Magdaragat, p.11
Magdaragat, page 11
Looking Back to Come In
In June 2022, I attended the Fierté Canada Pride Human Rights Conference, where I connected with 2STLGBQIAA+* elders, knowledge keepers, academics, artists, and activists from all over the world. I learned about the history and the current state of my local and broader queer community. It was a life-changing and life-affirming experience. It reminded me we must continue to centre and uplift the voices most marginalized. It reminded me that our collective liberation is bound to the liberation of Indigenous nations and lands. We must protect Indigenous, Black, and People of Colour children and lives. We must remember that gender fluidity is sacred and ancestral. We must continue to build coalitions across generations, locations, and every other intersection. Organize! Mobilize! Educate! Bring your communities into the circle! The time is now and we need everyone committed to creating and cultivating spaces that are safe and inclusive for all.
My healing journey will be lifelong. I believe life is cyclical, and I will continue to circle back to the questions of “Who am I?” and “What is my purpose?” I have only begun to answer my questions around my identity, and that’s okay. This work requires patience, research, learning, listening, connecting, and co-creating with the community. It will require us to learn and acknowledge the impact of colonization on our psyche and value systems. But knowing is not enough: we must continually take action in our lives to use our power and privilege to dismantle all systems of oppression at different entry points. I hope we all continue to heal through internalized colonialism and colonial mentality, so we can all live an authentic, empowered, and liberated life. I hope you all find a sense of well-being, are able to fortify your self-confidence in your identity, remember your ancestral strength and ways of living. We are the descendants of warriors and healers who have lived together and collaborated for generations and will continue to do so for eternity.
Coming into myself
You are creation.
You are beautiful.
Your journey is sacred.
You are whole.
You are loved.
Your life matters.
1 E.J.R. David, “Part Two — The Aftermath,” in Brown Skin, White Minds: Filipino -/ American Postcolonial Psychology (Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing, 2013), 51.
2 Leny Mendoza Strobel, introduction to Coming Full Circle: The Process of Decolonization among Post-1965 Filipino Americans, 2nd ed. (Santa Rosa, CA: The Center for Babaylan Studies, 2015), xi-xvi.
3 E.J.R. David, “Chapter 2 — The Catholic Convent: Spanish Colonialism,” in Brown Skin, White Minds: Filipino -/ American Postcolonial Psychology (Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing, 2013), 13.
4 Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization is not a metaphor,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1, no. 1 (2012): 6.
5 Leny Mendoza Strobel, A Book of Her Own: Words and Images to Honor the Babaylan (San Francisco, CA: T’Boli, 2005), 182.
Patria Rivera
Landing and Arrival: A map of no return
1 The ugly face of fear
Fear drove us out of our homeland. The constant, nagging fear that on any day, at any hour, some frenzied military soldier would put the whole country on hold, declare a mini-coup, forever shatter the fragile peace we knew under the Marcos dictatorship. Marcos had placed the Philippines under the dragnet of martial rule on September 21, 1972, ostensibly “to keep the peace.” Proclamation 1081 suspended civil rights and imposed military authority in the country. The directive effectively barred mass demonstrations and rallies against the regime’s inaction to ease poverty in cities and on farms, improve abject working conditions, and end corruption in the government. The military incarcerated labour, farm, and student leaders who led mass protests on the streets of Manila and in other parts of the country. Although the government was ousted from power after two decades, when protest masses and mass rallies in the mid-1980s galvanized effective opposition to the government, the country continued to experience only restive peace.
That was the point at which my husband and I decided we could not live with any more uncertainty. Our four daughters were growing up; we did not want them to suffer and live the rest of their lives knowing the ugly face of fear. We would move to Canada.
2 Six suitcases and a map of no return
Six suitcases. My husband Joe and I decided we needed just six suitcases to emigrate from the Philippines in the summer of 1987. Although staff at the Canadian Embassy in Makati, the financial and commercial hub in Metro Manila, said we could send over household items and furniture free of freightage, we opted to travel light. Our journey would be a clean break. No baggage from the past. Just our clothes, shoes, and some money in the bank to tide us over in the first few months.
We had earlier sold our house so there would be no home to go back to. We were homeless and property-less now. It would be with a certain sense of premonition and irony that 1987 also inaugurated the International Year of Shelter for the Homeless, since we would begin our first day in our adopted country without a home, without any next of kin, and just the shirts on our backs. At the same time, we were heartened that, at the beginning of the year, astronomers at the University of California took first sight of the birth of a galaxy. We had bought one-way tickets only. There was neither a looking back nor a going back.
