political content & engagement chapbook

M i l l s Col lege © 2 013

“WHERE THEY BELONG”Instructor Melissa R. Sipin

Mg RobertsMegan Zapanta

Kathleen Gutierrez

Joshua CastroTeresita BautistaMarygrace BurnsKay Cuajunco

POLI T ICA L CON TEN T & ENGAGEM EN T CH A PBOOK

2 WHERE THEY BELONG M I L L S C O L L E G E © 2 0 1 2 – 2 0 1 3

THE POLITICAL CONTENT & ENGAGEMENT

WORKSHOP HOSTED AT MILLS COLLEGE

invited writers and social justice activists to shape their memoir,

poetry, and prose with an emphasis on the political and impacting

perceptions, be they personal, social, literary, or cultural. We

exchanged our writings and developed authority while working

on craft techniques to elevate the richness and toughness of our

voices.

THE CLASS CONVENED OVER FIVE FREE SESSIONS,

had visiting speakers, such as award-winning poet Barbara Jane

Reyes and writer Rashaan Alexis Meneses, and conducted many

in-class writing assignments.

HERE IS OUR WRITING. Our voices. Our work. Enjoy.

Cover Art by Cher Musico and Eliseo Art Silva, respectively.

pol it ic a l content & engagement work shop

INSTRUCTOR’S BIO

MELISSA R. SIPIN is a writer from Carson, California. She

won First Place in the 2013 Glimmer Train Fiction Open for

her story, “Walang Hiya, Brother,” and her writing is published

or forthcoming in Glimmer Train Stories, Kartika Review,

Kweli Journal, and The Bakery, among others. She is the

Narrative Writing & Community Engagement Fellow at Mills

College and the Tennessee Williams Scholarship recipient at the

2013 Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Her short fiction received

the 2013 Ardella Mills Prize, the 2011 Miguel G. Flores Prize,

and in 2012 and 2013, was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. As

a VONA/Voices fellow and U.S. Navy wife, she splits her time

writing on the Pacific and Atlantic coasts.


contributions: works-in-progress

Mg Roberts writer & teacher

1. I Don’t Want to Write Another Boat Poem

2. Field Conditions

3. Mother Passes Fear like Life Saver Hard Candies

Megan Zapanta AB member

1. Where They Belonged

Kathleen Gutierrez AB member

1. If Rampart and Temple were Lovers

2. A Bulakenya Dream

Joshua Castro BAYAN member

1. Vallejo

2. Lola

Teresita Bautista writer & activist

1. On the Lookout

2. Kundiman

3. Campfire Camp

5pol it ic a l content & engagement work shop

Marygrace Burns writer & teacher

1. tarantan

2. geographies

3. abandoned landscapes

Kay Cuajunco AB member

1. “P.H.” for Paradise Hills, for the Philippines

2. Love for the Land


COMMUNITY PROJECT DESCRIPTION:

BY MELISSA R. SIPIN

My narrative writing and community engagement fellowship centered on building a political community via writing within the Filipino American social justice movement. The threads of this movement is highly counteractive, engaging, and conflicting, but the Fil-Am movement is most centralized in the Bay Area due to many things: 1.) SF carries the highest populace of Filipino immigrants/Fil-Ams in the nation, 2.) The history of the Black Panther Movement integrated with the fight against colonialism in the Philippines and against the Marcos Regime during the 1960s, and 3.) The monument in the center of Union Square manifests the whitewashing of the Philippines’ past as a colony, and perpetuates the ongoing fight against U.S. policies and cultural erasure. My project, thus, manifested into three phases:

In Phase I, I facilitated a community workshop in political writing with Anakbayan, a national democratic organization that protests U.S. neo-colonialization of the Philippines, and non-AB Filipino American writers who perceive the organization as “overly” militant. It was an act of community, a workshop that built a safe space for political organizers and writers to convene and talk about the role of writing in their political lives. It focused on building a understanding between the conflicted threads of the Fil-Am political movement in the Bay Area, and it allowed members of AB and non-AB members to disarm, self-reflect, and dialogue about political self-identity, practice mirroring and exposing the self, and deconstruct the Philippines’ colonized past. I brought in speakers (Rashaan Alexis Meneses and Barbara Jane Reyes), we dismantled geographical place and how it affects the impressions of a politicized identity, and we culminated the project through a political chapbook and a reading of participants at the Bayanihan Community Center in San Francisco. Phase I’s focus was to deepen my ties with the community, learn how political movements affect the varied selves of Filipino American activists and writers, and achieve community among the disenfranchised and marginalized, using writing as a tool to heal, expose, and build.


