas migrant wave—US Navy men—tried to exercise his agency amid historical changes in the Philippines. While his actions can be perceived to be justifiable, his final will was subverted by outdated laws and a legal system that tends to be too rigid in its supposed defense of equity and justice.

With Lorenzo growing up in the Philippines during the first decades of the colonial transition, he knew very well the importance of documentation as Filipinos scrambled to satisfy various requirements imposed by the new American colonial administration, which had promised but failed in enacting true agrarian and land distribution reform (Martin, 1999). Having witnessed first-hand the poverty in Nabua and having experienced racialization aboard the American naval ships, Lorenzo tried to protect his assets to secure a better future for his wife and children. His final wish and lifework were so easily thrown out by the very legal mechanisms which were meant to bring order to Philippine society. Not coincidentally, some of the outdated absurd logic of these legal mechanisms—those around blood and the “illegitimacy” of children—have already been abandoned in Spanish law. These need to be revised in the Philippines as well in order to keep up with societal transformations, or else they become more of a hindrance rather than a pillar of social order and a tool of repair.

The discussion above shows that there is a mismatch between colonially inherited Philippine laws that favor nuclearity, consanguinity, and hetero-normativity, on the one hand, and on-the-ground everyday practices as well as what we perceive as just on the other. Future work in the anthropology of law in postcolonial Philippines should discuss the reasons behind this growing gap.

Through decades-long inheritance cases such as Llorente vs. Llorente, we can also learn about what is at stake when court battles layer with a family’s coming to terms with the passing of kin. For those involved in inheritance cases, fighting the battle is not solely a project of retaining and reclaiming gained wealth. For Beverly, the prospect of reclaiming the family home motivated her as the case dragged on for years, “there is always this something, a rootedness in Nabua… So whatever happened, a common denominator is that we always go back to our roots”. By reclaiming their house after 15 years of litigation, they were able to re-establish and deepen their rootedness in Nabua. Ultimately, the town that witnessed their anguish for many years was still their home.