Six suitcases. One each for me and my husband. One each for our daughters — Jenny, Kim, Isobel, and Rani. Our two older daughters were in their teens, fourteen and thirteen, and our two younger ones, eight and six. How do you leave a past lived for more than thirty years in a suitcase? How do you determine which item or belonging to keep? Or which memento or memorabilia mean the most to you and your family? Our decisions were fraught with risks and uncertainty but were founded on what we knew we wanted most for our family: some peace of mind. A good education for our children. A family life centred on simplicity. Although my husband and I were both gainfully employed and enjoyed thriving careers in Manila, our lives were forever on the brink of the next coup or the next bombing or prey to any and all of the stresses and dislocations that seethed and frothed over the cities and towns, small and big, in our old country.
In January 1987, government forces fired at a group of farmers on their way to Malacañang Palace in Manila to protest the lack of government action on land reform. In June, seventeen civilians suspected to be members of a rebel group were reported to have been killed by army soldiers in Lupao, a town near the foot of the Caraballo Mountains in Nueva Ecija. We chose to follow the map to the Door of No Return, a map that navigated rivers, mountains, and oceans ten thousand miles away from where our home once stood. We left our homeland with its storied 7,641 islands, a cacophony of voices and cultures that spoke in 186 languages (two of them now dead), a diverse flora and fauna, and the uncertain dangers of the Pacific Ring of Fire making it vulnerable to typhoons and earthquakes.
In January 1987, Frobisher Bay, in the Northwest Territories, changed its name to Iqaluit. Iqaluit is now the capital of Nunavut, the newest, largest, and most northerly territory of Canada. On June 30, Canada introduced its one-dollar coin, which locals quickly nicknamed the “Loonie.” By early July of that year, we had said our goodbyes to siblings and their children and close relatives and friends. It was like experiencing a death in the family. My parents had died within a year of each other: my father in 1985, my mother in 1986. Joe had lost both his parents years earlier. They had been our anchors. Their loss meant breakage from our roots, our past. We felt like orphans needing to heal. We were saddened but determined, and ready to leave. For good.
3 Landing
On July 31, 1987, we landed in Vancouver, British Columbia, where our immigration papers were stamped at the airport. Earlier, we had asked friends in Toronto to help us find an apartment, but it was suggested we look for a place to live after we’d arrived. Once in Toronto, we stayed at a hotel in Don Mills and spent four days searching, but we were fortunate to find a place right away and settled in a three-bedroom townhouse in the Finch and Leslie area.
The small townhouse on Thorny Vineway in Willowdale overlooked a children’s park. It was also close to St. Timothy’s Catholic School, where we promptly enrolled our children. At the time of our arrival, the school was in the process of registering new students. It had been a fine, sunny, and breezy summer, so the children did not have a tough time adjusting to life in Toronto.
We planned our move like clockwork: house, school, work, in that order. We came a month early to allow our children to adjust to the weather and to life in a new country. We did not want any surprises. Our goal was to blend in as smoothly as possible. And we did. Our empty apartment soon filled as we went bargain hunting for furniture, kitchen appliances and utensils, fall and winter clothes and boots. Before Zellers and Winners and The Bay, there were the BiWay and Simpson’s department stores. We would scan the sales ads in the dailies and got what we needed as the seasons changed.
At school, our youngest, Rani, who had kept mum and just quietly observed her new surroundings, was abruptly hustled into an English as a Second Language (ESL) class. As soon as her teacher heard her speak the next day, however, she was promptly upgraded to the grade one class. “Why didn’t you tell me you could speak English?” her teacher asked with concern. “Because you never asked,” our tiny tyrant quickly replied.
When we moved to another townhouse a year later, our children responded to the new situation in the best way they could. There was no house help or aunts and uncles around to assist with errands and chores. The kids learned to help with the dishes, the cooking, the laundry, and the house cleanup. Initially, it was challenging. Getting up early to head to school in the middle of winter when they wanted sleep and a warm bed. Doing chores in addition to school work and assignments. Fending for themselves while my husband and I were at work at low-paying jobs.
After two years of struggling with humdrum administrative work because he did not have any vaunted “Canadian experience,” my husband decided to go to law school and etch out a new career.
Like most immigrants chasing a dream, we wanted careers we had trained for at university. A job commensurate with our education and work experience. Or if it were not yet achievable because we did not have the requisite Canadian experience, a job just a few notches below what mainstream Canadians would be hired to do. We did not want to think that our skin colour defined us when employers looked at job candidates. We were optimistic that future employers would see beyond what was visible and hear beyond the sounds of our cacophonous and accented voices.