Phase II of this project is working with the youth and using writing to further solidify political bodies within the community. In the Fall of 2013, I will teach a one-day writing conference with a senior high school class associated with Pin@y Educational Partnerships, a Fiipina/o American Studies curriculum and teaching pipeline. PEP is currently a service-learning program and partners with SF public schools located in the Excelsior neighborhood, which has the highest concentration of Filipina/o youth. The writing conference is a highly intensive workshop on political writing, where I will bring in speakers, writers and political activists, to create dialogue, serve the younger community by providing a safe space to write, and subvert the cultural erasure of U.S. colonialism. The project will culminate into an anthology and a reading of participants at the 2nd Annual Filipino American International Book Fest at the SF Public Library in October 2013. Phase II’s focus is to use the political tools I learned from Phase I and instill these tools of writing, archiving, and mental sustenance into the Filipina/o youth.

Phase III has the potential of reaching a digital space for the Filipino & Filipino American communities. By using TAYO Literary Magazine’s expansive community that reaches differing sects of the community across the globe, I will take the experiences from Phase I & II and implement an online workshop with five sessions, pairing writers of Filipino descent with each other and building an intimate community that has tangible and real affects (in publication and sprouts of new projects). The result will hopefully blossom into a finalized anthology with each phase: I, II, & III, showcasing the attempts at dispelling the “single story” of the Filipino & Filipino American community.

In summation, my narrative writing and community engagement project is about making and sustaining political bodies in the Filipina/o social movement and using writing as that unifying thread. It is about creating community among the diversified, marginalized, disenfranchised, and the oppressed. After my project, I plan to continue my political work in the second biggest populace of Filipinos in America: Virginia Beach. The underlying thread that ties my community together is this notion of one body, hiya (shame), one narrative, one single story of Filipinos in America, oneness. But I personally believe that writing, as Junot Díaz said, “forces you to see every flaw.” My task is to introduce this nuanced and diverse balance and sense of self to my community, and I believe it is only through writing can political bodies survive, self-check, and heal.


ABOUT PARTNER ORGANIZATION:ANAKBAYAN EAST BAYFounded in 2007, we are a chapter of Anakbayan Philippines, a comprehensive national democratic mass organization of Filipino youth in the Philippines. Anakbayan unites youth from all backgrounds to achieve national democracy with a socialist perspective. Anakbayan holds the belief that Philippine society today is neither truly free nor democratic. The national democratic struggle seeks to realize true national liberation for the country and democratic rights for the people.

WHAT DOES ANAKBAYAN MEAN?

ANAK (Tagalog) child (a female or male child, a daughter or son)BAYAN (Tagalog): The People/ Country/HomelandANAKBAYAN: Sons and Daughters of the People

MISSION

Anakbayan–East Bay is a youth and student organization that seeks to build a progressive movement that engages, organizes, and mobilizes Filipino youth and students around the collective interest of poor and working-class Filipino communities in the East Bay; while linking their particular struggles to the conditions and popular movements for Philippine national democracy.

OBJECTIVES

Our objectives are to promote, to educate, organize, and mobilize Filipin@ youth in Oakland/Eastbay around issues of social justice and social change with a special emphasis on and in connection with the principles of the movement in the Philippines towards true and national democracy.


CAMPAIGNS

Workers & Migrants: Anakbayan aligns with pro-people workers and migrants organizations in the Bay Area. We stand in solidarity with members of People’s Association of Workers and Immigrants (PAWIS) East Bay, National Alliance for Filipino Concerns (NAFCON), and Committee for the Protection of Workers Rights (CPWR). Most recently, we have mobilized for the passage of the Domestic Workers’ Bill of Rights (2012).

