Answer:
The Spaniards issued the Claveria Decree in 1849 in an attempt to assign all Filipinos surnames. This decree was inconsistently enforced, and there are no records describing its institution. In many cases the local magistrates simply assigned surnames to those who did not already have one.
On the 21st of November 1849, the Governor General of the Philippines, Don Narciso Claveria y Zaldua, issued a law (thereafter called the Claveria Decree) requiring Filipinos to adopt Spanish AND indigenous names from the Catalogo Alfabetico de Apellidos for civil and legal purposes
