Weaving Our Kuwentos (Stories) toward Ginhawa (Aliveness): Pilipinx American Social Work MotherScholars Enacting Praxes of Survival and Thrivance in the Academy

Abstract

Five Pilipina American (PA) social work MotherScholars, from a doctoral student to an interim dean, used kuwentuhan (Pilipinx methodology) to amplify their survivance and thrivance despite attempted exclusion, reduction, and distortion as Pilipinos by coloniality/modernity. Grounded in decolonial feminism (the view that oppressions such as sexism and racism co-constitute coloniality and that unsettling oppressions disrupts hegemony) and Pinayism (an integrated framework revaluing the labor, intellect, and nurturance of mothering through a cultural lens), the authors work coalitionally across their PA diversity to re-center ginhawa (aliveness or sense of ease and wellness). Together, they embarked on an iterative self-study process of data generation and analysis that included presenting, recording, and transcribing two panel presentations at a premier social work conference, writing reflections and hay(na)ku poems about their experiences and processes, reading and rereading the data, and meeting and discussing the data, their process, and past and current events pertinent to the content. The stories highlight how the authors are living and enlivening decoloniality, and that, in so doing, they continue a lineage of those who have resisted coloniality/modernity and promoted thrivance. Collectively, these kuwentos (stories), reflections, hay(na)ku, and their weaving together, are memory, resistance, counter-storytelling, and healing.

1. Introducing

As five Pilipina1 American (PA), social work MotherScholars (Matias et al. 2022), we persist within the colonial enclosures of academia by not only resisting coloniality/modernity, but by “living and breathing life” into the spaces we inhabit, as Alma M. Ouanesisouk Trinidad (masked for review) said during a panel presentation. Together, we weave our stories in a collective telling of descendancy from centuries of resisting attempted erasure in body, spirit, and mind, somehow remaining whole. Our counter-narratives uproot colonial fantasies of dominance and assert a decisive Pilipina epistemological continuity despite ongoing silencing, marginalization, and aggression. Our critical reflections depict our experiences embodying ginhawa, a Tagalog word that represents a living, integrated wellness practice, during the delivery of two relationally grounded panel presentations at a prestigious national academic conference and our subsequent collaborative arts-based reflection process (Paz 2008).

This present paper showcases our collaborative autoethnographic work as five PA social work MotherScholars, from a doctoral student to an interim dean who traverse the oft-times unwelcoming academic milieu, and delivers critical knowledge about survival and thrivance, despite attempted exclusion, reduction, silencing, and distortion due to coloniality. Our co-created knowledge joins a legacy of women and nonbinary people of the global majority who have pushed back on white supremacy in academia and the precarious positions in which we are placed in the hopes of further opening the academy to increasingly diverse and brilliant voices (Vakalahi and Starks 2010). Through the sharing of kuwentos (stories) and reflections, we insist on thrivance for ourselves, our communities, and our lineages (academic, familial, and otherwise).

2. Pilipina MotherScholars Moving Past Colonial Machinations

Failed.

Your Attempted

Erasure of Us.

(Joanna C. La Torre)

The academy is both integral to and a tool of colonial/modernity, which centers whiteness and disenfranchises and dispossesses Indigenous Peoples and knowledges, laying them bare for expropriation. PAs descend from diasporic survivors of Pilipinos impacted by 400 years of colonization in the Philippines and endure interlocking effects of racialization, health and mental health disparities, and lower help-seeking rates (Agoncillo 1990; Tuazon and Clemente 2022).

PA scholars reckon with colonially enacted epistemicide that centered missionization and westernized education, enacted by both Spain and the U.S., which variously impacted Pilipinx knowledge (re)production (Abinales and Amoroso 2017; Hall and Tandon 2017). The Spaniards advanced a feudal encomienda system of resource and labor extraction wherein many native Pilipinos were compelled to work and pay tributes to the Spanish, essentially helping to build and finance their own colonization. Spain relied heavily on missionaries to both promulgate western culture and dominate Pilipinos while simultaneously extracting knowledge about Pilipino cultures. U.S. colonization more so focused on epistemicide through the education system, deploying 500 American teachers, known as the Thomasites, charged with disseminating the English language and equipped with American textbooks. The colonial projects, on the whole, have harmed Pilipino peoples, knowledge systems, and lands for generations (Abinales and Amoroso 2017; Agoncillo 1990).

Colonialism, and related racialization, have had lasting effects on PAs including disparate mental health outcomes and low representation in prestigious environments like academia, though PAs face an enduring lack of research attention. For example, an August 2024 query of PubMed, a major medical database, found only 82 articles when searching for “filipin* & american & ‘mental health’”, compared with 1671 when repeated by substituting “asian” for “filipin*”. A similar August 2024 query of ERIC, a major education database, yielded 323 results for “filipino or filipinx or filipina”, versus 20,416 for “asian.” Though not exhaustive, the paucity of studies remains quite concerning given that PAs comprise nearly 20% of Asian Americans, or 4.2 million people, according to the Pew Research Center (Budiman and Ruiz 2021).

Still, what sparse evidence exists suggests that exposure to the historically traumatic events like colonial violence and genocidal policies, combined with contemporary exposure to racialization in diaspora, evince Colonial Mentality, a condition of internalized racism which has been associated with mental health disparities for PAs (David and Okazaki 2006; Sevillano et al. 2023b). Similarly, there is disparate representation of PAs in academia combined with a substantial gap in the scientific study of PAs in education, predominantly positioning them as a referent group for whites or collapsed within that of Asian Americans (Maramba et al. 2022). The first PA-focused national survey, in 2013, found 114 PA professors across the U.S., including only 16 full professors, 46 associate professors, and 52 assistant professors (Maramba 2022; Maramba and Nadal 2013). Of these, 61 were women and 4 were professors of social work. In 2019, Asian women made up 4.2% of tenured and 5.3% of tenure-track faculty (Race and Ethnicity of Female Faculty with Percentage by Tenure Status, Fall 2019 2021). Yet, disaggregated data pertaining to PAs remain difficult to locate, masking the nature and extent of challenges faced by PAs as historically marginalized in academia, especially at the doctoral level and extending into faculty positions.

