Walking tour
Zenaida greets me eagerly as I approach. She is a little taller than me, slim, and with gray streaks in her hair. She is one of the women I met during my fieldwork last year in Marikina for the Embodied Ecologies project. She is a mother and grandmother who has lived in Fortune for nearly her entire life. She moved here in the 70s after her family was forced to relocate due to riverbanks widening. Since then, she has resided in the here in the barangay. For those unfamiliar, a barangay is the lowest administrative unit in the Philippines. Every city or municipality in the country is made up of these units. Each barangay varies in size, but must have at least 2,000 inhabitants (See the PhilAtlas->https://www.philatlas.com/barangays.html). Fortune itself is home to 38,000 people according to a 2020 census.
She walks ahead of me as she tours me around her barangay and the neighboring barangay, Parang. We had agreed to meet outside her granddaughter’s school one afternoon in September. We pass by an astounding amount of factories, each differing in size and product. As we go through the narrow streets, she shares little tidbits of history. Parang and Fortune used to be one barangay before it was splintered into two. She doesn’t explain to me why. I later learn that it was separated only this century, in 2007. Fortune used to be a sitio (a smaller part of a barangay) of Parang. It earned the name from the gigantic cigarette manufacturing company, Fortune Cigarettes, that held its base of operations there.
Zenaida leads me through side streets I have never explored before. Usually, I visit Fortune by jeepney from the city’s bayan (downtown area), thus I never had a reason or opportunity to walk from Parang to Fortune, like we are doing now. She eagerly points out two large factories – one, another cigarette manufacturer. She tells me the name is “Redrying.” I mishear her several times so I ask her to spell it out for me. She is also unsure. When I try to look for it afterwards, I find out that it is not a different cigarette manufacturer - it’s actually a redrying warehouse for Philip Morris. She tells me a lot of the people from her neighborhood used to work here back in the day. But now, they’re all dead.
Aside from the warehouse, we also pass by a local school, a few small stores, and several houses. These houses are nice, far nicer than the ones I am used to seeing in Fortune. They have tall gates and are polished with fresh coats of paint. Zenaida points this out, a wishful sigh on her lips. “Ang ganda ng mga bahay dito, ‘no? (The houses here are beautiful, aren’t they?)” she whispers wishfully. I think of her own home that I had visited a year prior – wedged in between several other homes and having only a single window and a single door.
We eventually find a place I am more familiar with as we trek through Fortune Avenue, the barangay’s major thoroughfare. In my previous fieldwork, this was where the jeepney would pass by and I would alight along this road. Here, Zenaida points out more places I am familiar with, such as the factory for a local chocolate brand. I see the structure but as we come closer to it I begin to smell and hear it as well. It smells sweet, like sugar, but it doesn’t smell delicious or appetizing. It sounds like a hundred fans whirring to life.
Zenaida shares that this is typical for factories - they have a sound, and often they have a smell. Blessy had told me the same last year.
Blessy is also one of the women I met during my fieldwork last year. She is a recently widowed mother of four. According to her, factories have a ugong (a resonant sound). And of course there is also often a smell like that of the chocolate factory–sickeningly sweet. Other times, it is not as pleasant. Some factories smell of smoke or burning rubber. Living so close by, it is inevitable for the residents of Fortune to hear and smell the factories apart from just seeing their massive sites sticking out like sore thumbs above their humble concrete homes.
We continue to walk, passing by familiar sights. Here, the factories are plentiful. Zenaida points out a few, but she is unsure what they produce. She pauses a few times to allow me to take photos. As we venture further, I spot a large one in the distance. “Fortune Cigarettes, ‘yan, (That is Fortune Cigarettes),” Zenaida states.
I used to think that Fortune was defunct - several people have told me that it no longer operates. But Zenaida tells me the opposite. They still make cigarettes there, according to her. I look into this and find out several things. Fortune Cigarettes was bought out by Philip Morris International, so now the manufacturer is called PMFTC, short for Philip Morris Fortune Tobacco Corporation. The manufacturing site in Marikina is one of two in the Philippines, the second one being in Tanauan City, in the province of Batangas, some 70 kilometers away from this one.
Looking at the sheer size of it, it is clear why the barangay was named after the factory. Even from a distance, I could tell it was large. It loomed over the barangay almost menacingly. Last year, when I was first learning about Fortune, I remember being so struck by the idea of such a large factory operating in such close proximity to where people live.
Living with factories
In all honesty, there is not a lot of color in Fortune. The houses are often unfinished concrete, sad shades of gray and gathering black from soot and dust. Occasionally, there will be a rare bright thing – often a gate or a door roughly painted vibrant red, blue, or green; sometimes a parked tricycle painted pink to match the standard color of the drivers association. There are few plants, or even soil, as most of the place is concrete. Dark green moss clings to the walls dampened by this year’s typhoon season, varying in coverage the deeper I venture into the housing complex. There is a small creek that runs under several houses. It has an indescribable murky color, somewhere in between gray and green, with an unpleasant odor. The fences that border the factories are gray too, and much taller than the homes that people like Zenaida live in.
