THAT EVANGELISTA was able to finish college at all was already a great achievement. Although official data are hard to come by, just 400 or so Mangyan are college graduates, according to the Mangyan Heritage Center, a private foundation. Evangelista was able to attend the Divine Word College in Calapan during the first two years in college, and on to the Manuel Luis Quezon University (MLQU) in Quiapo on his third and fourth year only because he was supported by the same missionary who had taken his mother decades before. And even in college, he had to put up with insults about his people, although some were perhaps not intended to be so. He says that upon learning he was from Mindoro, one classmate asked, quite innocently, “Is it true that the Mangyan have tails?”

Yet this only made Evangelista more determined to plod on, and to do his best. When finances (or the lack thereof) got in the way of his dream, he taught beginner’s piano to children, for he knew how to play, having inherited his mother’s love for music. His mother was a consummate pianist who played classical music and was the first katutubo to have a premier piano recital in Calapan.

	BUSY with his law practice these days, Evangelista says he'll go back to the mountains of Mindoro someday to share what he has learned with the community that nurtured him. [photo by Lala Ordenes-Cascolan]

Evangelista wrote to various organizations, asking them to “be a part of history” by providing a scholarship and stipend to a Mangyan whose goal was to finish law. But part of the P4,000 he received as stipend from his eventual sponsors, the famed Ayala business clan, he sent home to his mother in Mindoro.

At his MLQU law graduation in 2000, his grandparents were there, in their full ethnic garb, bahag and all, to celebrate the moment with him. It was the culmination of his dream, and it was sweeter, he says, than when he passed the Philippine Bar in 2001, or when he received a master’s degree in law in the United Kingdom in 2005. When he walked up the stage to get his law diploma in 2000, he was accepting it not just for himself, not just for his family, but for his people.

Evangelista has his own private practice now, and is comfortable in a barong or in a suit. He is currently based in Metro Manila, where he sits in the board of the Mangyan Heritage Center, a foundation set up by Mangyan missionaries Fr. Ewald Dinter, Antoon Postma and Jesuit volunteer Quint Fansler. But someday, he says, he will go back to the mountains of Mindoro to be with his people. It is for them that he works hard, he says, so that when he returns home he can share what he has learned and contribute in his small way to the community that nurtured him.

Renato Zosimo Evangelista has not stopped dreaming. He is now working to consolidate the eight Mangyan tribes to form what he calls a Mangyan consultative assembly, which will serve as the Mangyan’s united voice in social, cultural, educational, and economic concerns. He is patterning the assembly after similar groups formed by Australian aborigines and American Indians. He says it’s about time that the Mangyan determine their future based on their own initiative, that people see the Mangyan situation based on the Mangyan’s viewpoint, and not on ready-made solutions “force-fed” to them by the government and other well-meaning groups.

“Maybe I’m too ambitious,” he says, “but I think it’s the only way.”