Letter from the Editor: October

I'm not sure if it's part of getting older or because so many catastrophic things have been happening back to back to back, but this year has got me a serious case of whiplash. I walked into Rite Aid on Sunday morning and almost had a heart attack when I bumped into a tiny cackling evil old lady before I realized, hold up that's just a scary witch statue and omg, it's October already. For us at Hella Pinay, this means it's Filipinx American History Month as well as Indigenous Peoples Month in the Philippines.

TBH as I've gotten older, I've realized that growing up "Filipina-American" left me indifferent to either country in terms of feeling a strong sense of nationalistic belonging, like feeling pride for any flag or government (this has to do with a lot of factors and is a bit too complex to go into here but, soon)...the feeling of being neither here nor there. So why celebrate FAHM? To me, regardless of whatever flag is flown within whatever invisible boundaries, we have contributed much to whatever land we live on. I believe it's important to share our history and our narratives, and to shed this whole shitty "forgotten Asian Americans/invisible minority" erasure of our existence thing.

October is also #LibraSeason, the scales representing balance and harmony. This month, in addition to reflecting on our histories, influences, and heroes, we're also thinking about what it means to be straddling two, and sometimes multiple, places and identities,"in the in between" as AC Dumlao puts it - and on that note, we're very excited to share their new column starting later this month! We're also super stoked to bring on Nella Ocampo, a SF-based graphic designer, who's gonna help us get our site design on and poppin (yay! finally! omg!) We also have some amazing partnerships in the works, and will be looking into bringing on some new team members and submissions from the community as well, so if you're interested plz keep an eye out for those announcements.

I'm super excited to keep doing what we do every month: celebrate us!

<3 Steph