When she began marching with progressive leaders, Eufemia Pet Doringo thought of how she could carry the calls of the urban poor while holding one part of a long banner. The answer turned out to be wearing earrings, adorned with phrases such as “No to budget cuts!” and “Makibaka, huwag matakot!”
Despite being secretary general of Kadamay, the militant organization of the urban poor, who leads contra-demolition rallies and dares a grassroots effort for the upper chamber, she still finds time to engage in creative work by crafting earrings while also extending help to whoever asks. “Okay lang, basta para sa mga junakis,” she said, her constant refrain whenever I asked her for yet another minute of her time.
Over a morning at the office of Kadamay, the 49-year-old leader endearingly called Mimi smiled and cried as she recounted her own struggles. She is not only a daughter, sister, and mother, but an organizer who fights for accessible housing and fairer opportunities for the urban poor.
Wading Through the Years
Mimi seemed an unlikely senatorial candidate. The third child in a brood of four sisters and a brother, her younger sister Creamie Paran recalls an ate who was a reserved, obedient daughter, taking after a mother who often went to church and made a living doing laundry for neighbors. Though they were not well-off, they had a home, with a father who worked overseas in Saudi Arabia to sustain their family.
At the same time, she was an excellent student who often helped her younger siblings with schoolwork, Paran recalled. She joked that Mimi was the type to eschew dating and nights out to study instead, for Mimi dreamed of being a teacher, a lawyer, or a nun.
Mimi, however, had to enter work without a college degree at 19 to provide for her family. At first, Mimi worked at a local cosmetics company, where she met her husband, who entered work at the same company just to court her. Now, they have three children whom she attends to in the mornings in Camarin, Caloocan.
Mimi worked at the company for 13 years, starting in 1993. But labor issues came to the fore. Holiday pay was once due to employees, but the company refused to pay on a technicality. Without a union, Mimi and other workers decided to stage a sit-down strike. She came face-to-face with company management.
“Siguro para sa mga mayayaman, isang araw ng sahod namin ay maliit na bagay lang, pero ako bilang magulang, isang araw ng sahod ko ay pambili ng isang latang gatas ng anak ko para sa isang linggo,” she said.
She made her case but soon resigned as the company brought in a contractual manpower agency to replace the workers. Afterwards, she earned her pay as a vendor.
Mimi, her parents, and her family first lived in Barangay 164, Caloocan, when Typhoon Ondoy struck in 2009. Tullahan River, only a stone’s throw from their home on Road 5 in GSIS Hills Subdivision, overflowed. Mimi was at home with only her father, changing her five-month-old son’s diaper when the waters began to rise quickly, forcing her to escape by the window and wade through the waters with her baby in tow. Once the storm abated, they found the roof had been totally torn off and furniture washed away, leaving only a toilet bowl in their former residence.
Crying while recounting the story, Mimi detailed the pain of her family and other evacuees surviving on rice and sardines. “Mula dun sa natitirang mga poste sa bahay namin, nagtayo na lang talaga kami ng apat na poste ng kahoy at trapal,” she said.
Mimi cried recounting how there was nothing left of their former home, ravaged by Ondoy. (Alexa Antoinette Sambale/Philippine Collegian)
Amid a deluge that left 5,353 families homeless and over 200 people dead, the National Housing Authority (NHA) began to offer evacuees from Mimi’s area spaces in tenements. In 2014, she became part of a batch offered a three-month moratorium on maintenance fees in Camarin Residences 3. Over 100,000 relocations from flood-prone areas were intended under the Aquino III administration’s Oplan Lumikas para Iwas Kalamidad at Sakit, but bureaucracy hampered implementation.
From Household to Barricades
Though they transferred to a new home, difficulties began anew. During the moratorium, hidden fees immediately emerged: Her family began paying P800 monthly for electricity and P400 for water.
Residents incurred similar fees, and others who were pregnant or with disability were put on higher floors, in a building without an elevator. Due to ballooning debts, water was once cut off to Mimi’s unit for five days.
“Dito sa [Camarin Residences] buwan-buwan pala kaming babahain, hindi ng tubig kundi ng bayarin,” she said.
Despite experience at the picket line, Mimi did not yet consider herself an organizer. “Dati, taong bahay lang ako: Nanay ako, tagasundo ng mga anak sa pag-aaral, namamalengke, naglilinis ng bahay…[pero] kung walang titindig, ano na lang gagawin namin?” she said.
A resident unionized at their company put the others in contact with progressive groups such as the Center for Trade Union and Human Rights. Organizers helped Mimi and other residents band together, physically sitting on the tenement-wide meter and demanding explanations from the NHA. Eventually having forced a meeting, they found the agency could not name the salaried building administrator and security guards listed on their books.
As a result, they won lower maintenance rates. From there, after repeated reelection to the local housing association and fighting against disqualification on technicalities, it was only a matter of time before Mimi fully joined Kadamay in 2017 as a representative of the urban poor.
Urban poor leader Estrelita Bagasbas, otherwise known as Inday, has lived for decades in Sitio San Roque, slated for demolition since 2010 to make way for a commercial district by Ayala Land Inc. Between handling community members seeking advice on family matters, Inday told me of a thorough, organized leader in Mimi, who stood with them at mobilizations commemorating the anniversary of San Roque’s first barricade against demolition and rose in only a year to become national spokesperson.
Offered assistance in Feb. 2019 by an army major in exchange for information about Kadamay’s activities, Mimi refused. The following month, truckloads of military personnel inspected their neighborhood and launched red-tagging seminars in schools, with one witnessed by her son. Mimi herself was red-tagged not long after, when she was declared persona non grata in Pandi, Bulacan in 2020, following the organization’s protest action at a relocation site.
Rising to the Occasion
Despite these threats, Mimi readily accepted the challenge when she was drafted by the Makabayan coalition as a candidate for their senatorial slate.
She first announced her decision to run to her three sisters during lunch at a mall, seeking their permission and advice. Her own husband was also apprehensive, knowing that she would be out of the house and on the campaign trail much of the time. Yet in the end, they relented.
A month into the campaign, hectic schedules bear down on Mimi, who campaigns with the rest of the Makabayan senate slate. From spending Feb. 23 at the Panagbenga Festival in Baguio, she joined hundreds of students of Polytechnic University of the Philippines in a Feb. 25 walkout on the anniversary of the EDSA Revolution—then only two days later going house-to-house in Zambales, before heading to Quiapo on March 1 for the press conference of Gabriela Women’s Party launching Women’s Month.
Mimi admitted exhaustion sometimes, but resolved to continue. “Pipikit muna ako sandali, iisipin ko muna uli, para saan nga ba [ito]? Tapos doon ko ma-re-realize na hindi, kailangan mo ulit magpalakas kasi ‘pag bumitaw ka, talo ka na,“ she said.
What Mimi seeks is simple: against an unjust system, affordable housing without onerous provisions and hidden fees for the urban poor. Urgent also is a wealth tax for billionaires and dynasties who control a third of Congress, along with commitments against rampant red-tagging, demolitions, and abductions by state forces.
One of Mimi’s signatures is hand-made earrings, bearing calls such as “Tunay na reporma sa lupa, ipaglaban!” on Oct. 21, during a national peasant mobilization in Plaza Miranda. (Nanay Mimi Doringo/X)
Weeks after our first conversation, at a mobilization on Plaza Miranda on Oct. 21, Mimi still smiled and offered me help to contact her sister for an interview, all while speaking for peasants and facing an illegal assembly case. Bearing hand-made earrings, she will continue her fight for the urban poor and all the sectors who struggle to put food on their tables. ●
