‘…I began using the Internet in 1991. In 1995, having lived away from the Philippines for a while, I began to check out the web and to use it to reconnect with my roots. This is when I found www.filipina.com, a web site whose homepage title was “mail-order-brides from the Philippines.” I was stunned and upset… Hoping to find better websites [with features written by Filipinas about Filipinas at home and abroad], I did a Yahoo! search for the word Filipina but became disheartened when I found numerous site results that were just the same thing—Filipinas looking for foreign pen pals, friends, and husbands. My dismay grew into horror when I also found many explicit websites about Philippine bar girls, sex tours, and pornography. I was miserable at how these sites used Filipina within their domain names…’
—excerpt from “Creating NewFilipina.com and the Rise of Cyberpinays,” by Perla Paredes Daly in Pinay Power, edited by Melinda de Jesus.
(Please see Filipina Presence 1995-2003 for a glimpse of what I found back in 1995).
i’m filipina. and like many filipinos, both my parents are also “pure filipinos” although they have spanish or chinese blood in their malay, indio lineage. most filipinos would call me mestiza filipina, and if I were that girl-brainwashed-by-commercialism-and-colonialisms still, I would lift my chin with programmed pride and dully think something of it. that colonized twit is gone now, and at this point, what really counts for me is that I am proud to be a Filipina (regardless of the Filipina stereotypes that are out there or the disappointment in how the Philippine government shamefully allows poverty to run rampant and brain drain to continue).
I believe that my ancestry, family karma, and personal dharma has brought me to a certain point in not only my journey but also within the evolution of humanity… i believe that my pagka-Filipino and my womanhood are major filters in my soul’s experience as a human being…
in the world as it is today, I see myself as a global citizen since I have grown up in both the U.S. and the Philippines, and my outlook on nation, humanity and spirituality is a mix of cultural perspectives plus hardwon insight to our human experience as spiritual beings. (or its just all an Illusion of my ego-based self)….
When i was 10, my mom, a widow, moved us all—her, me and my brothers—from California to the Philippine Islands, to join her family, the Ramos clan, in the little city of Bacolod. We were balikbayans during the 70s when martial law was going on. I was of course, different—speaking halting ilonggo with an American twang(you can imagine the teasing) at the all-girls-school of St. Scho(where I learned the mechanics of being a goody-two-shoes), but otherwise quite happy in my new-found Philippine life, friends and family.
Then later, during my college days in the 80s at Ateneo and U.P. Diliman, just some of the Manila hotbeds of student activism, i became a subversive, reading forbidden books and demonstrating against the crimes and dictatorship of Marcos and his Dynasty and becoming very into the “search for Filipino identity” and the examinations&rantings against colonial mentality, militarism and imperialism, the offsprings of the ancient nightmare that patriarchy can be.
on the outside, i may seem the 40+ year old conformist… but on the inside, I am still a radical, spiritual activist.
my interests? not necessarily in the following order they are: Bahala meditations, baybayin jewelry design, babaylan explorations. identifying limiting beliefs and crippled thought from colonization and patriarchy. Family, Web publishing, Filipina and Filipino identity and empowerment, women’s circles, gardening, yoga, digital art, filipino indigenous spirituality movement, reading, meditation, prayer, contemplation, writing, spiritual prose poetry, drum circles, dream journeying, dream interpretations. Existing outside of dogma.
what the-powers-that-be tell me is still not enough. i’m a Filipina still asking questions… still seeking answers.
(or its just all an Illusion of my ego-based self)….