Life in Fortune has been this way for a long time. Here, factories like the chocolate factory and the cigarette manufacturer are a given. Pollution is a certainty. People just had to live with these things. Based on conversations with long term residents, factories have existed here since at least the 70s, alongside settlements that housed hundreds of people.
Blessy and several other women I had encountered here in Fortune told me that the factories were an unpleasant presence in their barangay. Camz, another mother from Fortune, who herself had four young children, told me that the sounds from manufacturing often kept her kids up at night. The smoke made the children of the barangay sick with constant runny noses, cough, or even asthma. It was difficult for a mother to raise healthy children in these conditions, compounded by a lack of financial resources to opt for healthier alternatives.
But it wasn’t just the smoke that bothered the residents. Janice, another woman from last year’s fieldwork, lived in a two-story house she shared with her mother. Behind their home ran a creek. She complained that there were certain times that an unpleasant odor would make its way to their home and she blamed the creek. She had a suspicion that one of the factories nearby was dumping their manufacturing waste into the creek.
Judging by the looks of the body of water, it wouldn’t have been too far off of a guess.
Factories in Fortune contaminate both the air and the waterways. The residents like Zenaida, Blessy, Janice, and Camz recognize that these things are not good for their health – both their own as individuals, their families, and their communities. Constant exposure to polluted air leads to respiratory issues. This is something proven by science but also by the residents’ lived experiences. Polluted waterways such as the creek behind Janice’s house cause discomfort, and more largely can be a breeding ground for harmful, disease-bringing pests like mosquitoes.
In previous interviews, the women shared with me that there is not much to be done about their current living situations. The option of moving out, away from the polluted barangay, is slim. Average rent per month in the city is anywhere between five to twenty thousand pesos, depending on the size and location of the unit. Zenaida told me before that they paid only one thousand five hundred for their tiny studio. For lower income households, low rent takes precedence over safety.
With moving away out of the question, there is not much to be done by the people who live in Fortune. Camz tells me that as a mother, she has no choice sometimes but to keep her children indoors. Home is where they are safe from the polluted world outside. Here, she can keep her children away from harmful air or water. She can protect them from the pollution of the world beyond their homes. Homes are treated as respite from the perils of a polluted world. Mothers like Camz are able to limit their children’s exposure to toxicity by regulating indoor air quality through better ventilation. Alternatively, seeking out more open, “green” spaces like parks has also been done to reduce exposure to polluted air.
Mapping
Based on these conversations and observations, I created the following map:
It details the locations of some factories in Fortune and in some parts of Parang. Residential areas are also plotted. I have removed all place names and identifying features to protect the residents’ privacy.
The map is informed by a few things: aside from my own experience of the place, I also dug deeper into Marikina’s urban planning and development. I was not able to find the latest zoning map, but found one from 2016 [1]. Some things may have changed, but it accurately depicts Fortune as a heavy industrial zone (I3-Z). According to the 2006 Zoning Ordinance of the city [2], heavy industrial zones are designated for “highly pollutive/non-hazardous; highly pollutive/extremely hazardous; non-pollutive/extremely hazardous; pollutive/extremely hazardous manufacturing and processing establishments.”
The third volume of the Comprehensive Land Use Plan (CLUP) (Vol. 3) [3] also explicitly states that industrial processes should not cause any negative effects on the environment. Though the document does not explicitly qualify what counts as negative effects, it goes without saying that polluted air and waterways should count as harm inflicted.
Further, according to the CLUP Guidebook (Vol. 1) [4], industrial zones are required to have a buffer of 100 meters from residential areas. But the reality in Fortune is far from policy. Some houses share fences with factories. This has resulted in adverse health effects for the women I spoke with and their families.
In a 2011 study, Brender, Maantay, and Chakraborty [5] wrote about how living near environmental hazards can contribute to “poorer health and disproportionate health outcomes.” Their study was a literature review of previous work done on correlating proximity to hazards and certain health conditions, including respiratory ailments. They concluded that while the studies often differed in methodology, there is still enough evidence to point towards “significant relationships between residential proximity to environmental hazards and adverse health outcomes.” In other words, living so near to environmental pollutants can and will have repercussions on people’s health.
They ended their article with a powerful message which I echo: “Even in the absence of complete scientific proof, enough evidence of potential harm being done exists to justify taking steps to rectify the problem and to protect the public from potentially harmful exposures when all available evidence points to plausible risk.” The potential for harm should be enough to urge local governments to act towards the protection of its constituents.
My conversations with the mothers of Fortune all point towards harm – dirty air, unclean waterways. It is not an ideal place to raise a healthy child. The existence of places like Fortune, where people live with pollution on a daily basis, lends well to a larger conversation about incongruent exposure to toxicity. Residents of Fortune experience more pollution by virtue of their proximity to the source – factories. More affluent barangays such as the neighboring Marikina Heights might not report the same complaints or problems, since they are further away from the factories.
Fortune profoundly illustrates the uneven exposures to pollution in everyday settings. But, Fortune is still home. It is still a community – a community that deserves better than factories that pollute their lives.
↬ Francesca Mauricio.
#embodied_ecologies #Philippines #Marikina #pollution #toxicity