Padrino system

Pronounced pad-REE-no. Plainly: you need somebody, and everybody knows you need somebody.

The Filipino name for advancement through family affiliation or friendship rather than through an open procedure. It is usually discussed as a moral failing of individuals. It is more useful as a description of what happens when the formal queue does not work.

The origin runs straight out of Lesson 1.2. Under Spanish rule a Filipino generally needed the favour of an official or a friar to obtain a government post or improve his standing, and that requirement fused with compadrazgo, the imported Catholic ritual of co-parenthood, which turned sponsorship into a durable kinship claim.

“May kakilala ka ba sa LTO?” is not a joke. It is a rational first question in a system where the informal queue is faster than the formal one, and it stops being rational the moment the formal one is faster.

Note the sequencing rule this course follows: the origin of the padrino system is taught in Lesson 1.2, but the term itself is not used before Lesson 2.2, where the human protocol behind it has been explained.

Source: No single scholar owns this term. The course uses the Global Informality Project entry “Padrino System (Philippines),” free, for the definition and the Spanish-period origin, and treats it as a reference work rather than as a monograph: it is not used for any claim about prevalence. The administrative history it rests on is the office documented through Blair and Robertson in Lesson 1.2.

First used in: 2.2 · One of us, or not one of us