Two Students

About a year ago, a heated exchange broke out between two of my students. This was a community college, where most of the attendees were first-generation college students. The discussion topic touched on career goals, and a shy nursing student, I’ll call her Cam, spoke for the first time. Cam did not really want to [...]

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In Block & White

This discussion on Racialicious reminds me of those horrible skin lightening product commercials I saw on television the last time I was in Manila. If you’re Filipina, you know the brand I’m talking about. Block & White. And if you’re not Filipina but Asian, you probably have equivalent products and brands. I was no longer [...]

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The Long Run

I’ve been trying for a while now to write a post about running. After all, I do have the word “runner” in my blog subtitle. But I kept hitting the wall. So I’m grateful that John L. Parker helped me find the words. There’s a reason why many runners consider Parker’s Once a Runner the [...]

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They’re baaaack.

In Maneuvers: The International Politics of Militarizing Women’s Lives, Cynthia Enloe defines militarization as “the step-by-step process by which something becomes controlled by, dependent on, or derives value from the military or militaristic criteria.” It is an insidious process, one rooted in accepting that the world is a dangerous place and that having enemies is [...]

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Happy Birthday, Yuri Kochiyama

Today marks the eighty-seventh birthday of Yuri Kochiyama, an admirable woman who has spent the past six decades working for social justice. When her family was interned in an Arkansas internment camp during World War II, Kochiyama saw firsthand the parallels between the treatment of African Americans and Japanese Americans. The petite Kochiyama is a [...]

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Marriage Equality

In honor of California’s affirmation of marriage equality rights, as well as Asian Pacific American Heritage month, here are some interesting tidbits from my previous readings: New Peoples Army Recognizes Same-Sex Marriage by LeiLani Dowell On Feb. 4, [2005], the New People’s Army (NPA) conducted the first same-sex marriage in the Philippines. Two guerrilla fighters [...]

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Bayanihan in America

My grandfather used to tell me stories about bayanihan. Of how, when a family needed to move, neighbors gathered around the house. They slid bamboo poles under the structure, forming a sort of bamboo harness. Then individuals would each take hold of a pole, and together they would hoist up the entire structure and walk [...]

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“A Woman’s Place is in the Struggle”

The title of this post comes from a protest banner I saw at my first anti-imperialism rally. It was in the late 1980s, I was in my first year of college in Manila. I had already began thinking about feminism and social activism, but what these concepts meant exactly were not yet fully worked out [...]

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