In addition to white supremacy, women, non-binary, and queer people of color endure the compounding impacts of intersecting oppressions as they navigate the white cisheteropatriarchy of academia (Matias et al. 2019). Matias and other PA women scholars coined the term MotherScholars to describe how the two identities are inextricably linked and inform one another, and how holding this identity intersection interacts with systems of oppression to create different lived experiences. Matias and colleagues further explain that “the Motherscholar is both the mother, who draws from her practice of mothering to inform her research and pedagogy and the scholar who draws from her activism to inform her practice of mothering” (Matias et al. 2022, pp. 179–80). PA MotherScholars in particular are experiencing exhaustion as they work to protect and rear both their own children and their students in the face of continued oppression (Matias et al. 2022). The underrepresentation and exclusion of PAs from faculty, combined with silence on PAs’ well-being in mental health and education research and praxis reifies disparities and attempted epistemicide. Thus, the authors have taken up the mantle of transcending the effects of coloniality to exist, persist, and succeed in academia by focusing on the cultural transmissions they received and using them and each other as guideposts, moving toward thrivance.

2.1. Inherited Resistances and Cultural Continuity

Though colonizers attempted to extinguish Pilipino cultures, vital literature describes PA cultures that not only survive but continue to be passed on from one generation to the next. The Philippines remains a diverse country with various ethnolinguistic groups, federally recognized groups of Indigenous Peoples, and religions, for example, as well as many nuanced experiences with colonization. Resistance is similarly varied with some people and groups trying to live alongside the uninvited guest while others electing to return colonial violence in kind, for example, the legendary actions of King Lapu Lapu, who killed Ferdinand Magellen. The histories are quite complex, made more so by histories of diaspora, and need great care to unpack, the elaboration of which is not the goal of this present paper. Instead, the authors offer examples of works that begin to open up spaces of exploration and which argue that Pilipinos demonstrate survivance, or survival plus resistance, as part of their cultural inheritance. Coined by Vizenor (1994), survivance is “an active sense of presence” and “[a renunciation] of dominance, tragedy, and victimry” (p. vii).

Pilipino resistance is evidenced by the variety of languages, stories, foods, and practices which still proliferate the Philippines as well as the diaspora, as well as overt challenges made to colonial powers. Mawson (2023), in her book Incomplete Conquests: The Limits of Spanish Empire in the Seventeenth-Century Philippines, describes the often thin and failing control exerted by the Spanish, the thinness of which resulted in an increased need for grotesque forms violence and intimidation. Her work also unsettles colonial narratives of complete domination, tracking instead a hybridity, adaptation, and sovereignty that emerged alongside such violence. Even processes like assimilation may be viewed as not only survival tactics but resistance tactics, especially when practices are continued stealth and passed intergenerationally.

As one example, Fernandez (2020), a Manila-born, 20th century Pilipino food writer, argued that though Spanish and U.S. colonizers promoted their own foods in the Islands, Pilipino cuisine, foodways, practices, and wisdom remain alive and well. What Fernandez depicts is more of a veneer of colonial influence wherein though colonial foods entered into aspects of Philippine life, the native influence has always remained, saying, “Philippine foodways clearly reflect Philippine history: the foreign influences being indigenized into a changing culture” (p. 196). She goes on to say that “foreign food is adjusted to the local state, not vice versa”, giving several examples of western foods adapted to Pilipino taste, such as fried chicken that is first marinated in garlic and vinegar, and later claiming that religion and vernacular followed suit (p. 201). Furthermore, she stated that foods in the provinces, where the vast majority of Pilipinos live, have remained largely the same in terms of what is eaten and how it is prepared despite colonization. Fernandez further asserts that Pilipino foodways are steeped in generationally passed, environmentally specific, and time-tested wisdom and knowledge, for example, the use of souring agents in soups, which vary by region, known to both cool the body while naturally preventing spoilage in the hot climate.

Another example of PA persistence and resistance comes from the rap industry, which has long had a glass ceiling. Although many female rappers such as MC Sha-Rock, Missy Elliot, and Cardi B have cracked the glass, the ceiling has remained for other racially minoritized female rappers, including PAs. Ruby Ibarra, a rising PA female rapper, similarly refuses domination in her album Circa91, which engages critiques of racism, colonialism, colorism, and heteropatriarchy, while also celebrating women empowerment, culture, and resistance (Labrador 2021). The song Us in particular “is a loud and unapologetic proclamation of Filipina-ness, Peminism, Pinayism” (Labrador 2021, p. 224), and has become Dr. Sevillano’s hype song, played before major speaking appearances, presentations, and moments when she needs affirmation.

Many diasporic movements of resistance and survivance are found within PA communities and cultures. Strobel’s (2001) work, for example, has catalyzed a growing decolonial PA movement, inspiring and shaping many scholars, community workers, and culture bearers alike. A group of Igorot American activists, scholars, and educators formed Indigenous Knowledge, Art, and Truth (IKAT), where they have shared presentations and resources about their experiences as Indigenous Peoples not indigenous to the U.S. (Macapugay et al. 2020). Additionally, their Instagram page www.instagram.com/ikat.voices/ (accessed on 15 August 2024) shares critical knowledge about both their specific cultural inheritance and survivance as well as anti-Indigeneity experienced within PA communities. Macapugay et al. (2020) warn PAs against exotifying Indigenous Peoples and tokenizing their cultures in identity reclamation processes.

The authors understand their lives, families, and communities through the lens of survivance with the intention of reclaiming, recasting, and reimagining the brilliance, creativity, and ingenuity that saturates their ancestral inheritances. Engaging their own stories together, the authors aim to thicken the accounts of resistance and recenter marginalized Pilipino knowledges as an exemplar of decoloniality. They intervene upon coloniality/modernity, bolstered by critical decolonial, feminist, and Pinayist frameworks to illuminate their fortitude and persistence claiming spaces which white supremacy failed to foreclose.

2.2. Pinayist, Feminist, Decolonial, Anti-Hegemonic, Critical Intervention

When I think about past relationships, and perhaps even current ones, I sometimes think I am an “acceptable” brown person to many of my white counterparts. I have long thought that it was because I have a fairly strong command of the English language and more specifically, I don’t speak with an accent. As I started to learn more about my cultures and explored my intersecting identities I found literature that supported my hunch. Nadal (2004) speaks of two main characteristics setting apart Filipinos from other Asian groups: Catholicism and strong English proficiency.

