November 20, 2019
by: the RAPS Balita Team
Aleisha Flores is the Marketing Coordinator for Island Spa and Sauna and Editor of the RAPS Balita 2018-2019. The BALITA asked her for her experiences and insights on the massive gathering of Filipino-Americans from across the East Coast at UConn last year.
The BALITA: What is a barangay in your own words?
Flores: Having been born and raised in the United States, I was never really familiar with the term “barangay” until later in my life when I would visit my relatives in the Philippines. Here at home in the States, I had a neighborhood, I had my hometown, I had friends in my school but it was all so detached from each other. A barangay to me is where everyone knows each other and is there for each other in the toughest of times. It can be political at times, but there is a sense of family no matter what and I saw that this past summer when my Lola passed away. The barangay provided assistance with the prayers, the funeral, and bringing food to make sure my family was well taken care of as we grieved, and that’s something I didn’t see in my life at home until I made more friends within my Filipino community and got older.
The BALITA: Why did you decide to go to FIND Dialogue last year?
Flores: I mostly decided to go to FIND Dialogue 2018 because I’d heard good things about FIND and I had gone to FIND Conference in my Spring 2017 semester and really enjoyed it! I had originally planned to go as a regular participant because it was my first one and I didn’t know what the structure was like, but then my friend Carlo Arellano at UConn (District 2, which was hosting Dialogue ’18) messaged me asking if I’d be interested in being a moderator because they were short LOL I was apprehensive at first because I knew it would be a lot of work, but since we were in the same Filipino youth group, he assured me a lot of the formats would be the same as discussion groups for our group and that’s how we ended up as co-Ate and Kuya for our family that year (shoutout to Dumaguete!!)
The BALITA: What is one lesson you took away from FIND Dialogue 2018 that you bring with you into your every day life?
Last year’s theme was “Binhi: Growth Through Action,” and a lot of what we discussed was about coming to terms with your identity and your role as a Filipino-American and reconciling those two different parts of yourself (along with others) as you moved through your life. There were a lot of lessons that I learned, but as a moderator I took not so much just lessons, but the stories and experiences of the participants of my family, with me afterward. There is so much diversity under the umbrella of being “Fil-Am” and the stories we shared in our classroom will always remind me to remember who I am and that we are able to overcome each of our individual obstacles to self-acceptance.
The BALITA: How do your Filipino roots affect your personal identity?
Flores: Being Filipino is such a huge part of myself - it’s the mold of how I grew up. What foods I ate, what methods my parents used to raise me, the traditions that are so ingrained in my upbringing - I would not be who I am without them and how I navigate the world is connected to that. In everything that I do as a young adult in the US, I think about how it affects my relatives at home in the Philippines and at home in this country. I acknowledge that all my personal successes and failures are not just mine, but theirs, and the product of generations of hard work before me.
The BALITA: Where do you fit inside the Fil-Am barangay?
Flores: These days, I’d like to say I have my role among my fellow Filipino friends and family. A barangay not just physically, but in spirit. It’s a space of people that I trust and am comfortable with and that I know will be there for me and vice versa in tough times. The things that I am talented at contribute to the barangay’s existence as we cultivate a space for ourselves in the place that we are in at this point in time.
Disclaimer: Any views or opinions represented in this post are personal and belong solely to the individual interviewed and does not represent an official endorsement by the Rutgers Association of Philippine Students of the aforementioned views or opinions of the individual. Any views or opinions expressed by the author are not intended to malign any person or organization. The Rutgers Association of Philippine Students is a nonpartisan student organization.
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