Evelyn Pacheco Mangulabnan was born in Manila. She spent part of her childhood in Mariveles, Bataan, where her father worked in the carpentry shop of the National Shipyard and Steel Company (Nassco). She was the eldest of eight brothers and sisters. The family called her Belen. She wanted to write, and dreamed of a career in journalism. But her parents wanted her to become a teacher. She enrolled in the Philippine Normal College in Manila and received her BSEEd in 1969. She received very high ratings in her board exams, and also ranked first in competitive teachers’ examinations in Bataan.
She pursued her dream and became a writer. She wrote a literary column and served in her senior year as editor-in-chief of the school paper, The Torch. She became an active member of the College Editors Guild of the Philippines (CEGP), serving at one time as its national secretary.
Friends described her as pleasant and soft-spoken. She did not talk much but she was patient with people, explaining issues and freely sharing what she knew. People often listened to what she said.
The Bataan Export Processing Zone, opened in 1972, spans some 1,600 hectares in the town of Mariveles and surrounding areas in Bataan. In 1969, two barrios called Camaya and Nassco in Mariveles heard the news that the Marcos administration was starting expropriation proceedings to build the industrial zone. While they still had work in the area, residents had to find new places to live in faraway relocation areas.
There was resistance from the two barrios and among the leaders of this resistance was Segismundo Pacheco, a local union officer, and the father of Evelyn, by then a certified teacher. Evelyn joined her father in the activities launched by the community and by Nassco workers to protest the relocation. She immersed herself in these activities, and was an attentive listener to the teach-ins being conducted by student groups from Manila coming to support their struggles.
She was soon recruited to the Kabataang Makabayan (KM). She moved to Manila and opened community work in the Paco area. She organized nursery schools for street children and gave mothers from the community some instruction in health and hygiene, and basic childcare. She also encouraged them to engage in political action, to join discussion groups and to study current issues such as why prices of goods kept on rising.
Evelyn herself joined many rallies and demonstrations in 1970 and 1971.
Also she became part of a network of student organizers for the “mouth of Pasig” area, covering such schools as Adamson University, Philippine Normal College, Pamantasan ng Lungsod ng Maynila, Mapua University, Feati University, Philippine School for Arts and Trades and Sta. Isabel College.
She met and married fellow activist Ric Mangulabnan from Mapua University and gave birth in 1972 to a baby girl she named Earnest.
The young family moved to Bataan where Evelyn found a job as teacher at Jose Rizal Institute in Orion town. Shortly, however, Marcos declared martial law, and the couple, both known to be activists and seeking to avoid arrest, left their child to relatives, and went underground. They continued to work in the province, especially among the residents of barangays Nassco and Camaya who had been displaced from their old locations and were still seeking proper relocation and just compensation for the last they had lost.
Later they left Bataan and in September 1977, Evelyn’s family was told the two had been killed in Nueva Ecija. Relatives tried to claim the remains but failed.
Evelyn had a very promising future as teacher and with her sharp mind and dedication to teaching, she might have become school principal one day. She chose to fight a dictatorship, however. This cut short her life and the career she might have developed. She was almost 29 years old at the time of her assumed death.