(Cora de Leon)

This present study draws from critical, decolonial, and feminist scholarship, including Lugones (2010), Glenn (1985), and Tintiangco-Cubales’ (2005) culturally embedded Pinayism to infuse Pilipina feminism as intervention to academia. Decoloniality counters colonial/modernity with anti-hegemonic, plural, and coalitional acts of resistance, defiance, and persistence (Quijano 2007; Mignolo and Walsh 2018). Lugones (2010) and Glenn (1985) emphasize the co-constitutive nature of race, class, and gender/sex and coloniality, which produces the hyper-extraction, dispossession, and disenfranchisement of those deemed colonizable and the enrichment and elevation of those ascribed empowerment as colonizers. That is, the construction of coloniality/modernity is dependent upon the creation of a class of people (e.g., women, people of color) whose labor/resources/wealth may be expropriated and transferred to another class of people (e.g., men, white people). Thus, intervening to unsettle any categories created by coloniality/modernity is simultaneously a decolonial act, as it denaturalizes colonial suppositions, and an empowering one.

To this, we add Pinayism, a culturally embedded feminist framework which helps us respond from a place of intersectionality to resituate, resuscitate, and (re)-habilitate ourselves by liberating our lives, labor, intelligences, and identities from the limiting colonially ascribed and enforced roles as racialized women/gender expansives and MotherScholars. Pinayism encapsulates a decolonial liberatory feminism that re-values and uplifts the work of tending to the birthing and raising of children, families, communities, and movements within a Pinay (Tagalog for Pilipina woman) frame of nurturance. Together, these frameworks locate our coalitional work within multiethnic lineages of resistance while highlighting, in part, both the apparatus that has tried to contain us and its profound failure to do so. We further deploy a kuwentuhan, a culturally embedded methodology alongside poetic inquiry to acknowledge and advance our collaborative knowledge-making inside of colonially regulated space.

3. Self-Study and Kuwentuhan Methodology: Enacting Epistemology inside the Ivory Tower

Our methodological inquiry was informed by a combination of self-study (Hamilton and Pinnegar 2013; LaBoskey 2004), kuwentuhan (Francisco-Menchavez 2021; Gutierrez et al. 2023), and hay(na)ku (Tabios 2019). These approaches were woven together to form a methodological basket to contain the ways in which we, as social work scholars, understand our work, while navigating and critiquing the colonial landscapes and practices of the academy. Ultimately, this methodology provided the mechanisms to illuminate the ways our survival and thrivance make up and promote cultural continuity.

First, we drew on self-study because it is “autobiographical, historical, cultural, and political... it draws on one’s life, but it is more than that. Self-study also involves a thoughtful look at texts read, experiences had, people known and ideas considered” (Hamilton and Pinnegar 1998, p. 266). Building on this definition, we incorporated kuwentuhan, a Pilipinx culturally embedded collaborative practice of talk story (Francisco-Menchavez 2021; Gutierrez et al. 2023) to study “one’s self, one’s actions, one’s ideas, as well as the [other]” (Hamilton and Pinnegar 1998, p. 266). In alignment with Gutierrez and colleagues’ conceptualization of kuwentuhan as a research method (2023), we shared kuwentos (Tagalog for stories) to promote decoloniality, to amplify the multiplicity of PA lived experiences, and to (re)center healing—ours, our families’, and our communities’. We further animated these methodologies with our art through hay(na)ku, a culturally conceptualized poetry form developed by Pilipina writer Eileen Tabios in 2003.

We further contextualized our inquiry and paper with our positionality, a feminist intervention that destabilizes categories such as “woman” while still speaking to the strictures placed upon those assigned or perceived within that category. Alcoff (1988) developed positionality in response to a debate between cultural feminists and post-structuralists, to expand the space between woman identities overdetermined by sexism and misogyny and the conscription of woman as an anti-identity that needs total undoing. Positionality has since been invoked in research, feminist and otherwise, to expand, nuance, and contextualize both the researcher, research processes, and knowledges created, and to break from essentialized, reductive logics and claims. Putting forth and discussing openly the positionalities of the researchers aided in the authors’ ability to enrich and thicken analytic and descriptive processes while contesting hegemonic identities, roles, and processes. We now present our positionality, maintaining the order in which our kuwentos appear:

Lainey Sevillano is a Pilipina born in Olongapo City, Philippines. She/they/siya emigrated to Los Angeles, California, when she was three years old and grew up in the area now known as Historic Filipinotown. Dr. Sevillano is a first-generation student turned Assistant Professor. She is an emerging health equity scholar focused on reestablishing culture as medicine. Cora de Leon is a Latina/Pilipina daughter, sister, mother, and partner. Her overarching goal is to expand upon the idea of relationships and humanity as the main underpinnings to all aspects of her work and personal life. Joanna C. La Torre (siya/they/she) is a gender/queer, multiethnic solo mother who has been involved in PA decolonial movements since 2010. Siya aims to build upon culturally embedded interventions to remedy PA mental health disparities. At the time of writing, Mx. La Torre is a doctoral student at the University of Washington, where she is being trained by the Indigenous Wellness Research Institute. Alma M. Ouanesisouk Trinidad (she/they) is a Pinay/Filipina, born and raised on the island of Molokai, Hawai′i, mother of two youths, who has been involved in PA and other Indigenous movements. She has been part of the academy for nearly two decades, as well as involved in community-based work in Hawai′i, Michigan, Washington, and other national and international works that elevate the voices of the diverse Asian Pacific Islanders communities. Lisa Reyes Mason (she/her/siya) is Filipina-American, born in San Diego, California, to her Filipina mother and White father. She is married, mother to a teenager, and a former Catholic who chose Judaism in her late 30s. Her research, speaking, and writing focus on climate change as an urgent social justice issue.

This collective self-study project began with the five authors deciding to present two panels at a national conference on social work education. The aim of these presentations was to model how kuwentuhan can be used as a pedagogical tool to encourage critical dialogue and disrupt colonial hegemony, specifically by centering the authors’ own narratives and resisting the norming of whiteness. Panels at national conferences dedicated to PA experiences are rare. To document and celebrate the significance of our visibility at this conference, the first and second authors had the idea of audio recording the panels in the hopes of being able to reflect on these convenings at a later time. After the presentations, the first author conceptualized a self-study to explore how interactions with intersecting systems of oppression such as coloniality/modernity, cisheteropatriarchy, and white supremacy have influenced our experiences as PA MotherScholars. According to LaBoskey (2004), self-studies are self-initiated and employ multiple methods. The self-study used lived experiences (shared as kuwentos) as primary data, as well as written reflections, conversations, and hay(na)ku (Tabios 2019). Hay(na)ku are tercets, or short poems, where the first line is one word, the second is two, and the third is three.

