Filipino Communities Counter Election Grief

As the United States gears up for another Trump presidency, communities are feeling shock waves of emotion that range from fear and despair to powerlessness and anger.

Many of us are experiencing election grief, defined by psychotherapist Pauline Boss as an “unresolved grief” that shows up in “the loss of hopes and dreams and plans that [people] thought were coming from the other candidate, a loss of certainty in the future that was what they wanted, loss of trust in the world as a safe place, loss of feelings of freedom over your own body, the loss of support for people who have lesser means than the rest of us do, the loss of support for your neighbor and people who are different from you.”

Election grief has a tendency to debilitate us, leaving us in a frozen or shutdown state. This information is worth paying attention to, especially when it is critical to stay focused and mobilized as the state of democracy is increasingly threatened. As we participate in more collective actions, we need to find places of retreat to sustain our commitments to social justice.

With their instinctive sense of community care, Filipinos in the diaspora have been co-creating places of healing and restoration. Three of these community spaces have been actively seeding and tending cultures of both rest and solidarity. Who are they, and what can we learn from them?

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A Place of Rest

When I picture a grief support center, I imagine rooms with white fluorescent lights and cookie-cutter chairs arranged in a circle. But at A Resting Place, a grief and loss cultural resource center in Seattle, visitors are greeted with a warm atmosphere full of lush plants.

The walls are lined with photographs, handwritten letters, and artwork. There’s also an altar where visitors can leave gifts for their loved ones who have passed away. “I love seeing all these pictures on our altar,” shares A Resting Place’s founder, Derek Dizon. “It’s really a way for people to memorialize and commemorate their person who has died, or maybe it’s their animal. This altar expresses and depicts a lot of life … that people still hold on to.”

A Resting Place draws on Filipino identity and ancestral values, including atang, an Ilocano ritual of offering food to honor the dead and driving away malevolent spirits. That’s intentional. “Seventy percent of the people who enter A Resting Place do not know what they’re coming into,” says Dizon. “They go in [thinking] it’s a gift shop, but they leave [with a] tissue in hand or a letter [written] to their dead loved one.”

To Dizon, Filipinos are skilled archivists, with photo albums used as emblems to preserve family legacy and cultural memory. “My dad recently retired to the Philippines, and he left me with all our [photo] albums,” Dizon says. “He left me this big-ass suitcase of albums. It’s so heavy, I almost injured myself carrying it!”

Dizon is no stranger to loss: His mother, Phoebe, a Filipina immigrant, was murdered while helping a friend escape an abusive marriage. During Susana Remerata Blackwell’s divorce trial, her estranged husband shot her, Phoebe, and Veronica Johnson while they were sitting on a bench outside the courtroom. All three women died, as did Susana’s unborn child. Dizon was only 4 at the time.

“You’re not the same person when you experience death,” he says. “No matter how many deaths happen, you’re always a different person after you experience grief: I am now this person. We are now this people.” Every year, he organizes a vigil with API Chaya, an agency created by survivors and for survivors from marginalized communities, in honor of his mother, her friendships with Johnson and Blackwell, and the support she gave other immigrant women.

These vigils can mobilize attendees to demand the change necessary to prevent further violence. “To me, grief is synonymous [with] justice,” Dizon says. “Grief is the way that we experience our connection to something that has been taken away from us.”

For diasporic and immigrant people of color, loss has always been entangled with the death of a people and the severance from one’s homeland and culture. For Dizon, grief is “always a discussion of justice,” as it entails lamenting the many versions of death caused by colonial violence. “I believe grief invites us to be an active participant [in] our origin story,” he explains. And as we remember these stories, we also access a creative and regenerative force that “asks us to really reimagine the kind of world we want to live in.”

Dizon shares that mourning openly and without shame can reshape culture and challenge cultural norms. “There’s a lot of possibility,” he says. “Grief asks us to create new traditions. And why not? There’s so much creativity that grief invites us into. Why not be transformed in our grief? Why not change who we are as a people [and] as a person, and celebrate that?”

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Reimagining Our Connection to Land

The Reimagination Farm began out of a desire to heal both individual and collective trauma. Founded by Filipino American activist and author Robyn Magalit Rodriguez, Ph.D., and her husband, Joshua Vang, a second-generation Hmong refugee and nature specialist, the Reimagination Farm is a learning center for those seeking solace and wanting to practice radical love for themselves, other people, and the Earth.

In 2023, Rodriguez, a professor at the University of California, Davis, left academia to become a full-time farmer. She teaches visitors sustainable farming techniques as well as nature awareness, land justice, and Indigenous farming knowledge. Rodriguez made this pivotal shift in the height of the pandemic.