Human Rights: Anakbayan supports the fight for human rights in the Philippines. We respond to the call of human rights organizations against government-perpetrated violence and harassment against the people and extrajudicial killings in the Philippines.

Justice for Melissa Roxas: We support Melissa Roxas, a Filipina-American victim of state-sponsored abduction and torture in the Philippines, and her pursuit of justice and accountability. For more information on Melissa, visit http://www.justiceformelissa.org.

SOS (Save Our Schools, Anakbayan-USA): We, along with the other youth organizations under the banner of Anakbayan-USA, participate in a broad Save Our Schools (SOS) campaign, with the goal of preventing budget cuts, increasing access to free education, and advancing pro-people curricula. We have backed Proposition 30 (the Sales and Income Tax Increase Initiative of 2012) and the pro-people schools of the Philippine lumads.


I Don’t Want to Write Another Boat Poem

Mother remembers time through wet. Dry. Wet seasons. Talks about her ten siblings that appear and disappear in times of drought, she only remembers two of their names: Victor and Mariquita. She says, “They are the two that survived.” Mother talks about earth between toes, fabric wrapped shoulder to wrist to mimic long sleeves. She raises her hands, pretends to pull on a pair of gloves, shows me the holes in her palms from coarse braided fibers held to lead the caribou into field. Mother talks about her mother’s death from broken heart and her father that never left his wife. She says she remembers the day her Lola died, running her thin brown fingers across my scalp. She says, “I remember the way the lice fanned out of her hair, I remember everything scattering.”

MG ROBERTS


MG ROBERTSField Conditions

I remember the cracked orange stucco of the apartment building—orange breaking into 4ths, 8ths, and 16ths. I remember the neighbors below, the way they fought on Friday nights and the row of beer cans that lined their patio in long ribbons of silver when I awoke on Saturday mornings.

My mother and her boyfriend fought too, although not as regularly as the neighbors below. I remember the schefflera plant that hung in the living room from a brass hook, whose cuttings populated every room.

I remember the day that plant’s leaves and stems were tossed to the floor tossed on the floor, a now mottled yellow. Its dirt trail the argument just missed. My mother squatting with dustpan in hand, scooping roots, white balls of fertilizer that glisten against brown carpet. Her fingers so very long, red into bone. I remember her saying we have to move again and this boyfriend will not be coming with us.

I remember running to the chain link fence that separated our orange apartment building from the tract houses on the hill. Mother says they are owners there and when she ever meets the right kind of man we will be owners too.

I place bent fingers into the fence’s metal holes and claw, climb, and watch the mustard flowers veer into Moffet Field below.


Mother Passes Fear like Life Saver Hard Candies

In the darkness everything is black against the flat canopy of stars. All that twinkles remains out of reach--constant. Plenty” is a flat plane whose face comes in white hues dressed in pressed dungarees. In a jungle green populates at accelerated speeds. A severed limb from a Narra tree oozes blood.

wak-wak-wak

The path from the jungle to the city is bent canopy on the verge of disappearing, the sound of birds shifting, waiting, and watching the body move through not yet.


MG ROBERTS was born in Subic Bay, Philippines and teaches in the San Francisco Bay area. She is a Kundiman Fellow and MFA graduate of New College of California, where strange tricks were added to her bag. Her work has appeared and or is forthcoming in Mission and 10th, 580 Split, The New Delta Review, Web Conjunctions, and KQED’s Writers’ Block, among others. If she were not a poet she would be a snake handler, or maybe just a good speller.”


