Ancestral Trauma,Filipino Spirituality & Growing up mixed-race: interview with the Community Storytelling Composition Project
Ancestral Trauma,Filipino Spirituality & Growing up Mixed-Race: Interview with the Community Storytelling Composition Project
How our lineage and ancestors influence us today…
Recently, I was interviewed for the Community Storytelling Composition project, a platform for community, social, and political-based struggles to be heard through the lens of performance.
It is a project that creates space for both community member's narratives and conversations to not only be shared, but to generate dialogue amongst our local & global neighbors, provoking collective listening to initiate change.
Visit their page to find out more.
My interview was a part of the project A Call for Justice. The collected stories are combined to create a performance-based work acknowledging an unpleasant truth - that our country has profited from oppression since its inception. The piece hopes to shine a spotlight on racial injustice - both from those who have experienced it and those who have perpetuated it.
“I was born in Germany because my family is a military family, so we were stationed at a German Air-force Space, but I also have a long lineage of family there in Koln. My grandmother is from Germany as well, she lived there most of her life and later moved to the USA with my grandfather, a Filipino man who grew up in Hawaii and joined the US Air-force.
My mother is half-German, half-Filipino, she and I lived right across the street from my grandparents for most of my life. For most of my childhood, I was really raised by my grandparents, and that was such a beautiful upbringing because I really got to feel that a sense of - you know in a lot of cultures it’s pretty normal to be raised by your grandparents - so it was lovely to be raised by both of them.
My grandmother really set the tone for all of the folklore, the ancestry, we learned a lot about German food, and culture.”
And only recently, have I started to understand the beauty and pain of my Filipino ancestry
My grandparents
“That was the first time that I actually thought about the fact that I am mixed-race. I walked through the world as a white person and I gain a lot of privilege from being white.”
Back in 2016 I started doing a lot of anti-racist organizing, with Milta Vega Cardona and The People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond. That was the first time that I actually thought about the fact that I am mixed-race. Because I walk through the world as a white person and I gain a lot of privilege from being white.
I started to look back on a lot of my childhood as this huge push into trying to assimilate into whiteness. My mother jokingly told stories about experiencing racism and perhaps wouldn’t maybe put it in those terms. But we grew up lower middle class, relatively poor. And also I grew up watching Fox News. Everything was this push towards a being a white, middle class family.
That was a huge mindfuck! I didn’t grow up thinking I am mixed race. I grew up thinking all of us were white.
The fact that that never occurred to me, and the fact that we grew up in such proximity to whiteness and striving for whiteness and striving for more money was a huge realization.
Overcoming Imposter Syndrome & Ancestral Trauma
“For the last year I’ve been having an incredible experience, reclaiming my Filipino ancestry through hearing some of [my grandfather’s stories] My grandfather used to say “I was stupid, dumb, not educated enough” and to hear him internalize that sense of white supremacy is heavy.
My whole life I blamed my mother for giving me this sense of imposter syndrome. I think a lot of us have imposter syndrome. I’ve started a non-profit organization. I’ve done really fun, awesome, amazing things in my life. And the whole time, the whole way, the voice in my head is going: Who the hell gave you the right? Who do you think you are? It’s heavy. It held me back a lot. And I watched my mother do that do herself too…”
Ancestral trauma is a huge aspect that I was not recognizing for a lot of my life. Some people in this world are actually made to feel like impostors. Impostor syndrome isn’t just something that your brain just comes up with to trick you. It is an element of your lineage that is perpetrated by colonialism that is made to make certain people feel that they are imposters. That they aren’t good enough. That they aren’t white enough. That they aren’t rich enough.
“Ancestral trauma is a huge aspect that I was not recognizing for a lot of my life. Some people in this world are actually made to feel like impostors. Impostor syndrome isn’t just something that your brain just comes up with to trick you. It is an element of your lineage that is perpetrated by colonialism that is made to make certain people feel that they are imposters. That they aren’t good enough. That they aren’t white enough. That they aren’t rich enough.”
Filipino Ancestry and Folklore
“One of the things that was most fruitful for me is starting to do research and digging into Western Vissayan or pre-colonial Filipino folklore and spirituality.
Reading about that helped me put myself in the context. I grew up Catholic, but I was always more interested in talking to flowers, plants, digging in the dirt, and coming up with poems, spells and burying them in the dirt. I don’t know where I got some of these ideas, but I don’t think it was from television.
In Filipino folklore and spirituality, there’s this idea that everything has an energy and essence. It helped me to step out of a culture of hyper-individualism and into a place of recognizing that the way that I see the world and the way that I can connect to the energy in the world actually comes from the long history and lineage of people that believe that everything is alive.”
“It helped me to step out of a culture of hyper-individualism and into a place of recognizing that the way that I see the world and the way that I can connect to the energy in the world actually comes from the long history and lineage of people that believe that everything is alive.”
Reclamation & Anti-Racism
“I work with a lot of clients that feel a sense of extreme loss and grief around not having that connection to their ancestry. When our ancestors came to America, we had to give up a lot in order to become “white” and what we had to give up was pieces of ourselves and our ancestry.
A lot of people deeply feel isolated. It might not come up as a sense of where do I come from, but it shows more as a sense of feeling of emptiness, of what can I be connected to, who came before me that can show me how to navigate these experiences?
I’ve watched people transform - studying their ancestors, rediscovering some of their old traditions, and feeling that you have a place in the world. I think that’s huge. It can happen collectively and individually, but it starts with allowing yourself to feel grief and loss.”
“Being anti-racist is about reclaiming your humanity.”
If you liked this interview, visit The Community Storytelling Composition Project for more interesting interviews like this.