From Mom’s photos that I found in the Italian wall cabinet that my parents called the “soggiorno.” These are from the early 1980s, in La Maddalena, Italy. Before I took Fil Am Experience class in college or saw a PCN.

You go to college and experience an awakening, learning about your culture and the history they didn’t teach in you high school. But if you were listening and watching, it was already there, inside you. Your lived experience.

I was seven or eight when I watched my mom dance in the singkil and pandanggo sa ilaw, and my parents the carinosa. Mom danced in the Philippines before I was born.

Her friends today, an ocean and a lifetime apart, will often reminisce with me about how Mom was such a good dancer.