Poverty and the One-Third World

I am an immigrant woman of the Two-Thirds World, who is living with the One-Third World.
I first came across Esteva and Prakash’s concept of the One Third/Two Thirds World via Chandra Mohanty’s Feminism Without Borders. The concepts recognize the transnational nature of capital, and how policies instituted by people in the One-Third World (middle and [...]

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The Women’s Desk

Back in my student activist days in the Philippines, I’d occasionally cut classes to march with anti-imperialist coalitions. One particular coalition tried to ensure representation by designating a workers’ desk, a peasants’ desk, the migrants’ desk, and so on. To represent kababaihan, women, the organization also created a “women’s desk.”
Choosing representatives for workers, peasants, migrants [...]

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We may be Brown, but we can take on the White Man’s Burden.

“The Filipino people are the most pro-American people, maybe even more pro-American than the Americans themselves.”
Ladies and gentlemen, that was our President Gloria Arroyo, with a candid description of how she regards her country’s former colonizers. And she’s hardly alone in this attitude. Many Filipinos do promote this idea of a westernized Philippines, [...]

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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 [...]

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Good Reads: Fit to Be Citizens? by Natalia Molina

In Fit to Be Citizens?, Natalia Molina gives a thorough but engaging account of how public health discourse was deployed to exclude non-white immigrants and institutionalize racism in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Los Angeles. Clothed under the aura of scientific objectivity, she illustrates how “diseased” immigrants—starting with Chinese launders, then Japanese farmers, [...]

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