Data Generation and Analysis

Data generation and data analysis were not isolated processes. Rather, they were immersive, iterative, collaborative, and informed one another. The transcripts from our presentations became the first dataset, which we analyzed iteratively as individuals by reading, writing, reflecting, and creating poetry, and together through discussion, reading and responding to each other’s reflections/poems and asking each other questions. Data generation and analysis were cyclical and integrated. For example, when we met to discuss our reflections (data analysis), we also created collective hay(na)ku (data generation). This reciprocal process spanned nine months (October 2023–June 2024) and included continual data review, reflection writing, virtual conversations to react and facilitate further introspection, and hay(na)ku creation, both individual and collective. We each immersed ourselves in the data generation and analysis processes in that we repeatedly read, reflected, discussed, and wrote about our experiences of the presentations, the results of which became additional data for our analysis process.

From October 2023 to June 2024, we met six times. Each meeting lasted for 60–90 min, during which we contextualized our experiences within and pertaining to current events as they intersected with our data, reflections, and hay(na)ku. We also raised critical questions about the emerging analysis and knowledge that we were generating. Each author simultaneously interrogated their own experiences with intersecting oppressions while generously sharing and creating space for difference to emerge. For example, though all of the authors are MotherScholars, three authors have transitional age or adult children, and two have children under five. Similarly, there was a mix of experiences with regard to gender/queerness, career stage, race and ethnicity, socioeconomic status (past and present), and religious background (Jewish, agnostic, Catholic in a mixed faith/Buddhist partnership).

With the aim to disrupt hegemonic ways of writing academic research papers, the authors decided not to confine our manuscript to typical ways of analysis and writing. As such, our collaborative analysis was primarily guided by our discussions of our reactions to one another’s offerings to this paper and its process. Prior to each meeting, the authors individually read each other’s written reflections line by line (Saldaña 2021) and then shared key themes and reflections with each other during the whole group meeting and developed themes (e.g., mothering, racialization). Similar to Kim et al. (2023), we shared drafts of our individual reflections and assigned writing of sections as a group throughout the analysis and writing processes, allowing for multiple rounds of feedback and triangulating our interpretations and meaning-making (Vanassche and Kelchtermans 2015). Guided by this iterative and reflexive process, each author crafted the following hay(na)ku and reflections representative of pertinent and connective stories wherein we individually and collectively defy colonial subjectification and instead create and illuminate our aliveness.

4. Respiration: Breathing Our Stories Together

Together, we present results of our counter-hegemonic endeavor at knowledge co-creation. Each author presents an hay(na)ku alongside their reflection that was cultivated in and around our collective conversations. Lainey Sevillano presents their wisdom pertaining to the vision, initiative, nurturance, and more, which is required to (re)build a world wherein PAs thrive. Cora de Leon shares her wisdom of celebration from navigating stereotypes, microaggressions, and critical identity development at the intersections of oppression, coming from a multiethnic family. Joanna C. La Torre gives voice to the uncovering of ancestral knowledges within her family, reconnecting with the multilayered healing potentials offered therein. Alma M. Ouanesisouk Trinidad’s account of healing generational harms and unpacking nuanced truths serves as a beacon for continued healing. Lisa Reyes Mason’s writing illuminates the nuanced and layered truths relating to the mixed experiences of living within Philippine and U.S. landscapes, contextualized by becoming/maintaining her legibility as Pilipina. Together these kuwentos are both stories of survival and survival itself; they are stories of resistance and resistance itself. These kuwentos and hay(na)ku are stalwart representations of decolonial, feminist, and Pinayist interventions upon the colonial/modern formation of the academy.

4.1. Pinay MotherScholar Nurturing Liberation: Lalaine Sevillano

We

are portals

(re)connecting ancestral ways.

During a presentation at a national conference on social work education (Sevillano et al. 2023a), I spoke about Pinayism:

Pinayism is really important because it uncovers the challenges that Pinays face, while creating plans of action that pursue social change for the betterment of our lives. Paulo Freire, who we credit for the term critical consciousness once said, “Liberation is thus a childbirth and a painful one.” Tintiangco-Cubales and Sacramento (2009), co-creators of Pinayism, expand on this and say, “Pinayism is more than childbirth, where the nurturing process of child rearing is what truly leads to the humanization and liberation of teachers, students and Pinays.” And so this motherhood metaphor runs deep, especially today, because we are here as Pinay MotherScholars, about to share our kuwentos (stories) giving birth to consciousness around our marginalization. We will also nurture our liberation-based healing through kuwentos by challenging dominant narratives.

Reading back the transcript from our presentation, these ideas about childbirth and childrearing remain deeply intertwined with my journey as a MotherScholar. In fact, I write this reflection on the sixth anniversary of becoming a mother. On 7 May 2018, my eldest child was born. Nothing prepares you for the physical pain of childbirth nor the psychological toll of childrearing. Indeed, I began my doctoral program when my firstborn was just three months old, naïvely underestimating the demands of both childrearing and academia. While childbirth is undeniably painful, it is also a privilege, a transformative experience where one becomes a portal for another human life to journey earth-side. The physical pain of childbirth is temporary yet the emotional bond is profound. I often feel my children’s pain as if it were my own because they are, quite literally, extensions of my being.

Thus, I think this is why childrearing is so much more painful than giving birth because it is not just the physical pain of recovering from such a violent event to the body, but it is an ongoing, multifaceted challenge. Childrearing involves enduring the pain associated with breastfeeding, the agony from sleepless nights, and the torment from society to “bounce back.” Not to mention the constant doubting of oneself and asking, “Am I even doing this right?!” These same painful challenges in my childrearing journey parallel the painful challenges in my academic journey. I am sore from constantly contorting my work so that it is legible to social work and to the academy. I have spent sleepless nights grinding to make sure I keep pace with the tenure clock. And, yes, the “Am I even doing this right?!” question is omnipresent. Indeed, I write this reflection a couple weeks after what seemed like a promising campus visit, only to hear a few days ago that I was not offered the job at one of my dream institutions. The sting of this rejection was compounded by the immediate needs of my youngest child who had contracted pneumonia, which he successfully transmitted to me.