MEGAN ZAPANTAWhere They Belonged

The only place she felt truly happy was the small Norwegian island where she spent summers running barefoot over rocks. She ran until she was out of breath and then sat down and dangled her calloused feet into grey water. As she gasped and inhaled the salty air, her thoughts poured quickly in a jumbled mix of Danish, Norwegian, and English. For a moment, she was away from her evil stepmother, the noise and concrete of Chicago streets, drunken fighting, and all the different sets of stepfamilies passing in and out of her life. Here, where icy water cut jagged rocks, she could just be. When he went home for the first time in fifteen years, he couldn’t speak to his family in Tagalog or Chavano. They insisted that when he had left, he could chat in both. They told him how spoiled he had been—he was the eldest grandson, everyone had taken care of him. They gave him his own room in the crowded house, but asked for money and the new clothes his mom had just bought him. They called him Mr. Saturday Night Fever, John Travola, because he wore his hair long and dressed like he was going to the disco. He felt too sweaty, too claustrophobic. Before he learned he didn’t belong at the dark, humorless university in Chicago where he would study the next year, he knew he didn’t belong here. On a cold winter night, she noticed beads of sweat drip from his curly hair as he chopped pizza toppings in the kitchen. He was flushed with fever, but still picked up an extra shift for a buddy. He had dropped out of college; she had never gone. By the time they met working in a pizza shop in Chicago, they had both run away from home and the plans their parents had made for them. They strung together a life out of late night back-to-back shifts, drinking and smoking too much, watching Star Trek, and dreaming of a big house where they would raise kids.


MEGAN ZAPANTA

MEGAN ZAPANTA was raised in San Diego, California. She attended Amherst College in Massachusetts and works as a development associate at Asian Pacific Environmental Network (APEN). She is a proud member of Anakbayan East Bay.


KATHLEENGUTIERREZ

If Rampart and Temple were Lovers

I immediately recall the “extremes” of climate: fat raindrops, puddles, the smell of wet pavement or suffocating, dry heat that melted the blackened gum spots on my sidewalk. I remember pigeons and a stray white rabbit on Temple St. I took it home with me and named it Castoff. The only flora that stands out is the fern-like weed that grew under my apartment building’s stairwell. Oh! And this tall, tall tree that acted as the protector of our front gate. My aunt must have cut it down sometime in the mid-2000s.

There is the Pan-American dance hall at the corner of Rampart and Temple. Diagonal to this is the 24-hour donut shop that easily had its “going out of business” sign posted for seven years. There’s also Amigos liquor and grocery store, a couple of doors away from the hall. That’s where my mom purchased my first pair of sneakers. I was so particular then, I picked pebbles from the shoe grip with a toothpick. And there was the large duplex across the street from our blue apartment building, where a classmate of mine lived. I delighted in seeing her come home from school.

Our music was 106.7 KROQ or the Time Life Christmas Classics—always on repeat by late November.

If Rampart and Temple were a lover, it would be a gentle one.


KATHLEENGUTIERREZ

My mom has these deep scars—ones that are like burrows in her flesh. You might think pieces of her have been removed. She used to wear long skirts to cover a gash on her left ankle. She says it came purely from mischief and a cast-iron wok. Her shame was grafted onto me at an early age. But, instead of preventing wounds, I sought them with valor: each scar, evidence of being badass.

So, she grew up with fruit trees and meadows, a field for palay and multiple kubo. She was an adventurous one: rolling joints out of mango leaves and running away from home just ‘cause. I’d like to think I made the same of my surroundings. Our building was its own cove of linoleum splendor and light blue paint. I was a champ when it came to chalk and inventive, cinematic stories.

Hm. It sounded like she had lot more space than I did.

KATHLEEN GUTIERREZ was raised in Historic Filipinotown in Los Angeles, California. She attended the University of California, Berkeley, and works at the California School Health Centers Association. She is a proud member of Anakbayan East Bay.


JOSHUA CASTRO

Vallejo

Vallejo moves in slow motion. Cars cruise along lazily. People lurk along the pavement. Elders melt into lawn chairs sitting upon creaking wooden porches. Empty lots are homes to yellowed grasses and towering weeds. The streets dented with potholes and sidewalks yearn to be restored to their former glory.

The corner of Florida and Tuolumne hears the songs of birds interspersed with E-40 and Mac Dre and Flowmasters.

Downtown is a cuckold as its former lovers flee to the more “exotic” locals of San Francisco and Oakland.

Wintertime is busses splashing puddles as they round turns down flooded street corners. Summertime means lost teenagers shoulder-tapping strangers to buy them 40-ouncers and Newports from the liquor store. The small of Mexican food trucks mingle with the smell of exhaust.

Lola


JOSHUA CASTRO

JOSHUA CASTRO has been an Oakland resident since 2010. He attended San Francisco State University and majored in Asian American studies and sociology . As a former member of League of Filipino Students at SFSU, he is now a regional staff member of BAYAN-USA-NORCAL.

