Queer Filipinx Youth and The Metaphorical Balikbayan Box: Imagining the Possibility of the Return Home to Self

• In Event: Storying Intersectionality for Collective Thriving: Dignity and Wisdom Across Cultures, Generations, Space and Time

Abstract

This dissertation study is a youth participatory action research and practitioner inquiry, The Balikbayan Project centers the voices, wisdom, and embodied joy of queer Filipinx youth. Through a multi-phased, community-centered, and collaborative process, this study invited youth to engage with the radical act of imahinasyon (imagination) as literacy - not just a future-oriented dreaming, but as a sacred, intertwined weaving of the past, present, and future.
This project emerged in response to the persistent absence of queer or color narratives - particularly those of Asian American and Pacific Islander youth - in educational research and curriculum. Through multimodal methods in storytelling, art, and critical dialogue, queer Filipinx youth participants reclaimed their bodies, identities, and ancestral lineages as sources of dignity and wisdom. They explored how queerness and Filipinx-ness are not fixed categories, but fluid constellations that shift across time and space.
Through the sharing of artifacts and dialogue, this presentation will highlight the co-designed programming, which explored pre-colonial gender identities, Filipinx mythology, and dynamic definitions of self-hood. It will also highlight queer Filipinx youth expressed reflections through reflective art journals, a virtual zine, photo essays, and conversation. The framework that emerged is titled imahinasyon as literacy - which offers four strategies of how queer Filipinx youth navigated their intersectional identities moving towards collective thriving: (1) honoring ancestors, (2) an expansive and fluid return home to self, (3) dynamic definitions, and (4) wrestling with inherited norms through reflection and unlearning.
This project is not just about queerness or ethnicity insolation, but rather it’s about intertwining intergenerational and ancestral survival and collective transformation. It illuminates how queer Filipinx youth story their identities with tenderness and resistance while inviting us to witness their becoming through generations, cultures, space, and time.

Author

• Anthony Andre Zarate, University of Pennsylvania