Today Is lOrena Barros’ BirthdAY
3/18/2022
I would try, in this moment, to describe the life of Lorena Barros in this journal, as I believe it is important to understand the people you grieve yet, I find myself unable. How can one capture a life in words? How do you summarize a movement without missing what's in between? I don’t pretend to know and I won’t attempt to try in this short entry; rather, I would direct you to the links below before continuing on.
Gomez, Maita. “Ma. Lorena Barros: Gentle Warrior.” Six Young Filipino Martyrs. Ed. Asuncion David Maramba. Pasig: Anvil, 1997
http://remembering-lorenabarros.blogspot.com/
Today is Lorena Barros’ birthday and less than a month ago Chad Booc, Jurain Ngujo, Elgyn Balonga, Robert Aragon, and Tirso Añar were killed by the Armed Forces of the Philippines. They were volunteer Lumad school teachers, health workers, drivers, people tortured and mudered by the facisist military of a country that would claim their deaths as those of enemy combatants. There is so much loss. So much grief. So much rage.
Death’s fingers have long been intertwined with fist of the Philippine revolution. Those who answer the call to wage war against the feudal, imperial, capitalist beast do so knowing that they may never live to see victory. To struggle, to give your life to the movement in any way is as lenten sacrifice as it is a gift. Even death cannot hold at bay one’s devotion to the masses. Lorena Barros writes of her comrades in her 1973 poem “Sampaguita”,
“How like this pure white bud
are our martyrs
fiercely fragrant with love
for our country and people!
With what radiance they should still have unfolded!”
“But sadness should not be
their monument.
Whipped and lashed desperately
by bombed-raised storms
has not our Asian land
continued to bloom?”
We understand armed struggle to be the necessary solution in order to combat and defeat such a violent oppressor. Yet it is not to kill or be killed that defines the red fighter; the path of a guerilla is one walked in an arduous commitment to live. To life. To be a revolutionary is to know that in a world crucified by systems of exploitation, death may be what gives rise to rebirth.
Teachers are among those often targeted by the Philippine government due to the threat that indigenous sovereignty poses to their genocidal resource extraction projects. Many volunteers have been flagged as terrorist insurgents, hunted down by the Armed Forces of the Philippines alongside land defenders and community leaders. Chad Booc and Jurain Ngujo were volunteer teachers with the Alternative Learning Center for Agricultural and Livelihood Development (ALCADEV) at the bakwit schools set up in the evacuation centers for Lumad indigenous peoples displaced from their ancestral land by corporate and military encroachment. Chad and Jurain’s commitment to serve the people in this way was one made knowing that a death at the hands of facisim was never far away and still they continued to teach. Chad Booc’s words have been widely shared, echoing across the ocean since the massacre of the New Bataan 5,
“When Lumad Indigenous people die, they aren't buried, they’re planted. When I first heard this, I didn’t understand. I thought maybe they just didn't want to use the word ‘funeral’ because of superstition. Or maybe they disliked saying ‘are you coming to the funeral?’ because it would be like saying you're being buried together. But I realized later that it wasn’t just superstition. It’s about their indigeneity, their connection to their ancestral land, and their struggle. When you’re planted, you return to the soil that you came from. You will grow, flourish, multiply and bear fruit again. When you’re planted, it’s not your end. It’s your beginning. That’s why, when I die, I don’t want to be buried. I want to be planted.”
I highly encourage you to read more about the work that ALCADEV and other similar organizations do as part of the struggle for Lumad sovereignty against the fascist Philippine state in order to understand the task that people like Chad and Jurain devoted themselves to.
Human rights organization IBON has a background on the origins of ALCADEV here https://www.ibon.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/lahutay2021.pdf
The nature of martyrdom within the National Democratic movement comes with so many contradictions. Death is not always a glorious thing and to be remembered is so often a question that comes without choice. But to look at death in the western tradition of an absolute end, I believe does a disservice to the ongoing heartbeat of the revolution that so many have died for. We have returned enough of our comrades' bodies back to the earth to replace the mountains they have stolen from us and still we fight. There is so much pain in death. In a movement so grand in scale, a project built across continents and centuries, still the loss of a single voice amidst millions rings out so deafeningly.
What does this tell us about the weight of one’s life? What does it mean to mourn someone who you have never met? Someone who has lived and fought and died decades before your own birth thousands of miles away and still you feel their loss. What does this say about our capacity to love one another in this way.
