World-Making Beyond the Borderlands: Learning to Read Neocolonialism and Myself as a Filipina American Through Trese

• In Event: Engaging Popular Culture as World-Making: The Everyday Practices of (Re)Storying Histories, Futures, and Positionalities

Abstract

Objectives
Through my K-12 education, social studies curricula have historically erased “the traces of difference” made by my multiple, intersecting historicities (Beltrán, 2014, p. 274) as an Filipinx-American. And, unable to read, write, or speak Illocano, I have not quite lived on the borders of my cultures (Anzaldúa, 1987), but rather in a dislocated beyond. This paper explores however, how I have read myself through Trese (Hwea, 2021), and taken up its magic and monsters to imagine a world in the dislocated beyond.

Perspectives
Informed by Halagao’s (2004) notion of “colonial mentality” and Beltrán’s (2014) critique of dislocated curriculum, this critical auto-ethnographic study recognizes Trese as disrupting the Eurocentric savior narrative undergirding and perpetuating colonization across the Filipinx diaspora. This study believes in the power of speculative fiction and fantasy to agentify the Dark Other (Thomas, 2018), to bend dominant narratives (Thomas & Stornaiuolo, 2016), and to build a world beyond the borderlands (Anzaldúa,1987).

Methods
Taking up Boylorn & Orbe’s (2014) approach to critical auto-ethnography, I engaged in writing and art-making to reflect upon how I am learning to read myself and my world after viewing each episode of Trese. I then utilized critical narrative analysis (Souto-Manning, 2018) to examine the ways in which I/the show recycle, challenge, and negotiate institutional narratives, and reimagine a different world.

Data
Data included journal entries, collage, narrative fan fiction, and poetry, alongside memos reflecting critically on my viewing to make sense of who I am in the context of my histories and cultural communities intersecting with Trese (Boylorn & Orbe, 2014, p. 17).

Results
Trese served as a primer for me to read myself as an active figure within the story of neocolonialism, rather than far flung and dislocated. I understood Trese’s depiction of the Babaylan – pre-colonial priestesses – as those with the ability to read, recognize, and resist neocolonialism. As Thomas (2018) describes of the Dark Other in speculative fiction, animistic figures once made monstrous by Spanish colonizers (Meñez & Coben, 1996) are complex and agentive in Trese, and only monstrous when corrupted by neocolonialism. Simultaneously, Trese reifies institutional colorism, Eurocentric beauty standards, and the primacy of English. These internal conflicts, however, pushed me to consider the ways these narratives occupy my everyday life, and how I might embody Trese’s Babaylan to challenge them and build a new world.

Significance
Trese demonstrates the possibility pop culture has for diasporic, U.S.-born individuals living beyond the borders of their cultures, to read the ways (neo)colonialism has impacted and continues to impact our becoming, and the worlds we can make to challenge it. Trese animated a spirituality once smothered by Spanish colonization, casting the Babaylan as a figure of ongoing resistance. Reflecting on artifacts like Trese through a critical lens can help Filipinx individuals like myself read and interpret our experiences within the context of being multiply-Othered (Kumashiro, 2000), and fitting nowhere (Beltrán, 2018). Taking up Trese’s Babaylan vision can help us read and remake the world, challenging dislocated curricula that dominate K-12 learning spaces.

Author

• Bianca Licata, Teachers College, Columbia University
  Presenting Author