| if you want to know what we are 2001 (aka part 2)
if you want to know what we are
observe us who live in lily white suburbs
and chocolate ghettos
in pandesal cities
and white bread towns
on different coasts
and some say
on different levels
we who celebrate our people
our lives
our struggles
righteous wisdom
and inner and outer peace
if you want to know what we are who live in rhythm, words, poems, music
from the kulingtang clanging
to the dJ's scratchin that beat
who hear our ancestors weaving our stories
tapestries covered in pain and poetry
if you want to know what we are who rap, flow, dance, scratch, spin, write
wage war with words from the beaches of morro bay and virginia beach
to parking lots in la, ptown,
to sanfrancisco south of market, stockton, little manila
our very bones make music
if you want to know what we are who are pinay who are second generation, third generation, one point five and immigrant
who bear legacies of babaylan priestesses and whose shoulders who bear the brunt of every burden
yet our spirits are never broken
we who are flips, pinoys, pinays, pilipino, filipino,
we who are uprooted and transplanted
into the asparagus fields
we who toil in sweatshops
bought and sold on the global market
we watch our families starve
for what is termed
"development"
we are the legacies of hundreds of years
of the archipelago
and in the americas whos spread out
in search of dreams
and something to feed our children
we are the hope of our parents
and we reap the benefits of their sweat
they who bore oppression and lonliness in search of a promised land
a land full of promises rarely kept
if you want to know what we are we've been colonized, demonized, criticized, ripped apart, and seldom realized
we who say we hate the system
who wear the labels of our own oppression:
GAP
NIKE
POLO SPORT
we who are hypocritical
sometimes critical
rarely radical
and some of us
pitiful
if you want to know what we are who are on time for being late
who get booty at some party
and get corrected at conferences
who are paradoxes to our parents
and strangers to each other
we who love to hate and hate to love each other
if you want to know what we are observe the way we dog each other out
we who play our own people in the philippines in here of the belly of the beast
we who bow to ivory towers and higher powers
if you want to know what we are see global capitalism creeping
and certain government officials sleeping upon the backs of those who toil
who carry the history in the dirt underneath their fingernails
we are flips searching for love and some pal for home
who reach back and forth transnational
creating a world without borders
we who search hungrily for history
and yearn for a land where we've never lived
to gain a sense of peace
we are the pre-med at hardvard
and the peasant woman begging in dondo
the post stocks scholar and the politician
the mother the father the sister the brother we are fighting for the veterans and striking for ethnic studies
we are fighting imperialism everywhere and injustice all the time
struggling to love each other more than we love our oppressors
we are a million strong and everywhere
brown and mestiza and mestizo
we who are in DC: daly city and district of columbia
and san diego, and stockton, san jose, salinas, new jersey, and new york city
looking for a way just to get through
we are the activists, the artists, the doctors to be, the nurses in training
the engineers, the organizers, the writers, the teachers
the prophets, the workers,
reaching for the future and claiming the present
we are the navy kids, the third generation kds,
the new immigrants,
and the reborn decolonized
we are on the picket lines demanding justics
we are in the voting booth making change
we are building our communities
we are not afraid of the political
we are transforming culture
and we have created a renaissance
we are the new hope new joy new life everywhere
if you want to know what we are
we are revolution.
-dawn mabalon
inspired by if you want to know what we are by carlos bulosan
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(in short, it was amazing).
