affirmations
It's interesting how the inevitability of (physical) distanciations serve as furnaces to cement ties within the family. It's official, our (extended) family has become transnationalized. It did occur to me however that it has been transnational since before anyway. I was born to a family where the father worked as an entertainer in Japan, and later served with the US military to acquire imperial citizenship. Though we never heard of him again, we were still aware of the fact that he was out there, somewhere... making ourselves conscious of his being outside of the boundaries of the nation - here the intervention of education makes itself apparent... I must confess that 10 years of brainwashing resulted to me thinking of Filipinos abroad as nothing but a bunch of traitors...
I've always thought of our family as one that is safely sheltered in the national boundaries. The family finds pride in its political-economic roots, from both the north and the south. The southern connection is really interesting. It puts me as a fifth generation Chinese migrant. For terra-association, I'm Tagalog and I've always felt Tagalog. The family's oral tradition speaks however of my great-great grandfather as a patriotic Filipino, contrary to what many scholars say about him, at least tacitly. No matter how Tagalized our family has become, it is interesting how we always find the space to romanticize our "ethnic" background, tracing perhaps to our family's involvement in national politics... at least up to the time of my great grandfather who died from an asthma attack and an overdose of heroin treatments. Other than that, you'd hear members of our family deploy similar monikers against Muslims in Maharlika village or Tandang Sora as any Tagalog family would do. Case in point: when General Dolorfino was taken as a "guest" by the MNLF, my grandmother uttered that the military should never trusted the Tausug because they are known for their treacherous nature. I replied by saying that [Filipinos] can't be trusted as well, if we look at what the Jabidah massacre stands for in historical memory.
Going back to the event occurring as I write this piece - it's not as if our family is a stranger to migrations. Both my grandparents come from the periphery of the imperial center of this nation. My mother speaks two "dialects" while I speak only one, though I undestand most of what Ilocanos can probably say in the slowest possible way. But today's movement within the family is couched in different terms. Before it was purely a performative exercise of social and political mobility - My aunt studied in Syracuse through the copra extractions from peasants in the former province of Cotabato. Today, the reasons for travel are couched in both social-mobility and survival terms. My mother has been away from her country of origin for the lngest time while we enjoy regular boxes of goods sent from the US but probably made in neighboring Malaysia or Vietnam anyway.
I've always thought of our family as one that is safely sheltered in the national boundaries. The family finds pride in its political-economic roots, from both the north and the south. The southern connection is really interesting. It puts me as a fifth generation Chinese migrant. For terra-association, I'm Tagalog and I've always felt Tagalog. The family's oral tradition speaks however of my great-great grandfather as a patriotic Filipino, contrary to what many scholars say about him, at least tacitly. No matter how Tagalized our family has become, it is interesting how we always find the space to romanticize our "ethnic" background, tracing perhaps to our family's involvement in national politics... at least up to the time of my great grandfather who died from an asthma attack and an overdose of heroin treatments. Other than that, you'd hear members of our family deploy similar monikers against Muslims in Maharlika village or Tandang Sora as any Tagalog family would do. Case in point: when General Dolorfino was taken as a "guest" by the MNLF, my grandmother uttered that the military should never trusted the Tausug because they are known for their treacherous nature. I replied by saying that [Filipinos] can't be trusted as well, if we look at what the Jabidah massacre stands for in historical memory.
Going back to the event occurring as I write this piece - it's not as if our family is a stranger to migrations. Both my grandparents come from the periphery of the imperial center of this nation. My mother speaks two "dialects" while I speak only one, though I undestand most of what Ilocanos can probably say in the slowest possible way. But today's movement within the family is couched in different terms. Before it was purely a performative exercise of social and political mobility - My aunt studied in Syracuse through the copra extractions from peasants in the former province of Cotabato. Today, the reasons for travel are couched in both social-mobility and survival terms. My mother has been away from her country of origin for the lngest time while we enjoy regular boxes of goods sent from the US but probably made in neighboring Malaysia or Vietnam anyway.
posted by Janssen at
11:55 PM
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