Culture is to a society what a flower is to a plant. What is important about a flower is not just its beauty. A flower is the carrier of the seeds for new plants, the bearer of the future of that species.-African proverb
Kasama Robyn Rodriguez’s article in Hyphen. This excerpt below particularly moved me deeply, as a Filipino-American who often travels back to the Philippines for political & cultural integrations. As children of migrants, or some of us migrants ourselves, it is imperative that we are more critical of why we are forced to leave our homeland.
“Why were Filipinos migrating so much to begin with, such that there was now a category of ‘OFWs’? What did the tearful yet excited applause by all of the passengers on the plane suggest about the kind of traumas migration produces? Since I had participated in the clapping and the crying, didn’t it mean that somehow, in some way, no matter where I was born, I was a balikbayan too? How did these official categories originate and in what ways do they resonate, or not, with people? To what purpose are those categories deployed by the state and by migrants themselves?”
