BOOK REVIEW:MAGDARAGAT, An Anthology of Filipino-Canadian WritingEdited by: Teodoro Alcuitas, C.E, Gatchalian &, Patria RiveraPublished by: Cormorant
CEBU CITY – Considering that the Filipinos reside in an archipelago constituted by at least 7,000 islands, it is safe to conclude that a big percentage of the population are closely linked to the sea . Only those living in the highlands, faraway from the seashore, would have very little contact with the sea.
And these “perpetual departures” have made our ancestors wanderers beyond our shores. On October 18, 1587, a Spanish galleon docked at what is now the Morro Bay in California carrying the first Pinoy ancestors to reach North America. Centuries later, more Pinoys would migrate to the U.S.A., especially when we became a colony in 1898. Men were recruited from mainly North Luzon to work in the plantations of Hawaii and California.
According to a 2022 study, approximately 1.83 million of the Philippines’ 110 million citizens were OFWs. Just a few years from now, the number could easily reach two million as thousands continue to apply for passports in the hope of finding a job abroad. But if we were to include all overseas Pinoys, a broader term to include all of those with Filipino ancestry, regardless of citizens who live outside the country, the number would reach around 12 million.
Through the years more books would be written by first- or second-generation Filipino-Americans detailing their lives lived away from their country of origin while adapting to the demands of living the American dream. A number of these have been published in the U.S. Some of those that have gained readership include Gina Apostol’s IA recent phenomenon has been the publication of anthologies written by a group of writers from one specific country.
Like many Pinoys who have left our shores as an escape from what the editors claim as the “extreme poverty in the homeland – exacerbated by corrupt politicians embezzling money from the public coffers and a World Bank unforgiving of debts that its own colonial projects caused, layered over by ongoing pas de deux with post-colonial melancholia – which have driven Filipinos overseas taking all varieties of work to survive.” Most end up as caregivers of all kinds: nurses, housekeepers, nannies.
Having settled in another nation-state with its own cultural realities , Fil-Canadians have no choice but embrace the phenomenon of hybridity in the various aspects of their life abroad while asserting their own identify. In Alexa Batitis’ essay she writes of the pragmatic embrace of a hybrid life: “There are so many of us living this kind of hybrid lives of languages, starting to feel comfortable with exploring our Filipino roots, desiring to feel more connected to the homeland.