After Rodriguez’s son, Amado, died in 2020 while living with Indigenous communities and land defenders in the Philippines, she was encouraged to open the Reimagination Farm to honor his memory. Before Amado died, Rodriguez said he told her, “Mama, don’t even worry about me. It’s you that I’m worrying about. … You need to get back to the land.” Now, Reimagination Farm fosters Amado’s vision for Rodriguez and others to be in right relationship with the Earth, which Rodriguez says is “incredibly healing not just individually—[but] for all of us collectively and across generations.”

Now, she uplifts practices that prioritize both respect and reciprocity: “It was like a promise I and my husband made to ourselves and our family in that time, that if we were gonna live through the pandemic, we were going to pledge to commit ourselves to a different relationship to the land and Mother Earth,” Rodriguez shares.

Rodriguez is a regenerative farmer, which, to her, means focusing on the soil rather than plants and what they can yield. “It’s about the soil and its ability to hold life for multiple generations,” she explains. “I think it’s a practice that has always been at the core of how Indigenous peoples worldwide have approached the land and life and the soil.”

In early September, the Reimagination Farm held the Fall Anihan Festival (anihan means harvest season in Tagalog). Rodriguez shares that the festival was held the same weekend Filipino American farmworker and union organizer Larry Itliong co-led the grape strike in Delano, California, in 1965.

“They were exploited immigrant workers who were working on vast tracts of land devoted to grapes, the production of grapes, mono-cropping, large-scale agriculture —having been displaced from being in a relationship to land where people can grow their own food and sustain their own families,” Rodriguez says. “Because of the violent legacies of colonization, that’s what propelled Filipinos like [Itliong] to have to seek out employment in the United States. So what a juxtaposition to think about that.”

Rodriguez is learning from these labor organizers, including Itliong and Cesar Chavez, about how to challenge the prevalent immigrant narrative around struggle and sacrifice. “The creation of the Reimagination Farm is meant to grow different ideas, not just resistance and struggle, but to grow the possibilities of radical imagination,” she says. “And the possibility to dream other kinds of futures, to do the work of freedom dreaming.”

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Centering International Solidarity

Pinay Collection is a feminist brand with a team of 15 Filipino members from both the homeland and the diaspora. The social enterprise helps diasporic Filipinos reconnect with Filipino culture by selling merchandise, hosting educational events, and writing articles about the struggles in the motherland, including state-sanctioned violence, workers’ rights, and the complexities of faith and colonization.

Founder Jovie Galit created Pinay Collection in 2019 to “amplify [the] voices of the masses” and to “rethink [the] ways we tell stories [about Philippines-based Filipinos] that resonate with the people of the diaspora so that they [take] action.” Galit dreams of using Pinay Collection to create a more grounded form of reconnecting in which diasporic Filipinos do not neglect the struggles of the exploitation and state violence in the homeland.

“There’s so much urgency in the work,” Galit shares. “Doing this work with Pinay Collection, I’ve come to understand how activists back home [in the Philippines] do their work. I see the need to be out there [on the ground].”

Galit, who was raised in the Philippines, migrated to Canada at 19. When she relocated, she noticed some diasporic Filipinos were reclaiming Filipino culture and identity without developing an awareness about systemic issues within the Philippines.

“There’s beauty in [decolonization], [but] there’s also the privilege of being able to reflect on who we are, our identity, and our connection to Filipino culture versus Filipino people [in the Philippines] who are organizing to survive,” Galit says. “As much as it’s important to understand who we are, it’s also important for us to [turn] that understanding into mobilizing and organizing.”

Galit believes international solidarity is essential to reclaiming Filipino identity, especially for those living in North America. As the archipelago country faces incessant climate catastrophes and human rights violations, Galit says it becomes “dissonant not to address [these] real issues.” That’s the reason Pinay Collection has an emergency fund for typhoon relief as well as political prisoners, farmers, impoverished people, and other marginalized groups in the country.

Galit hopes for a time when Pinay Collection doesn’t need to exist because the work of liberation is more realized. “That means we created a more sustainable structure for community organizations to thrive or maybe that means that communities of the diaspora are really honed in doing international solidarity work with Filipinos back home.”

Ultimately, A Resting Place, the Reimagination Lab, and Pinay Collection are offering spaces that, as Rodriguez explains, are “less in the space of a resistance and dismantling an unjust system but really in the space of creatively imagining, manifesting a different kind of future.”