My relationship with my mother has always been a tumultuous one, punctuated by many disruptions due to differences in world views, acculturative stress, and concealed hurt. In retrospect, many of our clashes seemed to stem from our different views on the Pilipino cultural virtue of utang-na-loob, or debt of will. As Reyes (2015) explains, utang-na-loob is best understood by the mother–child relationship, “The mother has given the child his very existence, carried him in her womb for 9 months, and nourished and protected him into adulthood. The child should acknowledge this and be grateful, and must strive to repay her back somehow” (p. 160). My mom believed that the more I assimilated to U.S. culture, the more individualistic I became and the weaker my utang-na-loob became. Yet, as Hollnsteiner (1973) points out, “a child’s utang na loób to its parents is immeasurable and eternal. Nothing he can do during his lifetime can make up for what they have done for him” (pp. 75–76). So, I felt like I was in a lose-lose situation, and I vowed that I would not put the same pressure on my own children.

One of the more memorable ruptured periods in my relationship with my mom occurred during my pregnancy with my first child. In fact, she was not present at the baby shower my sister hosted. However, as Ate2 Allyson and Ate Jocyl said, childrearing is what leads to humanization and liberation. Twelve days postpartum, I was struggling with yet another sleepless night and the gravity of all the newness that comes with parenthood. I remember vividly crying in the middle of the night, grappling with my new reality and I texted my mom that I needed her. She texted back immediately. The next day she visited with my dad and they brought over tinola, a chicken soup packed with moringa, a plant known to help with breastmilk production. There were no verbal apologies shared or discussions about past tensions, yet I knew that our relationship shifted. It seemed like our bond, albeit not fully repaired, was fortified by the struggles of motherhood that we both now know innately and silently shared. I do not believe nor do I hope that our relationship will ever be turned into a Lifetime channel or Hallmark movie. Instead, I aim to cultivate a relationship that is both humanizing and liberating. By working to see ourselves in the other, we keep the portal open for intergenerational healing, cultural knowledge sharing, and coloniality delinking.

In a way, I believe that academic institutions also play on this idea of utang-na-loob to keep PAs marginalized. We are socialized to be grateful for the access granted unto us and thus we take on extra labors to pay off the “debt”. We are reminded of our “privilege” yet infantilized as we navigate being tokenized while also branded as a DEI hire. As a portal for ancestral wisdom, healing, and love, I aim to (re)connect not only my familial relations but also my academic relatives to Pilipinx cultural wealth. This summer, as I embark on my third year on the tenure track, I will have a fully funded research lab with three Pilipinx undergraduate research assistants. Collectively, the K.A.P.W.A. (Kultura Amplifying Pilipinx Wellness and Abundance; kapwa is Tagalog for a central Pilipino value of seeing the self in the other) lab will explore the links between Pilipinx culture and bio-psycho-social-spiritual health outcomes. As a mentor, I am a portal for nascent Pilipinx scholars who are eager to excavate and extend Pilipinx epistemologies. I hope that my legacy includes familial and academic lineages who no longer need to navigate survivance but instead are moving toward thrivance and abundance.

As this portal, I also seek to unlearn the colonial mimicry that my elders were forced to use as a mechanism to survive colonization. I reject the notion that my brown skin needs to be washed by skin-whitening papaya soap or that my flat nose needs to be clamped down with a clothespin to make it more pointy. Instead, I aspire to teach my children and my students that beauty standards are rooted in white supremacy. I also strive to celebrate the ways we care for one another, like the ways my fellow MotherScholars, my sisters, care for me. When the academy tells me (like it did just a few days ago) that I need to be more productive, or that my work needs to be broader, my sisters remind me that the academy and its standards are rooted in white supremacy. My sisters lift me up and remind me that I am more than enough.

4.2. Relationship Status: It’s Complicated!: Author Cora de Leon

Ancestors

Transcend Blood

Speak through Song

Reflection. Intersectionality is an interesting thing. A person has so many different facets of oneself, some they may like more than others. Some of my identities include being a mother, daughter, sister, Puerto Rican, and Pilipina. Mixed in with these identities are the values outsiders ascribe to them and, subsequently, what I internalized of those values. What do you think of when you first think “Pilipina” or “Puerto Ricaña”? Maybe that they were both colonized by the Spaniards? As a child, I would hear negative connotations attached to Puerto Ricans—criminals, machismo, men having a lot of children with different women, while hearing more positive adjectives associated with being Asian (no one really knew I was specifically Pilipina)—smart, good at math. But honestly, my relationship with these two parts of myself was complicated growing up. My biological father, who is Pilipino, left my teenage mother when she was pregnant with me. Her Puerto Rican father, mother, brothers, and sisters helped raise me. My dad, who is also Pilipino, adopted and raised me as his own, which is to say, I have his last name, am not sure he remembers that I am not actually biologically his, and I experienced his strict discipline style and lack of warmth in the same way as the rest of my brothers and sisters.

So, how does a person reconcile the external values assigned to their cultures while learning that they do not begin to scratch the surface and are honestly, heavily inaccurate? For me, how do I simultaneously forgive inaccuracies and acknowledge traumas my parents experienced while healing and celebrating the different pieces of who I am so that both my daughter and I can go out into the world with pride? For the most part, I try to equally share the good and bad parts of who I am.

In my work as a social worker in academia, the work of forgiving, healing, and celebrating begins when I step into a room. My colleagues and my students see a person that is part of the fabric of the community. I am able to be a person that teaches people who will go on to work with community members that may look like me, whose stories may resemble mine, their food and music incorporating instruments and spices of my ancestors. I am also able, through my name and the color of skin, to show that BIPOC can be found in the “giving of help” column of social work as well as the “receiving of help” column. My lectures weave in cultural acknowledgements of health and wellness, inviting people to consider forms of healing that are different from their own. Should things become difficult in the classroom, I call upon the inspiration from my kapwa of social work scholar sisters and brothers, their stories and experiences reminding me to stand in my space and thrive.

