When we moved to this part of the country, some of the first kababayans we met sounded concerned we'd found an apartment in Norfolk, and not in Virginia Beach. Perhaps they meant well, even when they said things like You should move as soon as you can so you don't have to live in the ghetto, where there are a lot of blacks. Then there are those who caution their daughters and sons when they begin to date: Anyone really of any race, except yellow or black. So it shouldn’t have been surprising to hear those same daughters and sons say Our parents are not like those Filipinos on the west coast or in Hawaii— they came here as professionals. Perhaps they don’t know what they’re saying; perhaps they can't hear what those words really mean, having been raised in a culture of skin bleaching products where white is held up as right, and the fair-skinned mestizo will always get the office or the acting job over the dark- skinned ones who look like maids or peasants: hampas-lupa, those who crawl like worms along the earth— mud-dwellers, clay compared to the haughty figures whose marble floors and shoes they buff until they shine and won’t acknowledge that the brown reflections they see every day in the mirror are their own.
Purveyors of fine poetry since 2003.