Katrina Stuart Santiago

I’ve always considered myself lucky to have been in the State U in the late 90s to the 2000s, across an undergraduate degree and my MA, because it gave me the opportunity to have the best teachers in the humanities.

LQS was one of those teachers, and she didn’t just welcome me as a sophomore into a basic Filipino classroom, she also would have me in her MA classes the years before she left for the States. I don’t remember much about what those classes were exactly, as much as I have a keen sense of what it was that I learned in them, beyond readings and syllabi, given the kind of teaching she practiced.

It was in that sophomore Filipino classroom, for example, where I had the best lessons in diversity and unity, history and empathy. It was there that I became friends with Anifa, who was the lone Muslim girl in class, and who LQS grouped me with for final projects. This meant being forced into discussions about Muslim Mindanao and the struggle of the Bangsamoro, with the goal of building upon similarities, toward working on truths borne of the multiplicity of voices. I was in over my head. I realized very quickly that there was no cramming all this information about Mindanao into my head, and that I had to settle for admitting that I knew very little, and what I had instead were questions. It was also the first time I had a sense of risk and privilege. Where I realized that a conversation such as this one meant so much to Anifa, whose life, history, heritage were on the line, while it did not, in any way, affect the way in which mine would unfold.

At some point before that final project’s presentation, I told LQS that I felt it was important that Anifa be the one to lead the discussions, and she nodded. Like I had learned the lesson she meant for me to discover for myself. Read the room. Let others speak. Admit your limitations. Be an ally. Know your place. (more…)

A couple of days before Christmas, on probably the only time I’ve driven down the stretch of EDSA-Northbound since the March 2020 lockdown, I saw huge tarpaulins hanging on flyovers and walkways obviously released by the Duterte government. In small font on top of the tarp, it said Communist Party of the Philippines and at center it crossed out the number 52. Both of these are secondary to the declaration, in larger font, for us to “Disown and Junk Marxism-Leninism-Maoism” (Itakwil at Ibasura Marxismo-Leninismo-Maoismo).

I remember pointing it out to my younger sestra—a former student—riding with me in the car, to which she cheekily replied: “Ha? How do we takwil class inequality and struggle?” or something to that effect.

It was then that it became clear to me that while this government will insist it is only after “the communists” and “the Left,” it is in fact lying through its teeth. What it fears is not the insurgency or the number of people who might decide to go to the mountains and join the armed struggle. Its real fear is that as more of us see how incompetent and violent this Duterte government is, we might start thinking differently about governance and politics, focused as we become on class inequality, injustice, and rights violations, and the kind of systemic corruption in government that has brought us to this point of crises. (more…)

There are many things we might have in common, living where we do, under the leadership that we have, in a 2020 riddled by crises. Here where it wasn’t (isn’t) just the pandemic, as it was a Taal Volcano eruption early in January 2020, government’s refusal to ban Chinese mainlanders from entering the Philippines despite the threat of Covid-19 spread in February, the longest lockdown/quarantines in the world from March 2020 to the present, strong typhoons and massive flooding in the last two months of the year.

It is easy to think this is all a matter of being Filipino, but it seems important to highlight how this is also a matter of social class. Of course one is mindful about using the term “middle class,” tenuous and unstable as that category is, especially given the pandemic. To my mind though, the category suffices to define this particular privilege that is important to acknowledge, as it is important to address. Because we are often told to check our privilege, which also inevitably silences us: the majority after all, have it worse.

But why invalidate this particular experience of the middle class? Why be silenced by the notion of privilege, when while we are not the majority who are poor, neither are we at the opposite end of this deepening wealth gap? We are not the 5% who are oligarchs and old rich, for whom half-a-million beach trips and vacations is part of this new normal. Neither are we influencers and celebrities who are selling a new normal of spending thousands on Covid-19 tests just to go on a beach trip, or to party with friends. (more…)

If there’s anything none of us should be arguing about at this point, it’s the climate of fear as fueled and nurtured by Duterte.

Pre-pandemic, we saw how Duterte and his people’s manipulation of the law could keep Senator Leila de Lima in jail on trumped-up charges. We’ve seen this government unseat Chief Justice Sereno because Duterte considered her as “enemy.” We’ve witnessed Duterte get away with massive violations on our rights, where random statements like, say, “arrest istambays” will mean the warrantless arrests of citizens the following day. Where Presidential fury and finger-pointing is enough to get people removed from their positions, business owners divested from their own ventures, critics or perceived enemies arrested or killed. Let’s begin counting the dead bodies from organized Left organizations, and the drug war dead.

The pandemic was just what Duterte needed to further clamp down on our rights, lock us down in our homes, and ensure our silence. We were afraid of the virus, of course and expectedly, but this government was not satisfied with just our fear of getting sick in a time and place with no reliable healthcare system. They wanted to bury that last nail into the coffin of possible resistance, and what better way to do it than by passing the Terror Law and throwing the ABS-CBN shutdown our way?

After all, if a cultural monolith like ABS-CBN could be shut down by this government based solely on Duterte’s pettiness, what can it NOT do? In the course of the Congressional inquiry on the franchise, we also realized that much of it had to do with the content of the network’s shows—and they weren’t just talking about news coverage (!!!), but about the portrayal of politicos in soap operas and teleseryes.

And what is the Terror Law and the contingent soundbites from military officials about regulating social media and the President about cracking down on dissent which government equates with terrorism? What else could the push of the MTRCB to regulate Netflix, and of the FDCP to have all film, advertising, and digital content pass through its office, be about? What could all of these be but the multifarious ways in which this government tries to restrict what we say and what we create, online and beyond? And if they don’t push through with these policies, then at the very least it has made us quake in our boots a little more and has distracted us from the incompetence and corruption that permeates government.

If we, in our cloistered, privileged, middle-class to wealthy spaces, can feel this fear; if we acknowledge that a major stressor the past seven months has been both the virus and the incompetent and violent governance, complete with a President who randomly drops shoot-them-dead orders, and military officials deciding on our lives with not a smidgen of compassion. If we can be afraid, what more the majority in the vulnerable communities? (more…)

It’s a question we ask more and more now, I think more sincerely and honestly than we ever have, of friends and family, even of Facebook contacts and acquaintances. It’s never seemed more important to ask people: how are you? As opposed to “what’s up?” or “what are you doing these days?”

Because we all know what’s up, and regardless of what we’re doing, we all know that on a very basic level, we’re all just trying to survive. The pandemic takes its toll on the best of us, and on this fifth month since a lockdown was first declared, I think the mental toll is one that’s almost paralyzing.

Almost. Because privilege teaches us that some are luckier than others—we are luckier than the majority who did not only lose jobs during the two-month lockdown, but also had their communities taken over by police power, were disenfranchised from government assistance packages, silenced by fear, and disregarded by policy. Yes, we are all victimized by the Duterte government’s lack of an efficient, sufficient, and scientific Covid-19 public health response, as we all are by its Cabinet filled with incompetent and unkind officials, but as with many (all) things, social class difference puts things in perspective.

No, this is not a treatise on gratefulness, as much as it is a promise of solidarity. (more…)

Katrina Stuart Santiago

Katrina Stuart Santiago

Ma’am Lilia #LQS

The battle for thought

Survey Says: Fear