As a daughter and mother, acknowledging that my father’s strict disciplining style was the result of his own childhood experiences/trauma humbles me. Accepting his ability to give and receive love through my daughter, listening to him sing songs to my daughter and having her repeat the words, the very same words his mother sang to him, is at once indescribable and healing. Perhaps most painful is facing head-on the looks of disapproval by those who saw my young Puerto Rican mother hold my hand as she walked me to elementary school every day. It is only the memory of holding her hand tightly after I was hooded at my doctoral graduation that heals, something I carry in my heart every day. Sharing stories with my daughter of who and what has breathed her into existence, affirming that love wins so much of the time. This is forgiveness. This is healing. This is celebration.

4.3. We Are Intact.: Joanna C. La Torre

Unextinguish-ed/able

Gifted lineages

Living out legacies

My family and culture survived persistent attempted extinguishment, which both foregrounds and nourishes my pursuit of a PhD. In order to enter the academy, I had to first encounter and begin to practice resurgence, that is, I needed to learn and begin to understand the histories and forces that culminated to create my family in diaspora, before I was ready to undertake a master’s degree and PhD. Exploring my family’s history, colonization in the Philippines, and later colonization in the United States, formed the foundation of my ability to pursue advanced education. This information was excluded from my primary school education, which served to decontextualize the world around me. This misalignment nearly ejected me from high school because my body refused to attend history classes that did not contend with the truth of the racialized genocides, enslavement, and colonialisms.

Uncovering. Though my grandparents were discouraged from transmitting Ilocano, our language, to their kids, they continued cultural practices, such as foodways, which are deeply embedded with land-based practices. Apong Rufino La Torre, my grandfather, was a hilot, a term that can encompass several modalities of healing. In his case, he practiced manual manipulation and herbal medicines. We are not certain about if he was a shaman, but he was known to see spirits. Though my family retained lifeways and culturally laden practices alongside assimilatory actions, they did so without speaking about them, that is, I did not learn about my grandfather’s hilot until my mid-twenties, after he had already passed on. These practices became enshrouded in the shame colonization placed upon us; for example, in 2015, when my uncle’s hurt back was not healed by his western practitioners, he sought a traditional healer. As he retold the story of treatment by “Doctor WakWak3”, he laughed, shrugged his shoulders, and shifted his body in embarrassment. Though the treatment worked, and though he grew up receiving healings from my grandfather, he still understood that within the western system these things are not considered efficacious, and he embodied the tension of living with that alternative knowledge. My grandfather’s hilot worked, a fact validated by the word-of-mouth network that turned up strangers and community members at the house seeking his help. Despite the confidence of his community, he did not speak about his gifts to us; he did not teach us the systems of knowledge he embodied.

Survival Artists. What gets downplayed about immigrants is the creativity, brilliance, and ingenuity that goes into survival. Survival is not an accident. Poet Ocean Vuong ascribes immigrants as survival artists, acknowledging the intellect, imagination, and vision required and elevating their status by (re)naming them as such (Wachtel 2022). Continuation of cultural practices is not by chance. Survival is, by its nature, created and creative, and cultural continuity is curated. My grandfather’s community co-created space in which hilot continued to be practiced, far from home, in occupied lands. Though he was displaced into lands of the Nisenan, Cayuse, Umatilla, and Walla Walla Peoples, my grandfather’s deep relationship with the land allowed him to know and create with lands where he settled, such that he learned to forage, farm, and practice traditional medicines there.

When thinking about my grandfather’s immigration story, having left his barangay (Tagalog for village) and everything he knew at 18 years old with only what he could carry, his knowledges, and memories, I think about his community who were facing destitution in the shadow of colonial plunder. I think about the violences they witnessed, the deaths, the torture, the tears, and the losses. I think about the contrived conditions that made my great grandparents send their eldest son out into the unknown, across an ocean, into foreign lands, just to try to regain access to having enough food and basic necessities. These are not passive survivors, they actively resisted and fought for their right to exist, for their culture to be practiced, and for their lineages to continue. The decisions they had to make were heartbreaking and have impacted generations of my family, changing the structure of our connectedness permanently. My knowledge of growing up Pilipino tells me that we are incredibly family-centered, which to me, inflects the severity of the situations my ancestors faced. That they would send my grandfather away illuminates the level of deprivation and impoverishment they endured.

Rising. I came into academia through my community work as a leader in the decolonial Pilipinx movements. While not unilateral and essentializing narratives serve nationalism, neoliberalism, and Indigenous erasure, there is something of a Pilipino essence and culture across the archipelago and diaspora. Additionally, colonial systems, like the academy, were not made for us. Yet here we are. My entry into and success in academia has been based on uncovering and uprooting the racism and other -isms my family and communities have been surviving for centuries. My life and work now turn toward bearing witness and making more legible the survival artistry of my family, communities, and ancestors. In so doing, I seek to uproot the dominant image that gets promulgated about immigrants, which ultimately is reliant upon the same racist colonial logic that produced our disenfranchisement to begin with.

Living Anti-Racism. As academics in social work, we enter into sanctioned intellectual spaces, like conferences, classrooms, and publications, to encounter themes related to anti-racism or taking social justice action, and here’s the thing: my ancestors, my predecessors, my mentors, my community, my family members, my colleagues, etc. have already been living anti-racism. Surviving past and present racism is already creating anti-racist social work, education, and knowledge. Finding ways to continue to plant relationships and express foodways in the face of consolidating forces of empire, nationalism, and racial capitalism is already anti-racism. It insists upon survival, protects sovereign knowledges, provides leadership despite aggression, and exemplifies and embodies our counter-hegemonic power.

I used to believe my culture was dying every generation away from the homeland. Now I know that we are intact, our knowledges persist, and my culture is alive. We still have it; the practices that my mom and uncle kept of the foodways, my grandfather’s deep earth-based practices of being with land and growing together, and my own knowledges of building and tending relationships through servant leadership, are all steeped in culture. We come from a long line of survival artists, and these are the foundations of my gifts that bolster my persistence as I make my pathway through academia.

4.4. Restoring Fierce Ayat (Love): Alma M. Ouanesisouk Trinidad

Anak4

Across generations

Breaking the cycles

Reflection. A lot to hold on multiple fronts. I carry a heavy load in creating space for people. This is soon after celebrating some of my ancestors’ death anniversaries and taking a short leave of absence to deal with the disappointment, rejection, hurt, and struggle of putting myself forth as an internal candidate for the dean position. I care deeply about the relationships built along the way with people in the spaces I occupy in the academy. I also have learned the hard way to keep my mental health and emotional capacity at the forefront in order to keep pushing the agenda of social justice in the long haul. I am doing my best to show up, while protecting my own spiritual groundings, will, and divine scaredness. It is my way of resisting.