A kasama is such a unique kind of connection in this world. Beyond identity, beyond family, there is a bond between comrades that transcends place and time. It is in this relationship that I am reminded of the candles that are lit at the martyr’s altar. The act of striking a match and sharing its flame with wick is an expression of the first law of thermodynamics: Energy cannot be created or destroyed, only transferred and transformed. At a vigil, the fire of one candle is passed to the others, heat moving from one object to another. Even as the night ends and the flames are put to rest that warmth remains. In the sky where the smoke still sits, in the wax stained hands carefully packing away the candles for another day that energy still lives. If heat is just the motion of particles then what can burn a brighter flame than a movement? The life of a comrade cannot just be snuffed out through something as small as death. The birth of a martyr is a tragedy in the same way that it is a transformation. The heat of every single kasama who has given themself to this revolution is the same that will burn down the old world and live again to warm the new.
The last stanza of Lorena Barros’ “Sampaguita” reads as follows
“Look how bravely our ranks
bloom into each gap.
With the same intense purity and fragrance
we are learning to overcome.”
Today is Lorena Barros’ birthday and the 50th anniversary of the founding of MAKIBAKA, the radical women’s mass organization she founded in her youth. Celebrations of an anniversary like this can be complicated in that where we are today can feel so similar to the conditions that our comrades fought against long ago. I chose to not see this as a failure but as a testament to the difficulty of what we are trying to achieve. Revolution may be an impossible dream. And still we are learning to overcome the impossible day by day. We are lucky to have such incredible teachers as comrades to help guide the way.
Lorena Barros’ mother Alicia Morelos wrote of her daughter’s death “Laurie the sweetheart, wife, mother and comrade will be resurrected only when there is true freedom in our country.”
And it is for this reason that we will see true freedom. It is for this reason that one day we will see victory. So that the people we love may be resurrected. So that we may feel the life of our comrades again.
More Information on the New Bataan 5
To Donate to the New Bataan Memorial Fund
https://tinyurl.com/donate-newbataan5
The True Impact of climate disaster in the Philippines
On the 2nd of November, 2020 super Typhoon Rolly made landfall in eastern Luzon, the northernmost island in the Philippines, leaving a wake of death and destruction in it’s path. Typhoon Rolly and the later Typhoon Ulysses may have been some of the most powerful storms to hit the country in recent years however, they were certainly not the first, and as the future of the archipelago continues to be shaped by cooperate exploitation and global climate change, they will certainly not be the last.
More and more, the impacts of nearly every major “Natural” Disaster can be seen to have been shaped by the exploitation of the country’s land and those who work and care for it. Foreign mining, logging, and urbanization projects have eroded the nation’s protective mountains and coast lines, which are then overpowered by the massive storms created by rising sea levels. Peasants and Indigenous peoples are most effected by the destruction that comes with these disasters, where the loss of P4.6 Billion in agricultural damage from Rolly falls squarely on the shoulders of the over 50,000+ farmers and fisher folk trapped within feudal farming contracts. Meanwhile, the Philippine government responds with measly and underwhelming relief efforts, rather choosing to prioritize funding the military, police, and their own pockets.
7 years after the devastation of Typhoon Yolanda, the Philippines is still trying to recover. The need to provide material support extends long past the weeks proceeding the disaster as communities can often times the take generations to heal. The need to provide material support frankly extends beyond relief efforts as well. When the government choses to drown its people beneath the waters of capitalist-imperialist nightmare, it is up to those people to break the surface and rise up together in order to create a new dream.
What is labor contractualization?
Although common, labor contractualization is an illegal practice in many countries around the world. The Filipino Department of Labor and Employment (DOLE) defines labor-only contracting as “an arrangement where the contractor or subcontractor merely recruits, supplies, or places workers to perform a job, work, or service for a principal.”
Touted by companies as being an efficient, non-committal form of work, in reality contractualization can often lead to jobs that lack sufficient payment, benefits, security, and safety for workers. For example, in the United States a popular form of contractual labor can be found in ridesharing services like Uber and Lyft which hire drivers not as full time employees but as contract workers. In this case, rideshare drivers across the country banded together to go on strike demanding union rights, living wages, and fare transparency while encouraging the public to boycott Uber and Lyft services.
In May of 2018 it was revealed that even after being ordered to regularize 6,000+ contract workers a month prior by the DOLE, Jollibee Food Corporation (JFC) still stood as the top company engaged in labor contracting in the nation with 15,000 contractual workers in total. JFC contracted employees suffered from mass layoffs, union busting, unsafe work conditions with a denial of benefits, and ₱20 million in wage theft. Illegally terminated workers immediately began to organize a call to regularize all workers under JFC and its subsidiaries creating the #BEEastMode to encourage a boycott of JFC products and services. In July of 2018, JFC responded to the demands claiming to adhere to all laws and labor regulations but this has yet to be substantiated.
Illegally terminated workers of Jollibee Foods Corporation (JFC) shaved their heads in front of their main commissary and warehouse in Paranaque City as expression of their protest against JFC’s termination of its agency contracts with Toplis Solutions and Staff Search Agency that led to the lay-off of hundreds of its workers in 2018.