‘Manang’ Letty’s farm

From the perspective of the city, the countryside often feels like a foreign country, a network of colonial outposts long conquered and emptied of culture, reduced to either bare life or, as Marx once famously put it, a constant state of idiocy. A surprising exception is Manang  Letty’s farm in Pangasinan.

Fed by the waters of the San Roque Dam, the 6-hectare farm has expansive rice fields and a small herd of 15 carabaos of native Indian and Italian stock that produce milk and kesong puti sold every Sunday at the Legazpi farmer’s market. Birds of paradise and bromeliads grow wild on the edges of the fields and around a fishpond full of tilapia, while ylang-ylang, jasmine, and other flowers fill the air with their sweet fragrance.

Contemplating the emerald landscape from the deck of her house as birds and butterflies flit by, one encounters a version of the pastoral: the sense of nature tamed to yield its bounty to the will of those who claim and cultivate it. Narra and mango trees grow side by side with cacao and bananas, fish and livestock submit to human demands, while workers and animals carry out the plans and commands of the owner. The pastoral vision of nature made benevolent by the philanthropy of its owner is ironically enabled by its rational and systematic conquest.

Indeed,  Manang  Letty shifts from extolling the serenity of farm life to a litany of worries about untrustworthy workers, invasive plants, inefficient bureaucrats, and shifty neighbors with little regard for private property. Farming is hard work, as unforgiving as it is unending, so that it often feels like war. One negotiates with one’s surroundings, adapting to the soil, the weather, and the recalcitrant working habits of caretakers and local farmers. At the same time, one lays siege to what exists, appropriating what seems useful while pushing back what gets in the way. Agriculture, after all, is the enforced domestication of nature, even as its victories remain vulnerable to periodic catastrophes of all kinds.

In view of the unremitting challenges of agriculture, one is doubly impressed by Manang  Letty herself. She is otherwise known as Leticia Ramos Shahani, sister of former president Fidel V. Ramos. Born in 1929 in Lingayen, Pagasinan, she has met all but one president of this country. Educated at the University of the Philippines, Wellesley, and Columbia, and at the Sorbonne. She met her late husband, who was originally from India, in Paris. Widowed at a young age, she found herself a single mother to three Filipino-Indian children.

Following the footsteps of her father, Narciso Ramos, Letty Shahani served as a diplomat during the Marcos years, opening up the embassy in Romania, serving as ambassador to East Germany, Hungary and Australia, and eventually as the highest ranking woman at the United Nations, including being secretary general of the UN Conference on the Decade for Women in 1985. An early supporter of Cory Aquino, she won two terms in the Senate, authoring several key bills, many of which are benefiting women. These include the Anti-Rape Law that redefined rape from a crime against chastity to one of violence against persons, the Fisheries Code, the US Bases Conversion Law, and the laws that created the National Commission for Culture and the Arts, Tesda (Technical Education and Skills Development Authority), and the beginnings of what eventually became the reproductive health bill.

As diplomat and senator, Letty Shahani’s feminism inflected her patriotism, while both were shaped by her cosmopolitan outlook. Then, about seven years ago, she turned to farming, commissioning Francisco Mañosa to design a house based on the lines of the  nipa  hut. She leased her carabaos, learned everything about their mating habits, and converted their waste into methane gas. She installed a solar-powered water pump and subleased her rice fields to local farmers. And, with the help of two trusted maids and a driver, she now transports her milk, cheese and flowers every week to sell among the city folk of Makati.

Why this turn to farming? In her more reflective moments, Manang  Letty thinks of her farm as Walden Pond in the tropics. She also sees it as an affirmation of the continuing importance of agriculture in a nation where its social significance diminishes with every passing year. Reinventing herself as a farmer, she sees her role in pedagogical terms: to impart lessons about the intricate process of running a dairy farm as an ecologically-sound enterprise. In fact, her farm now functions as a model site for local students.

Mother, feminist, diplomat, senator, and now senior-citizen farmer, she gets up at five a.m. and, garbed in hat, gloves and boots, coaxes and coerces nature in pursuit of her Philippine pastoral. Manang  Letty is proof of the promise that remains in rural life even as more and more people abandon it for cities at home and abroad.

Vicente L. Rafael teaches history at the University of Washington in Seattle. He is the author of several works on the cultural and political history of the Philippines.