forever bastos, no longer mabait

Illustration by Agnes Ito for Hella Pinay / All photos courtesy of the author

she is so mabait!

at every big family get-together, there’s always at least one…and we all know her:

that adorable little cousin, niece, or inaanak who is just a vision of preciousness, looking like a little cherub angel with cheeks that make you so gigil and eyelashes for days that seem to sing beautiful eyes!! every time they flutter. she hardly cries or makes a fuss; and if she does, she’s so quiet, you didn’t even notice. when she comes over, pagmamano siya to every elder, pressing her soft forehead to every hand deemed worthy of respect - including that one tita who refuses the mano because she’s “not that old yet! nako!” she dances and sings on cue in such an endearing way that it shoots waves of coos and cackles out of the mouths of every tita in the vicinity. if you missed it at the party, don’t worry - it’s already posted on their facebook and you can check it out later.

she’s kind, polite, obedient and exactly what everyone wants her to be. like i said… she’s so mabait.

mabait: a moniker that continues to haunt me ‘til this day, the ever-present impossible standard i am obligated to compare and measure myself to.

i’ve swam with this word, living and obeying it when it seemed easy and simple. but as i got older, i began to develop in a way that felt intrinsically against being mabait. as i came into my own identity and my own person, i found it increasingly difficult to behave the way they wanted me to.

a new word started being used to describe me, one that wove shame and guilt into every action i took towards independence: bastos.

and with that, my mabait-ness began to fade into an identity of the past.

though pinays are incredibly diverse and varied, inhabiting so many different shades of personalities, i find that we are consistently locked into the same old good girl-bad girl trope that plagues all womxn and femmes everywhere: mabait vs bastos.

this dynamic gets even more complex when we think about how adults consistently encourage us to be scandalous, so long as we teeter the thin line of being offensive only to a point that is both palatable and entertaining. anything further is obscene and calls for penance.

in the wake of all this, i have to ask: what even is a “good pinay”?

being filipino-american has always felt like an intricate game of having to choose the parts of me that would most benefit my family’s reputation at social gatherings, while hiding the rest for the other world that exists entirely in my private life.

bastos at home, mabait at the family party.

i was expected to separate the parts of my personality that were “good” and simultaneously sever and reject all that were “bad”, but i couldn’t do it.

with every misgiving, i found myself desperately grasping to keep any semblance of being mabait and the acceptance that it rewarded me. at every turn i kept hearing, “you have no respect!” but how could i respect people who would not respect me? this was demanded of me with no reciprocity and no model to follow. my head spun. i wanted to be myself, but any evidence of this “rebelliousness” led to rejection and alienation. but conforming to their standards of obedience also felt like an inherent self betrayal that i was not capable of.

it was suffocating, like playing a game i hated and could never win.

through the confusion, i fully internalized the ways they blamed me for existing outside of the mabait narrative. for so long, i thought i was the problem. that there had to be something wrong with me to deserve this kind of reaction instead of love and acceptance.

this toxic dynamic made me hate my younger self, who viciously wished to just be normal. because if i was normal, good, mabait, all of this would just go away.

looking back, i find myself asking, “is this something our colonizers taught us?”

is this behavior a passed-down remnant of the ways in which spanish colonization dehumanized and separated our ancestors for control? this feigned, unforgiving obedience without any kind of recompense for the sacrifice has to be rooted in the cruelty of my oppressors. i refuse to believe it is an inherent cultural trait.

thinking about it gives me pause and grief. to think that our elders internalized this self-hatred and passed it on for generations until it trickled down to me and my homies.

there is a twofold complexity within this behavior, because the philippines’ history with colonization is not a simple one. its tight and controlling grip over our mother islands warps the very thing we call culture.

and it is clear how being pin@y, a diasporic filipino-american living in our colonizers’ stolen empire, lends itself to an even further layer of complexity.

US culture is obsessed with polarities, and filipino-american culture is clearly not absolved from that. if anything, american colonization has made us even more deeply entrenched, dividing us further and further from each other by way of competition and a deep desire for status and acceptance within assimilation walls.

we are too americanized (read: liberal) so we are bastos for being anything remotely american, but to be filipino/mabait (read: religious/conservative) is not true culture, but instead a bastardized amalgamation of colonized values. and all of this is done in the name of preserving a reputation that holds no real weight or power in a white ruled world.

we are so americanized in the standards we hold against our children that many of us have been tricked into thinking that american thinking is filipino thinking rather than seeing the string the US has tied to our hands and moved us through assimilation like puppets.

so what even are filipino values and why do i not represent them?

as the pin@y children of the diaspora, maybe the answer is to embrace the contradiction.

truthfully, they do not have to work in opposition. i can be both bastos and mabait as a single person, but it was never a narrative i was allowed to breathe through in my experience as a younger pinay.

this harsh journey of being the bad girl of my family has been a difficult road that i still contend with every day, choosing which parts i can give without fully abandoning myself to my families’ desired projection of who i should be.

it has lined my filipino identity with strife and discomfort. i am still navigating how to divest in the polarities bestowed upon me by my colonizers and reclaim the spectrum and complexity of my being that has persevered through the resistance of my ancestors.

but trust me when i say i love the fuck out of who i have become.

as an adult, i’ve recognized that every time someone has tried to label me as bastos has been a moment where i have lived freely - free from the constructs and confines of the normative, polarizing narratives that have plagued me my entire life.

as a queer, post-binary bastos pervert faggy pinay femme, i know that every day that i live free is a day where i defeat the colonizers in my head and in my heart. i absolve that poison from my lineages and call in the magick that has led me to this blessed state of being.

i revel in it, become empowered by it, and allow it to fuel me.

i feel it when i fuck, when i sing, when i cry. in every movement i make in this world.

it lives in me.

so now, anytime someone tells me i’m bastos, i can’t help but smile.

of course i’m bastos.

i’m bastos as fuck.

KALI DIWA

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kali diwa [they//themme], a bastos Bay Area post-binary pin@y femme, moves through the world as a community storyteller, smut slut, and a vessel for healing and change in the diaspora. kali strives to consistently dismantle all the f*cked up ways that heteronormativity messes with our beautiful queer minds as well as abolish all systems that keep us from collective liberation through emergent strategy and pleasure activism.

kali's interests include thanking their ancestors, authenticity and accountability, causing problems for the bourgeoisie, waxing poetic on transformative justice, sex farce, gender fuckery, and ube macapuno with mochi on top.