The Philippines, Through Binoculars

On Filipino connection at the corner of 5th Ave and 46th St, and across the Pacific

By Selma White-Pascual

Illustration by Jacqueline Subkhanberdina

It is 30 minutes past the 2 p.m. start time when the program begins. The protesters gathered in front of the General Consulate of the Philippines on 5th Ave joke, “It’s actually early for Filipino-time!” An organizer steps forward and tells us through a large megaphone that we will run through the chants together. I share a printed copy of the lyrics with the girl beside me. 

Sulong Gabriela, lumaban makibaka!

Abante babae, palaban militante!

(Forward Gabriela, fight back!

Forward women, militant fighters!)

It is March 8, a day before the United Nations begins the 70th session of the Commission on the Status of Women. Ten days of meetings to discuss women’s access to justice and freedom from discriminatory practices. But we are some six blocks away from the U.N.’s New York City headquarters. Instead, a coalition of Filipino organizations stand outside the Philippine Consulate, decrying President Bongbong Marcos Jr.’s presence at the Commission. 

In a statement the following morning, President Marcos Jr. will herald the country’s commitment to empowering Filipina women and celebrate their role in shaping democracy, economy, and national character. He will, of course, also note that the work is far from complete. Here, his language becomes ambiguous, and he no longer speaks about the Philippines, referencing women “across many societies” who still experience violence, discrimination, and lack of opportunity. The women he lists become stateless and abstracted and the barriers they face become nondescript. The condition of their discrimination is primordial and placeless rather than inextricably bound to situated historical and structural forces of the Filipino context. 

For the Filipino Americans gathered outside of the Consulate, his assertion that Filipina women are a treasured cornerstone of communities will ring hollow. The labor brokerage state, developed in the Marcos Sr. era of the 1970s, actively facilitates labor export to solve domestic unemployment, institutionalizing migration and remittance dependency as a development strategy. Shaira Cruz, a representative of Migrante New Jersey, reads a letter to the crowd. She attests to a system which “forces our women to leave their children, their homes, and their country just to survive … risking exploitation, trafficking, and wage theft.” For the advocates here, it is their mothers, aunts, and cousins who immigrated to the United States to become the archetypal nurse, hospitality worker, or domestic helper. It is their neighbors whose vulnerabilities are multiplied, whose displacement seems to undermine the President’s words. It is an extended family and community that is now separated by an ocean, a practical reality, and a diasporic imagination. 

The chant organizer stops us. He chuckles and tells us we have to review this one. We’ve mispronounced pa-la-BAN as pa-LA-ban. I look down at the paper. How strange it is to chant in words that feel so unfamiliar on my tongue, and many of those around me. How strange it is to chant in a language we don’t understand.

I’ve been meditating on distance for the past few months. 

I grew up in Manila; now, having lived abroad for the past three years, I feel a distance from my home. In conversations about the Philippines with those who have never been, I sometimes feel a distance in our cultural imaginations of the country in the present day. But then, I also feel a distance from the country because I grew up in an English-speaking household. So, when I first met students in Liga Filipina, Columbia’s Filipino cultural club, most of whom were Fil-Ams, I could neither connect with them through a geographic reference point nor a shared language.

Two weeks before the protest, I attended the 2nd annual Filipino Ivy League Conference through Liga, which metastasized the distance I had been feeling. Held at the University of Pennsylvania under the theme Bayanihan, or community spirit, it featured several workshops that revolved not around issues facing the Filipino diaspora in the United States, but around issues in the Philippines. 

After a presentation on the series of floods that devastated the country last November, the speaker asked the audience, “What does mourning a disaster from afar look like? How can we support a country we have never visited?” From the questions and the answers they elicited, it seemed that the discussion rested on an assumed distance from a homeland, a lengthier and more calcified separation than I had ever experienced. As a student on Columbia’s campus last fall, I myself was not present during that catastrophe. Like many of the students in UPenn’s Houston Hall that weekend, I communicated with family back home through Viber, sending little animated GIFs of hearts and prayer hands. However, there remained a strange and elusive divide in my conversations with Fil-Ams, one that I’ve since discussed at length with friends from Manila having encounters similar to mine, a divide that I felt I was not able to cross.