Being a scholar warrior of ayat (Ilocano for love) and wayawaya (Ilocano for freedom) in a predominantly white institution continues to be an ongoing act of resistance. I am always seeing contradictions, and seeking ways to reconcile them in the moment, all the time. It is also experiencing joys and struggles and holding on to the constant opportunity to remain humbled. It is in humility you refine the discipline and practice of ayat and wayawaya, time and time again, ongoingly.

One of the joys I am focusing on is observing growth in my oldest anak and only daughter. Role modeling for my children, nieces and nephews, and other loved ones is something I take seriously. I learn from my ina (Ilocano for mom), apo (Ilocano for grandma/grandpa/grandparent), and many feminist warriors before me. I am taking in all good news in the last week: me receiving a Feminist of Color/Warrior Mentor of the Pacific Islanders, Asian American Youth Award; my anak decisively wants to go to the motherland with a delegation of youth and young adults from our region this summer; her getting inducted to her school’s honor society; and her facilitating and presenting a workshop (three rounds) on Ethnic Studies at the Asian American Youth Leadership. It was in 2016, eight years ago, when I went to the motherland for the first time as an adult. I feel proud and somewhat anxious seeing my anak grow into a young babae (Ilocano for woman). I am observing the cycle and chains of oppression breaking through each generation as trauma is being dealt with openly and with care.

During the panel discussion at a national conference, I shared a story of three generations of women in my family. It began with how my anak, then 13 years old, interviewed my mom for a class project focusing on educational attainment among women. Anak asked ina of her highest educational level, and my mom responded, “some college.” Anak asked the highest educational level of ina’s mom/apo’s. She responded, “third grade” and first-grade reading level. Anak was startled, and my mom proceeded to tell the story of how she did not go to school; she did not have a chance to go to school. And back then, ina’s mom also did not have a chance to go to school, as it was the Japanese–American war. Apo was running away from the Japanese soldiers back then. They were destroying the villages and raping the women! Schooling was not on the horizon. Anak was somewhat shocked to discover the impact of war and militarization.

She followed up with another question on remembering how it was to be a woman. My mom recalled a story of how she and dad, as newlyweds, emigrated to Hawai′i in 1969. A lot of other young couples were coming from one set of islands to another—the Philippines to Hawai′i. My dad was drafted into the US military, served in the Vietnam War, got out of the military, married my mom, and then moved to a Molokai with only a few dollars. Dad explicitly said to mom that in their partnership they could not afford having mom obtain her college degree. Mom went on to share how people in the community, specifically an elderly woman, were encouraging her to get a bachelor’s so she could get out of the pineapple industry. Hearing the story for the first time as an adult shortly after celebrating my father’s retirement, I was angry. I felt my dad prohibited my mom from exploring higher education. After discussing and unpacking the story with mom, I have come to appreciate how she has navigated life, family, and work, and most importantly, motherhood. Growing up, she was strict, saying, “Study hard; focus on school; no boyfriend; don’t date; don’t get pregnant.” But simultaneously, I was also hearing my dad, “Focus on school. No one can take your schooling or degree(s) away.”

Fast forward to now, having achieved the doctorate degree to being a full professor and holding multiple roles as mom, life partner, daughter, friend, and leader, my parents are proud of me. While I am proud of the individual and collective work, I continue to contend with the idea of representation and voice, being the very few WOC in leadership roles at a predominantly white (and up and coming majority minority) institution. Our voices and thoughts are somewhat amplified, but not really. We continue to negotiate how we would like to show up, be present, and facilitate processes. I feel in my body the signs of a severe case of compassion fatigue and burnout as I navigate motherhood and being in the sandwich generation. Despite it, I have decided to embrace the joys. Doing so invites breathing the legacies of strengths and willpower navigating through multiple terrains. More spaces are available for anak’s generation to grow and foster more confidence, individually and collectively, instilling strength and power through each generation and fostering the babaes to use their voices. Simultaneously, it teaches me to be clear on my multiple roles and responsibilities, even as I age, becoming a living ancestor. I am refining, resharpening, and reaffirming what it means to be a scholar warrior and steward of ayat and wayawaya.

4.5. Walking in Worlds of Complexity, Beauty, and Wisdom: Lisa Reyes Mason

Gifts

of belonging

Pilipina ako5, too

I grew up immersed in Pilipino life, my first seven years. In San Diego and Oxnard, California, and Quezon City for part of one year, my memories are that I was raised and surrounded by titas, titos, my grandparents, and Abolitz6, and Pilipino families who helped care for us when my mother was in the Philippines for medical school, unable to pursue her dream in the U.S. At times, back home, I was a blond-haired kid running around chirping Tagalog, unaware in those early years how very white I also was and looked.

Now over 40 years later, a tenured professor and, as I write this, three weeks left as Interim Dean, I walk in worlds embracing the complexity, beauty, and wisdom of the biracial being that I am.

Early on in the academy when applying to doctoral programs, I was asked by a PhD Director if I was “really Filipino” or if I “just checked the box.” Taken aback and nervous, but then also defiant and upset, I felt I had to defend who I knew myself to be, though others judged me based on their interpretation of how I looked.

At another institution, I had a leader dismiss Asian faculty as “not counting” in discussions of diversity. I also had a colleague refer to a biracial, Asian doctoral student, in another “diversity” conversation, as “that’s not who I mean.” In these two conversations, I recall again being flustered and, deferentially I admit with regret, not speaking up. I know now those ways of being for me are long gone as I speak up for and embrace my biracial and Pilipina fullness and my solidarity with other Asians and Asian Americans in the academy.

Meanwhile, where I am now, I seek out any new Pilipinx colleague I learn of, eagerly hoping they will become a new friend, just like moving around as a kid, casually dropping a Tagalog word into chatter before class, so they might know I was one of them, and moreover, hoping to create and support more community in the academy, knowing we are here and here for each other.

As Interim Dean, and during this particular year with Hamas’ attack on Israelis and Jews—who are also my people by marriage, motherhood, and my own choice to convert—and the Israeli government’s devastating attack on civilian Palestinian lives, with loss and horror beyond belief, I find the multiplicity of who I am influencing my leadership through this and other crises as Dean and in an increasingly polarized society, profession, and academic discipline.

