This chapter examines land ownership in Pagsanjan town, in the province of Laguna in the Philippines, in the late seventeenth century. Lists of “foreign” landowners were drawn from the land survey (composición de tierras) carried out in 1697 in the Philippines. These foreign landowners were other Asians, including Chinese, Japanese, Malabar, their mestizo offspring. and Philippine natives from other towns. The native community represented by the local elite resented foreign land ownership and used the opportunity given by the composición de tierras to petition the Spanish government to allocate the lands to them. The framework offered by institutional bricolage is used to understand these dynamics. The chapter argues that norms governing the allocation and ownership of land resulted from a continuous negotiation among these stakeholders through colonial institutions of governance. Moreover, the land tenure of foreign and mestizo settlers was likewise a result of compromises motivated by different economic and political factors at play in the seventeenth-century Philippines.