LolaMy lola always seemed to talk about the Philippines as a place that she would be required to return to in order to deal with business matters, but never as a place that she wanted to return to. The Philippines is a corrupt place where people speak of their devotion to the Christ from one side of their mouth and from the other they spew forth venom about how they covet thy neighbor’s goods.

“Filipinos are to blame for the fate of that country she would say.” I encouraged her to apply for dual citizenship so that she could vote for progressive candidates in the Philippine elections to which she replied:

“I will not stain my hands with blood. Let the politicians soil themselves and their country. I want nothing to do with it.”

When she did have something worthwhile to speak about the Philippines she told us her fondest memories. The smell of the sea air as she swam in the ocean near the beaches of Panay Island. She would mention how she loved the taste of taho in the morning and dried fish for merienda. She spoke of her family dog, a large German Sheperd named Adobo, who had been trained to fetch the family’s groceries from the palengke. Suddenly she would snap out of her daydream.

“But all that is different now. Your grandfather is buried in Colma and I am going to buried right along side him.”


TERESITA BAUTISTA

KundimanThe rice fields spread so far I could not see the end. Cousin Baldo walks slowly leading the old white carabao in and out of the lush green. If I went to the second floor of Uncle Pio’s house I could see the sea and the beach where the elves would wait for the fishermen to return before dawn with their nets heavy with the early morning catch. I was born nearby in Auntie Indang’s kitchen sometime after dinner and before the cock crowed in the dark morning.

Momma’s village was overgrown with tall grass where my Lola and Lolo would gather hangsad samora to cook for the Hilot oil that they would use when they delivered babies in the village. Orchids were abundant. Chickens, roosters, pigs and the handful of scrawny dogs.

On the LookoutOn by block were two other Filipino families who knew me since I was 7 months old. There were other Filipino families who lived around the corner. It was busy with a cafe on the corner and a big gas station across the street where my childhood Filipino best friend would steal cigarettes. Big trucks would come in and out off the freeway. A block away was the railroad tracks so you could hear the ding-ding sound of the arms coming down for each passing train to make its way east and west, carrying people, bearing products.

We lived on the edge of Oakland Chinatown where we would go to buy food, eat every Sunday after Church. I remember Momma would drive to the one block lined with restaurants and stores. She would double park. I would be her lookout to yell when a police car would approach. I would toot the horn so she could rush out and move the car.

We lived in a second floor flat in a brown-shingled building with two other apartments below. My Uncle Alex and Auntie Lila lived downstairs.


TERESITA BAUTISTA teaches history, culture, and current concerns of Filipinos in the U.S. and works as the programs manager at the Oakland Asian Cultural Center. She curated the OACC exhibit “We Are America: Resistance and Resilience,” a 100-year timeline of Filipinos and their struggle for civil rights in the 20th century. As an educator and community organizer, she integrates ethnic studies in her work with Asian immigrants and in ESL classes.

You’re so black!

Why is darkness so feared?

Momma welcomed me with her loud voice as I stepped from the yellow school bus filled with pre-teens traveling the last three hours on the highway from the California–Nevada border. I had spent ten days at Campfire Camp outside of Auburn. She didn’t want to hear how I nearly drowned taking my Beginning swimmer’s test on the lake. Nor did she give me a chance to tell her how I went to mass at sunrise. I had tied a towel to my bunk so counselors woke up the Catholics at 6:30 to walk in the shadows for 7 ‘o clock mass in the clearing beyond the trees. And what about my first time with a bow and arrow. After two days, I finally hit the bull’s eye.

Her first exclamation was startling enough. I blinked. She followed with:

And you’re so skinny!

Have I lost weight from my 80-pound frame after having three squares every day and gooey s’mores at the campfires?