In truth, we were given a modicum of leverage and provided opportunities to vie for employment that typical newcomers would have a challenging time with. I was hired as a telemarketer within two weeks of our landing in Toronto. Since I was still converting dollars into pesos, I felt elated that I was earning eleven dollars when the minimum wage was eight. And when I did find more stable work as a junior reporter for a national religious newspaper, my first real job just two months into my time in the country, I was ecstatic. Of course, I never let on that only four months earlier I had a driver, a secretary, and an office staff three times larger than my then employer.
Early on, the managing editor of a big Toronto newspaper whom I had written to asking for advice on how to get a start as a journalist had generously written back: “Try to get into a local paper first. That is where you will get your Canadian experience.” I still thank him to this day, for giving me the time of day to “get real,” to get my feet back on the ground. For what was real at that time was immigrant medical doctors selling insurance policies or working as orderlies in hospitals. Or PhD-holders, chemists, and engineers driving taxicabs. Or accountants taking orders for takeout. Or architects sorting merchandise in department stores. Or nurses and pharmacists tending to the elderly as caregivers. You name a service job or a low-income occupation, and there is an immigrant or newcomer in Canada, formerly a professional in their country, ready, able, and more than willing to grab and fill it.
4 First job
Before I went job hunting, I went to the University of Toronto to have my educational achievements evaluated and credentialed. I still have that certificate to this day. A document certifying that my four years of university education in journalism from the University of the Philippines and two years in graduate communication studies from the same university was the equivalent of a bachelor’s degree in Canada.
At first, I prepared a concise resumé for prospective employers with my real education and work experience. Soon, I began to realize that requests for interviews were almost non-existent. However, as soon as I downgraded my work experience and education to fulfill the basic education and work experience needed for the job advertised, I had more request-for-interview responses. To get hired, one needed to hide what one was worth. Otherwise, no employer would give me the opportunity to compete for a job. With zero Canadian experience, the best entry to the Canadian job market was to enter at the lowest level of the position one wanted.
With four daughters to raise and Joe having trouble finding a part-time job (even with his extensive education and work experience), I decided to apply as a junior reporter at a Canadian national religious newspaper. Just like my first temp position that gave me unbounded joy, working in journalism again, even at the lowest rung on the ladder, was heaven-sent. To keep me abreast of world events, our managing editor assigned me to rewrite news stories churned out by the hourly news feed from the Catholic News Service based in Washington, DC. Then she began assigning me to cover local news. Six months later, I was upgraded to national news. I interviewed church leaders and church workers — bishops and cardinals, priests and sisters and lay people. And when the news crossed boundaries, even Members of Parliament, business and political leaders, professors and researchers, social and community leaders of every stripe and colour.
My beats and reportorial assignments became my Canadian Education 101. If I needed to draft a story, deep-digging research and interviews became de rigeur. Since our newspaper covered the whole breadth and length of Canada, from east to west as well as the Canadian North, the twelve provinces and territories became a template that opened my eyes to the reality of a nation as vast and as varied as the four seasons and the peoples that lived, struggled, and thrived in it. Even as I wrote stories about the faith life of Canadians, I was also immersed in social justice issues and the struggles of immigrant workers and labourers in the Canadian workplace: from miners and transient service and migrant workers in the Prairies to domestic workers in homes and migrant men and women working in farms, factories, meat- and fish-packing plants, and service industries.
5 Family life
My family settled into a pattern as we tried to establish a new life in Canada. We would find a habitual rhythm to our inchoate and tenuous existence, like the Kellogg’s “The best to you each morning” slogan from 1958 that I first encountered when I was nine and in grade three.
This became the lore and legend of our lives:
On weekdays, breakfast-in-a-hurry, and lunch and dinner cobbled from two tins of sardines, some veggies, or a quick casserole.
Also, help with homework, clothes and school snacks prepared for the following day. On Friday nights, laundry and some ironing, if needed. On weekends, off to Knob Hill Farms in Markham to get the cheapest groceries, fruits, and vegetables.
Sundays were reserved for church.
Early on, we taught the girls easy bed-making tricks.
Fluff the pillows.
Take off and tuck in a loose bedsheet.
Tidy up the bedskirt.
Add another sheet and cover the bed with a duvet. Also,
Dust.
Polish.
Scrub.
