As the US gears up for one more Trump presidency, communities are feeling shock waves of emotion that vary from worry and despair to powerlessness and anger.
Many people are experiencing election grief, outlined by psychotherapist Pauline Boss as an “unresolved grief” that reveals up in “the lack of hopes and desires and plans that [people] thought had been coming from the opposite candidate, a lack of certainty sooner or later that was what they needed, lack of belief on the planet as a secure place, lack of emotions of freedom over your personal physique, the lack of assist for individuals who have lesser means than the remainder of us do, the lack of assist in your neighbor and people who find themselves totally different from you.”
Election grief tends to debilitate us, leaving us in a frozen or shutdown state. This info is value taking note of, particularly when it’s vital to remain targeted and mobilized as the state of democracy is more and more threatened. As we take part in additional collective actions, we have to discover locations of retreat to maintain our commitments to social justice.
With their instinctive sense of neighborhood care, Filipinos within the diaspora have been co-creating locations of therapeutic and restoration. Three of those neighborhood areas have been actively seeding and tending cultures of each relaxation and solidarity. Who’re they, and what can we be taught from them?
A Place of Relaxation
After I image a grief assist heart, I think about rooms with white fluorescent lights and cookie-cutter chairs organized in a circle. However at A Resting Place, a grief and loss cultural useful resource heart in Seattle, guests are greeted with a heat environment filled with lush crops.
The partitions are lined with pictures, handwritten letters, and art work. There’s additionally an altar the place guests can depart presents for his or her family members who’ve handed away. “I like seeing all these photos on our altar,” shares A Resting Place’s founder, Derek Dizon. “It’s actually a approach for folks to memorialize and commemorate their one who has died, or perhaps it’s their animal. This altar expresses and depicts lots of life … that individuals nonetheless maintain on to.”
A Resting Place attracts on Filipino identification and ancestral values, together with atang, an Ilocano ritual of providing meals to honor the lifeless and driving away malevolent spirits. That’s intentional. “Seventy p.c of the individuals who enter A Resting Place have no idea what they’re coming into,” says Dizon. “They go in [thinking] it’s a present store, however they depart [with a] tissue in hand or a letter [written] to their lifeless beloved one.”
To Dizon, Filipinos are expert archivists, with picture albums used as emblems to protect household legacy and cultural reminiscence. “My dad lately retired to the Philippines, and he left me with all our [photo] albums,” Dizon says. “He left me this big-ass suitcase of albums. It’s so heavy, I virtually injured myself carrying it!”
Dizon isn’t any stranger to loss: His mom, Phoebe, a Filipina immigrant, was murdered whereas serving to a pal escape an abusive marriage. Throughout Susana Remerata Blackwell’s divorce trial, her estranged husband shot her, Phoebe, and Veronica Johnson whereas they had been sitting on a bench outdoors the courtroom. All three ladies died, as did Susana’s unborn little one. Dizon was solely 4 on the time.
“You’re not the identical individual whenever you expertise dying,” he says. “Regardless of what number of deaths occur, you’re at all times a special individual after you expertise grief: I’m now this individual. We are actually this folks.” Yearly, he organizes a vigil with API Chaya, an company created by survivors and for survivors from marginalized communities, in honor of his mom, her friendships with Johnson and Blackwell, and the assist she gave different immigrant ladies.
These vigils can mobilize attendees to demand the change needed to stop additional violence. “To me, grief is synonymous [with] justice,” Dizon says. “Grief is the best way that we expertise our connection to one thing that has been taken away from us.”
For diasporic and immigrant folks of shade, loss has at all times been entangled with the dying of a folks and the severance from one’s homeland and tradition. For Dizon, grief is “at all times a dialogue of justice,” because it entails lamenting the numerous variations of dying brought on by colonial violence. “I consider grief invitations us to be an energetic participant [in] our origin story,” he explains. And as we bear in mind these tales, we additionally entry a artistic and regenerative drive that “asks us to essentially reimagine the type of world we need to reside in.”
Dizon shares that mourning brazenly and with out disgrace can reshape tradition and problem cultural norms. “There’s lots of risk,” he says. “Grief asks us to create new traditions. And why not? There’s a lot creativity that grief invitations us into. Why not be remodeled in our grief? Why not change who we’re as a folks [and] as an individual, and rejoice that?”
Reimagining Our Connection to Land
The Reimagination Farm started out of a want to heal each particular person and collective trauma. Based by Filipino American activist and writer Robyn Magalit Rodriguez, Ph.D., and her husband, Joshua Vang, a second-generation Hmong refugee and nature specialist, the Reimagination Farm is a studying heart for these looking for solace and eager to observe radical love for themselves, different folks, and the Earth.
In 2023, Rodriguez, a professor on the College of California, Davis, left academia to turn into a full-time farmer. She teaches guests sustainable farming strategies in addition to nature consciousness, land justice, and Indigenous farming information. Rodriguez made this pivotal shift within the top of the pandemic.