I walked past her mumbling, “Where’s Daddy?” How I wished he came. Momma was now chatting with Mrs. Croft, whose five red-headed children were filing out of the bus. I didn’t hear her ask about all their freckles! I got into our old 1949 Plymouth and saw my sister, who was even blacker than me.


tarantan

she moves impulsively through life

her thoughts quick & hard

questioning the intellectuality

around her

she breathes

not becauseshe has to

but because she can

knowing that the air is as

honestas her

it is deliberatea breathe

humble asshe exhales

MARYGRACE BURNS


MARYGRACE BURNS

geographies

there is dust thick layers that settle in the lungs so we could never run freely through the fields that held dry hay prickly bushes carcasses of cats neighborhoods bisected by empty dirt lots that held horses or stray dogs schools on the edge of orange groves a statue of a man holding dirt in his hands waiting or a miracle


abandoned landscapes

mama doesn’t talk about the home she talks about lola’s firm hand she doesn’t talk about the streets only that she would stand in them selling saging to passing motorists she doesn’t talk about home she only says what’s the point we’re here now papa talks about the mountains how they hid in them then later he was alone he talks about the ocean how he would swim everyday which caused why he’s hard of hearing today he wants to go back to Samar because he no longer remembers the color of his house the first picture i took of the Philippines were my feet on the ground gray vans on cold concrete


MARYGRACE BURNS is a 1.5 Pinay queer poet-educator pursuing an MFA degree from Mills College. As a Bay Area transplant by way of the Central Valley, she still struggles to find her identity and a community that has the same passion for stories and education. She has been teaching with Pin@y Educational Partnerships for the last seven years, working with students from elementary to college.


“P.H.” for Paradise Hills, for the Philippines

Growing up in San Diego, the neighborhood of Paradise Hills, affectionately referred to as “P.H.” beyond the abbreviation to mean “P.H.” fo the Philippines too. Many of my peers growing up were in Filipino navy families like myself that I never knew when a friend would need to move away when their family would get stationed elsewhere.

Paradise Hills for that reason was filled with this sense of transience. It’s like when you don’t want to plant a fruit tree in your backyard of the house you’re renting since you never know if you’ll live there long enough to enjoy its fruits.

If Paradise Hills were a lover they would be seductive yet subtle; taking you in like a warm picturesque place but with those reminders that you may not be around for very long and that moments should be captured to be put on postcards to remember that special getaway to paradise.

Away from the beachside landscape of salty shores, the concrete navy base in South East San Diego leaves a taste of dryness, a third for flavor beyond the starchyness of freshly ironed uniforms and American flags.

As a lover, Paradise Hills leaves you wanting more, like a too short summer fling.

KAY CUAJUNCO


KAY CUAJUNCO Love for the Land

From my grandparents, I was passed on a love for the land. Any particular farm or garden, a reverence for all the elements that make up a landscape. My grandpa was a rice farmer in the Philippines. I love the smell of dense wet soil after the rain, the crisp of a gentle breeze making the abundant harvest dance, the feeling of swimming in deep waters.

I have always been drawn to my Filipino brothers and sisters, as well as other Asian Pacific Islanders who hold on to these same memories of their grandparents working the land, working to preserve and care for it, working to sustain themselves and their families. This affinity lends itself to fear of displacement, being tied to a sense of place.

Recently my own geography due to work has been very food-centric and I see sense of place tied to the body, the land, and food. Growing up I would refer to the color purple as ube since it would convey that sweetness to me in a way tied to my ancestral cuisine that sometimes felt like my only outlet to reconnect and share with my distant relatives at the family party where we would find that mutual respect, that shared love of the land, despite the passing of time and distance.

KAY CUAJUNCO is an organizer, educator, and mediamaker based in Oakland, California. Her film “Roots of Struggle” about queer pin@ys navigating the contradictions of their military upbringing and finding home in Filipino-American anti-imperialist organizing just premiered at the Queer Women of Color Film Festival this summer. She is a proud member of Anakbayan East Bay.


Instructor Melissa R. Sipin is the recipient of the full-tuition fellowship in Community Engagement and Narrative Writing at Mills College.

Mills modeled the assistantship after similar community programs, including June Jordan’s Poetry for the People, Mark Nowak’s poetry workshops with auto workers in the United States and South Africa, and Heriberto Yepez’s public poetry/art movement in Tijuana.

“We thought about how we could use this new funding to further our mission around art and social justice,” said program director Stephanie Young.

“Creative writing is at its most relevant when it’s in communities and not in institutions.”

political content & engagement chapbook

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