it is really strange for me to look into the city/area where my ppl come from.

in one case, i”m really lucky because i know this. and, strangely, i know nothing about the white side of my family. like… nothing. i know what part of canada they settled, but not where they come from. like, obviously since it is a catholic area, it would be fairly easy (i imagine) for someone to trace back the roots, but i don”t really care and i”m pretty sure no one else on that side of the family cares either. they have no roots, no history, save for what they stole.

on my pin@y side, though… i know much much more. which does make me very very happy. in part because it is the heritage i identify more with because i was raised in a pin@y household around my family (family has always meant small, brown Tagalog speaking people, to me).

looking into some of my family history, it is really weird to see how it is probably very very likely that my family had class privilege back in pasay city.. Like. Yeah. definitely.

hell, they still do, since many of them have bought vacation homes there (well, i guess it isn”t really a ‘vacation” home if you have a place in your actual home)

but not so much while i was growing up. i know my dad worked in a factory and other blue collar jobs when he first immigrated. but he went in for a diploma of some kind and it was only when i was about 15 did we stop being poor. but i don”t really mean ‘we” because the moment my dad started making a decent amount of money? he spent it all on himself. there were no trickle down economics happening. i also started working at this age. and it was pretty clear that if i wanted new clothes/food/whatever i”d have to buy it myself…. all while my dad bought a membership to a golf/country club and was going back to the PH like 2 or 3 times a year. and eventually driving a bmw at the same time i was seriously considering doing sex work to survive a particularly rough patch (this is post high school btw when i was still talking to him).

what i”m saying is that… he came from a class privileged background in the PH, had a relatively brief stint of poverty while raising two kids on his own… and now is class privileged again.

this is what i know of my family history:

• one of my great/great/nth great grand Lolo”s was the mayor of pasay city. and based on this list it was most certainly during the spanish colonial period.
• that my family owned the property they lived on in the PH (but I they sold it after my Lolo died, but many of them own property elsewhere, now)
• according to my mom, my dad mentioned once that they had a maid growing up

anyway, no real point to this post so i”ll end it here…</p>