After Rodriguez’s son, Amado, died in 2020 whereas residing with Indigenous communities and land defenders within the Philippines, she was inspired to open the Reimagination Farm to honor his reminiscence. Earlier than Amado died, Rodriguez stated he advised her, “Mama, don’t even fear about me. It’s you that I’m worrying about. … You could get again to the land.” Now, Reimagination Farm fosters Amado’s imaginative and prescient for Rodriguez and others to be in proper relationship with the Earth, which Rodriguez says is “extremely therapeutic not simply individually—[but] for all of us collectively and throughout generations.”
Now, she uplifts practices that prioritize each respect and reciprocity: “It was like a promise I and my husband made to ourselves and our household in that point, that if we had been gonna reside via the pandemic, we had been going to pledge to commit ourselves to a special relationship to the land and Mom Earth,” Rodriguez shares.
Rodriguez is a regenerative farmer, which, to her, means specializing in the soil somewhat than crops and what they’ll yield. “It’s concerning the soil and its capacity to carry life for a number of generations,” she explains. “I believe it’s a observe that has at all times been on the core of how Indigenous peoples worldwide have approached the land and life and the soil.”
In early September, the Reimagination Farm held the Fall Anihan Competition (anihan means harvest season in Tagalog). Rodriguez shares that the competition was held the identical weekend Filipino American farmworker and union organizer Larry Itliong co-led the grape strike in Delano, California, in 1965.
“They had been exploited immigrant employees who had been engaged on huge tracts of land dedicated to grapes, the manufacturing of grapes, mono-cropping, large-scale agriculture —having been displaced from being in a relationship to land the place folks can develop their very own meals and maintain their very own households,” Rodriguez says. “Due to the violent legacies of colonization, that’s what propelled Filipinos like [Itliong] to have to hunt out employment in the US. So what a juxtaposition to consider that.”
Rodriguez is studying from these labor organizers, together with Itliong and Cesar Chavez, about the way to problem the prevalent immigrant narrative round wrestle and sacrifice. “The creation of the Reimagination Farm is supposed to develop totally different concepts, not simply resistance and wrestle, however to develop the chances of radical creativeness,” she says. “And the chance to dream different kinds of futures, to do the work of freedom dreaming.”
Centering Worldwide Solidarity
Pinay Assortment is a feminist model with a group of 15 Filipino members from each the homeland and the diaspora. The social enterprise helps diasporic Filipinos reconnect with Filipino tradition by promoting merchandise, internet hosting academic occasions, and writing articles concerning the struggles within the motherland, together with state-sanctioned violence, employees’ rights, and the complexities of religion and colonization.
Founder Jovie Galit created Pinay Assortment in 2019 to “amplify [the] voices of the lots” and to “rethink [the] methods we inform tales [about Philippines-based Filipinos] that resonate with the folks of the diaspora in order that they [take] motion.” Galit desires of utilizing Pinay Assortment to create a extra grounded type of reconnecting by which diasporic Filipinos don’t neglect the struggles of the exploitation and state violence within the homeland.
“There’s a lot urgency within the work,” Galit shares. “Doing this work with Pinay Assortment, I’ve come to know how activists again residence [in the Philippines] do their work. I see the have to be on the market [on the ground].”
Galit, who was raised within the Philippines, migrated to Canada at 19. When she relocated, she observed some diasporic Filipinos had been reclaiming Filipino tradition and identification with out growing an consciousness about systemic points throughout the Philippines.
“There’s magnificence in [decolonization], [but] there’s additionally the privilege of having the ability to replicate on who we’re, our identification, and our connection to Filipino tradition versus Filipino folks [in the Philippines] who’re organizing to outlive,” Galit says. “As a lot because it’s vital to know who we’re, it’s additionally vital for us to [turn] that understanding into mobilizing and organizing.”
Galit believes worldwide solidarity is important to reclaiming Filipino identification, particularly for these residing in North America. Because the archipelago nation faces incessant local weather catastrophes and human rights violations, Galit says it turns into “dissonant to not deal with [these] actual points.” That’s the explanation Pinay Assortment has an emergency fund for hurricane aid in addition to political prisoners, farmers, impoverished folks, and different marginalized teams within the nation.
Galit hopes for a time when Pinay Assortment doesn’t must exist as a result of the work of liberation is extra realized. “Meaning we created a extra sustainable construction for neighborhood organizations to thrive or perhaps that implies that communities of the diaspora are actually honed in doing worldwide solidarity work with Filipinos again residence.”
Finally, A Resting Place, the Reimagination Lab, and Pinay Assortment are providing areas that, as Rodriguez explains, are “much less within the area of a resistance and dismantling an unjust system however actually within the area of creatively imagining, manifesting a special type of future.”
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Gabes Torres
(she/siya) is a psychological well being practitioner, grassroots organizer, and author based mostly within the international South. Her medical observe and analysis deal with collective and intergenerational trauma and therapeutic strategies, together with the psychosomatic implications of imperialism, racism, local weather catastrophes, and human rights violations. Her ardour is elevating communities and fashions of collective flourishing. |
