Philippine Independence Day and Ancestry
June 12, 1898: an independence both permanent and short-lived amongst the budding and competitive and emerging empires of the West who play the rest of the world like an RPG strategy-based board game. They exchange fire, words, technology, infrastructure, dress, custom, labor, and assert complete influence and ownership. A day to honor a flurry of heroes and a people in a long and complicated battle. I spent the better part of my morning thinking about my grandpa, Agafino, whom I never got the chance to meet (neither my siblings), who served in the US Navy as a cook of various rankings. He was a hot-headed man too who had no qualms about stuffing you and your disobedience in an empty rice sack and tying you to a tree branch. As flawed as I've been told he is, he is still more a mystery, a myth, a laboring body in ships filled with sailors who don't look or speak like him (for the most part). I continually wonder what it was like for him. Was he ever called a "monkey...