Over and over, I try to return to humility in how I approach inquiry, belief in the values that guide me, care in my decision making, and openness to feedback, dialogue, action, and critique. And I do so, in reflecting for this paper, knowing that my approach stems very much from being the biracial and bicultural daughter that I am, raised by my Pilipina mother who gave and fought and led for health equity and justice, as a strong and passionate role model of helping others and seeking purpose and impact through work. And, also so influenced by my White father who was gentle and quiet and kind, out of the spotlight, always there to support, care, and wish for me whatever I hoped for my family and for myself.

Today, I know well the privilege that my whiteness brings, and also know that my stories inside are of a Pilipina, too. They are joyful with singing and dancing and food, and also painful and unlearning colonial ways and minds. They are honoring my mother and the difficult immigrant choices she made, while choosing to parent differently and help my daughter be uniquely her, unconditionally so. They are sharing and naming my Pilipina and biracial self with others, which I have learned has helped some embrace and name this, too.

As I near my first sabbatical, 16 years since becoming a mother and doctoral student, and 11 years since becoming a faculty member myself, I find myself coming to a place of enough. That I am enough. That my duality is a gift, and that it is enough. That “walking in both worlds” has brought me an ability to understand or imagine (even painful) alternative points of view, and a deep sense of purpose and living for change, and that these are enough.

That if I choose and act with care, compassion, thoughtfulness, and integrity, then I am indeed being me, enough, as I am—Pilipina, white, mother, partner, teacher, colleague, friend.

5. Healing, Forward, Together

This present study provides an in-depth look at the plurality of the authors’ lived experiences, highlighting both similarities and some of the diversities present within Pilipino and PA populations. In doing so, the authors signal, but do not represent in whole, the heterogeneity present within Pilipinos, while also describing complementarity and a sense of shared culture. Diversity is a hallmark of the human experience and groups of humans cannot be generalized, distilled, or reduced to a set of characteristics, practices, or behaviors. Still, there is importance in holding the complexities of sameness alongside difference without trying to adhere to colonial notions of homogeneity. The authors, in preserving the truths of our lives and resisting the urg-e/-ing to take up less space or reduce our stories to some essentialized narrative of PAs, have presented a unique intervention to coloniality/modernity, an exemplar of decoloniality itself. In refusing assimilation, in resisting conformity to categorization, we give texture and dimension to what survives despite attempted erasure. There is exquisite beauty in holding our sameness and distinctness together. We are not outliers to be edited out. We are (some of) the mosaic of diversity that makes up Pilipinoness, and indeed, humanness.

Collectively, our kuwentos, reflections, hay(na)ku, and their weaving together are memory, resistance, counter-storytelling, and healing. During one of the two presentations, Alma M. Ouanesisouk Trinidad shared her way of survivance as “living and breathing life in the space that I’m at.” Indeed, our artistry in this paper and its process reveal that each of us has been breathed into with life, as we have breathed it into others. We are granddaughters, daughters, mothers, and more. We are interconnected across ancestral and descendant generations, and the weaving of our stories heals traumas of the past and present, with hope and survival and a better world for our children and the future.

The life course reveals itself in our words and how it captures arcs of academic harm, persistence, survival, and thrivance. There is the pain of childbirth (What have I done? My body is worn. My sleep is gone. And yet, what magic I have created in this newborn child.) There is the season of young children (What strong emotions. What stories and songs to share, keeping memory alive. How they push against me, and I push against myself.) There is raising our anaks into adolescence and early adulthood (She wants to learn about our home! I am exhausted. I am burning out. But if my ancestors did, then I can, too. I must, for them.) And finally, periods of pause, restoration, rest (Who am I now? What is next? How do I give to and nurture myself, when for so long, I have cared for others?).

We, like those in our lineages, have lived and resisted and survived attempted erasure in our everyday lives. Our stories revealed ancestral gifts, such as hilot, things we could not see but could always feel. We watched as western society placed them in categories of things we should be ashamed of or things that made no sense, perhaps made to feel that they should not be valued or trusted. We resist erasure by embracing what has worked for generations within our communities, tending to our gifts of song, dance, food, and community. We allow ourselves to embrace hilot without carrying the tension or shame of saying our methods may not be what western society embraces.

We have lived and resisted and survived attempted erasure in the academy. And how? By finding kapwa, each other, our own voices, our rigor of knowledge, and our commitment to what is just and must be done. The generations are connected, and like our immigrant parents and grandparents (or ourselves, as young children) crossed oceans to survive so that we could be in these positions of privilege we now have, we too are challenging and changing this academic enterprise. Some of us wrote about forgiveness, releasing traumas, centering healing. These stories and counter-stories are liberation practice for that work. We illuminate harms that others in the academy have caused, and we illuminate our presence in this institution, bearing witness, challenging coloniality, stewarding love and freedom for ourselves, for and alongside our families and communities.

Our stories also show that sacrifices of our own health abound, and these must change. We cannot be the mothers we wish to be of our children and of our own academic work if we do not nourish, pause, sleep, rest. The academic enterprise can take and take, and our own intergenerational legacies of immigrant survival may lead us to keep trying, keep working, keep doing in order to send resources back home, literally or symbolically7. We must support each other in centering ourselves, our wellness, our families, and our lives as its own practice of humanization and liberation and resistance to academic norms.

Essentially, we reveal the gift of celebration amidst the adversity, embracing small moments, children’s hopes, family graduations, published papers, Pilipinx visibility and impact in social work education, and in rooms filled with food, laughter, kapwa, and joy. We are of people who (have) resist(ed), survive(d), and thrive(d), and we embody this in sisterhood together, holding space for sharing, encouraging each other on, celebrating incremental wins and the life changing, transformational ones. Returning once more to “living and breathing life in the space that I’m at”, this has become a thread of resonance among our stories and lived experiences of centering, being, and breathing through the call, desire, and need to be PA social work MotherScholars. Finally, we recognize our collective work of weaving our stories together, bearing witness to each other, building and deepening our relationships, and remaining stalworth in our commitment to survivance and thrivance as elemental to an emerging Pilipinx wellness framework, ginhawa8, a feeling of ease and aliveness (Paz 2008). In our enactment of our wellness, in the most whole sense, we are fashioning the world anew despite hegemonic forces, we are refabricating that which has been passed on to us into generative rather than extractive formations. We are living decolonially and enlivening decoloniality. We are (becoming) respiration.