Students spoke of the Philippines in a timeless manner—society is like this and like that. This quality was perhaps a symptom of emigration: a rendering of the homeland as timeless by geographically disconnecting it from the passage of real-time happening abroad. The Philippines became an Old World of conservatism and religion, and, while it is both conservative and religious, I felt that the country where I spent my childhood was at its worst taxidermied at the moment of a migrant’s departure and at its best sentimentalized. 

This was, of course, a distance that had not been constructed by them. It was the inheritance of what might have been a traumatic memory of the country from their parents; it was the flattened image of the country they may have received at school; it was the constant recreation of the Philippines in opposition to the life they were actually living. For those abroad, the country needed to be held together, something coherent enough to be passed down. 

And, many of the students were acutely aware of the Philippines-on-the-ground. What had really upset me? I had been confronted. They spoke with a fresh curiosity and critical eye that I, growing up there, lacked. Having left, they were able to analyse the Philippines with a new perspective. The political threat of the ‘70s was heightened in their mind. This collapsing of time between the catalysts for migration and the current moment, that created the ‘timeless’ quality I so disliked, also made the political stakes of the present appear in stunning clarity. It was too simple to see their distance as separation, and more truthful to see it as perspective. Not a more or less true perspective, but an equally legitimate one. 

Megan Wikowsky, a member of Anakbayan at UIC, walks up to the microphone. She is speaking on behalf of April Lowe, a member of Families of Filipinos in Detention. Lowe’s mother, known as Tita Rebecca, is a green card holder who had been placed in ICE detention for nine months. 

“My mother was deported on January 8, 2026. Despite efforts to obtain a third party medical evaluation through the Philippine consulate in Chicago, she was forced by ICE to board a plane as a medical flight risk. Prior to boarding, she was essentially kidnapped by ICE, transported and shackled, and coerced to take a sleeping pill and lay on a mattress at an unknown location … For 72 hours, she was unaccounted for.”

There are exclamations from the crowd, rising to find a word: “Shame!”

Wikowsky continues, “Marcos, as president of the Philippines, you must take better care of your citizens and ensure their safety!”

How can one think the links between the Filipinos abroad and their homeland are tenuous when they are constantly negotiating a relationship to the Philippine state? The diaspora’s connection to the Philippines may stretch generations and the lines of communication may fade; but, the homeland remains present insofar as it structures the terms of living at a distance.

After the protest, I searched for something to explain this strange coexistence of geographic distance and political enmeshment to make sense of the protesters' relationship to the Philippines. I stumbled upon Sharon Quinsaat, a social movements and migration sociologist who had studied the Filipino diaspora. Quinsaat argues that migration alone does not create diaspora. Shared political consciousness, developed through collective action like protesting, forges a transnational community. The state has often monopolized the affective loyalty of its citizens, which can alienate Filipinos abroad. Protest opens up an arena for different imaginations of national membership to emerge, where loyalty to the nation does not have to mean loyalty to the Philippine government. 

Here, I remembered Wikowsky’s speech and that of Maximo Londonio, or “Kuya Max,” a green card holder who had been kept in the Northwest Detention Center for two months without any assistance from the Philippine Consulate. Both condemned the Philippine government, yet appealed to a broader Filipino collectivity. “For the families of Filipinos, no matter where you are,” Kuya Max offered, “we will find you, we are here for you, and we will support and fight for you.”

What I saw at the March 8 protest was community among Filipinos, regardless of where they grew up, built upon a common hope for and a political relationship to the Philippines. The divide I had experienced at the conference now felt artificial, a product of my prejudice butting up against views that I could not understand and refused to push forward. Here, on 5th Ave, I understood that the distance that had so concerned me was not a physical distance between people and their country but an emotional distance from the nation’s struggle. 

In some kind of way, we are all distant from our homeland. None of us can encounter it in its totality. Physical proximity is not a guarantee of truth. What could fill the gap between the students and I at the conference is what I felt outside the consulate: An acknowledgement of the unevenness of experience, even if just through a repeated phrase to get the pronunciation right; a promise of solidarity and protection, especially at a moment when rights are under attack; and, an insistence to listen to each other even when we don’t understand our connection yet.