Miriam has worn many uniforms: factory worker, admin officer, pastoral worker, local official, peasant organizer.

By Shan Kenshin Ecaldre 
Bulatlat.com

Cabuyao City, Laguna — At 56 years old, Nanay Miriam Aledia Villanueva speaks with the calm steadiness of someone who has spent her entire life reading the language of land: the softness of soil after the rain, the weight of harvest against hunger, the quiet power of planting one’s future with one’s bare hands.

“I really grew up here in Lupang Ramos,” she said. “I was born at the health center in Dasmariñas. I was truly born here in Lupang Ramos.”

Her story is rooted in the farmland, and in a history that spans the Marcos Sr dictatorship, the rise of peasant movements, and decades of struggle over a 372-hectare contested agricultural land in Cavite. Like thousands of peasant families, the fight for land ownership was never theoretical. It lived inside the coconut husk of everyday survival, in the calloused hands of her mother, and in every harvest cooked over small fires.

But even in childhood, Nanay Miriam knew her life and the life of the other children in Lupang Ramos was unlike the lives of her classmates who lived in paved subdivisions only kilometers away.

“People would laugh at us because our only food container at school was a leaf,” she said. “Wealthier students had Tupperware. Our uniforms were sewn by my mother.” she said in an interview with Bulatlat.

Childhood and sugarcane

Lupang Ramos in the 1970s was a sea of sugarcane. Children forged footpaths between tall green stalks, shoes damp with morning dew. Snack time meant chewing raw cane until their gums tingled.

“I was around four or five years old. It was really all sugarcane,” she said. “Our house stood right in the middle of the vast sugarcane fields.” 

Her mother, both farmer and vendor, sustained them through small harvests and livestock raised with painstaking care. But hardship was constant. When the rains came, she and her siblings scrambled for pails to catch leaks from a roof too patched to keep water out.

Her family was also complicated by silence. She was the illegitimate child of the caretaker of Lupang Ramos.

“My life story is unpleasant compared to others because we are a broken family,” she said.

Learning inequality

Despite financial struggles, Miriam excelled in school, graduating salutatorian and earning a place in a prestigious Catholic academy. But she could not escape class discrimination.

“I can’t forget that in first year high school, the teacher said that my attire was not appropriate,” she said. “She made me stand in front, walk around, comparing my clothing to someone better dressed.”

It was the first of many moments that sharpened her political clarity. The humiliation of poverty had a name: feudal exploitation.

Formation of a farmer-organizer

By 17, while peers explored adolescence, Miriam was already in the fields organizing farmers through the Catholic church’s social action program.

Her turning point was the Mendiola Massacre on January 22, 1987. Thousands of peasants marched to Malacañan Palace demanding genuine agrarian reform. The police opened fire. Thirteen were killed.

“I was there. I am a survivor,” she said. “It planted in my mind the question: who will raise the consciousness of farmers?”

The answer, she realized, could never be someone outside the community. It had to be the farmers themselves.

From then on, she organized peasant communities across Cavite and Southern Tagalog. She spoke in chapels, under mango trees, beside flooded paddies. In every meeting, the demand was the same: a life dignified by land.

Returning home, continuing the fight

When she returned to Lupang Ramos in the 1990s with a husband and children, the struggle did not end. Landowners continued to evict tenants. Developers eyed land conversion. Soldiers harassed communities.

But people kept planting.

“My entire life revolves around the life of a farmer, organizing farmers, being a parent, and being the wife of a farmer-organizer,” she said.

Necessity hardened her resolve. She sold cows to buy school supplies, crossed dangerous rivers during storms, and held soil between fingers the way others hold prayer beads.

When she became a barangay councilor in 2007, her first priority was a bridge for students.

“When I survived the floods, maybe it would be my children who would be swept away,” she said.

The bridge now stands as quiet testimony to grassroots governance.

Farmer’s many lives

Miriam has worn many uniforms: factory worker, admin officer, pastoral worker, local official, peasant organizer.

She saw the lives of semiconductor factory workers. She counseled displaced farmers. And when needed, she returned to the soil.

Her husband, both farmer and security guard, is proof that peasants must work twice, often thrice, as hard to survive.

Building organizations and communities

Her leadership extends across peasant formations in Lupang Ramos. Since 2017, she has served as secretary of Katipunan ng mga Samahang Magbubukid sa Lupang Ramos (KASAMA-LR),  the largest farmers’ alliance in the community. She helped form the local chapter of Amihan, a national federation of peasant women.

Collective action, she said, is the only antidote to feudal despair. “Once we realized that individual survival was difficult, we learned to unite.”

Through associations, cooperatives, seminars, and dispersal programs, the community built livelihood systems that landlessness never granted them.

She stressed that Cavite was dangerous. “We feared sudden executions, (when) people would be found dead because they allegedly opposed the governor.”

She learned early that speaking out had a price. Yet she spoke anyway.

Motherhood in the farmlands

Her children grew up touching seedlings, learning the soil’s weight. Two have already graduated. One is still in Grade 6.

With quiet pride, she said, “I teach my children how to cultivate land.”

It is inheritance beyond title: knowledge as survival.

The struggle continues

Today, real estate developers and private claimants haunt Lupang Ramos. Families face intimidation, demolition threats, and harassment. Despite being awarded land by state agencies decades ago, farmers are treated as trespassers on their own fields.

Still, Miriam persists. At 56, she still serves KASAMA–LR. She still organizes meetings. She still plants. “My entire life revolves around farmers’ struggles,” she said.

Legacy in the soil

“Even in hardship, we continued farming,” she said. “When there was no work, we farmed.” In this quiet philosophy lies a lifetime of resistance.

Asked if she ever dreamed of something grander, bigger homes, softer jobs, clean uniforms, she only smiles. “I was already happy living in a small hut, the bahay kubo we stayed in. I never dreamed of living in a big house.”

What she longs for was fairness. Safety. A bridge across flooded rivers. Livelihood without fear. Land that belongs to the people who feed the nation. (RTS, DAA)