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Leia Albornoz's avatar

1. I'm a teenage fil-am with not a lot of filipino friends. my parents did not teach me tagalog and i am trying to learn on my own. i'm also going through a journey of decolonization and learning more about my pre-colonial ancestors and their history.

2. i love OPM from modern to older OPM. music has been a huge part of my identity as a fil-am. i've also been reading on pre-colonial filipino artifacts like jewelry. those sources are really interesting and make me happy because i love wearing gold hoops just like my ancestors did.

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Trish's avatar

What made you interested to study more about Philippine culture?

I'm in a bit of a transitional period of my life - I'm in the process of reframing my life after hustle culture took up the first 20 years of my life. I'm grateful for where it got me but I'm ready to have work/school not be the center of my life anymore. I'm married to another Filipino and we're both very proud of our culture but we really only know pop culture and whatever our parents know, which of course in itself can be very biased. I want to learn more about Philippine culture and history for myself and for our future children. It feels like a part of me that has been missing but at the same time something that's been there all along, maybe just hiding; once I learned what kapwa was I realized its tenets were how I lived and viewed my life in relation to the rest of the world before I even had the word for it.

What is your favorite resource (book, film, article, etc.) about Philippine culture? What about this resource resonates with you, that you feel might be an important truth about the Filipino identity?

Current fave is Babaylan: Filipinos and the Call of the Indigenous compiled by Leny Mendoza Strobel. I read it over the summer and it really kickstarted my journey towards learning more about the culture. In particular it speaks to me as a Filipina woman in the diaspora to know that the strength and conviction I've previously attributed to being American and obnoxious actually has its roots instead in the strength and perseverance my ancestors showed in the face of impossible adversity.

Thank you so much for this space!

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