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final gif for my zine!

Click here for the gif of my zine

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Here’s my first draft of my zine! Click on the pages to zoom in to read them.

I might change which pages come first or later for my final draft.

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Reviewing mlsoto’s zine

Summarize the Zine

I see Maria’s zine as a look into what immigration and education for a Latino immigrant coming into the United States. I like her title page and title, “Sin Documentos,” as it shows what the zine’s about in a succinct but good way. I think the intended audience can be a wide range of people, but mostly for people with a similar experience to her mother’s, or for children of immigrants. When you see someone who can relate to your experiences, someone who can empathize with what you’ve been through, or understand the struggles who’ve made you who you are today, it can be a sense of comfort. Telling the stories of family, and how they’ve made it to where they are today, and why they’re here today, are important for their children to know so that they can know their parents, and why they’re living where they are.

Compelling Quote

“I know a few things to be true. I do not know where I am going, where I have come from is disappearing, I am unwelcome and my beauty is not beauty here. My body is burning with the shame of not belonging, my body is longing. I am the sin of memory and the absence of memory.” -Warsan Shire

This is from Warsan Shire’s book, Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth. Shire is a poet who in her works, talks about what a journey means, as she is a first generation immigrant herself. The quote could probably be cut down a little to put in your zine, but I think having it fill up a page, or be overlayed on an image about your mother’s journey would work.

Picture for Zine

I think including a picture of the Mexican-American border would help set up your zine and give your readers an image of what the area looked like. I grew up in Chula Vista, so I know what the border looks like, but people who haven’t lived in San Diego probably don’t know what it’s like. This image is labeled for reuse if you want to incorporate it into your zine.

Powerful Content

“Being undocumented meant many things for my mother, one thing it meant (that still is true to the many undocumented latino people of today) is that education is difficult to pursue. Already for the average American Latino student in the US, chances of attending college are low. Statistically, “latinos have the lowest rate of degree attainment when compared with four other major racial/ethnic groups”.  Being an undocumented student, means those chances of degree attainment becomes even lower.”

I like how you talked about your mother’s experience as an undocumented student, and what it meant for her. To put this in your zine, I think just putting it in as text can work, but maybe also as a comic without text at all, or a series of photographs could put together the story as well.

Relational Analysis

“For my relation analysis about my national contexts I want to examine the difference between how my mother was seen in Durango, Mexico and how she is seen in the U.S. In Mexico she fit in with all the other Latinos. She shared traditions and her culture with all the other people in Durango. However, that changes when she came to the U.S. because she was no longer apart of the majority of the community.”

 To reword it to make it more accessible, or to shorten it so it can be put in your zine, I would just take out some words and shorten the sentences, like for you first sentence, it could be, “My mother was seen differently in Durango, Mexico than in the U.S.” It still keeps the idea of a relational analysis in, but it takes out the terms and language that readers probably won’t know.

@mlsoto

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Here’s a draft of my next few zine pages, it’s a recreation of my mother’s classroom picture from chicago. My mother’s the one in the 3rd row from the top, 4th from the left.

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This is kinda a rough idea of a page I wanted to do, where I would take pages from a Filipino newspaper and redact parts of them to make phrases. These sections are from a newspaper called Philippine Mabuhay News, and the article is titled “Duertete hits Aquino, cites command responsibility in Mamasapano massacre”

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My zine cover, I might redo it later, though. My mother is the one on the far right. Pagkakaiba means difference.

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My grandfather in the Philippines, around the 1950s. Even though the majority of people spoke mainly Filipino dialects like Tagalog or Bisaya, many signs, including road signs, were written in English.

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Notebook 3

My grandfather fought in WWII as a guerilla Filipino soldier. He didn’t really fight alongside any American soldiers, but he saw the American and Filipino soldiers as on the same side. My family grew up in a colonized Philippines, with America being the one to kill thousands of Filipinos, and the one to be seen as a great place to immigrate to and live a better life. My family’s “American Dream” was to leave their small island and make sure their children get American citizenship, grow up in America, get college degrees and work over in the U.S. This is for a settler-colonialism relational analysis, and how America’s colonization of the Philippines, the Philippines independence, and how America is viewed in the Philippines today is formed by a long history of settler-colonialism. It could be said that the process of colonization is still going on today, with assimilation and whitewashing of culture for Filipinx immigrants, and Filipinx citizens even back in the Philippines.

I want to keep my theme of Im(migration) and Citizenship, but I’m changing my object to a house. Specifically, the house that my mother grew up in Chicago with, but two other houses also. When my mother moved over, she didn’t know how to speak any English and could only speak in Tagalog, so her parents wouldn’t allow her to speak in the house unless she spoke in English. She was silent in the house until a month or two later, when she started to pick up English through assimilation. I’m connecting language to assimilation because for immigrants, learning the native language of a country isn’t just a fun pastime, or because of boredom, it’s a survival mechanism, it’s to best integrate into the country and be able to live life. Because of this moment, I want to ask the questions: What led up to my family’s immigration and assimilation into America? What had happened, and was currently happening in the Philippines to start this journey? What did assimilation in Chicago, 1970 mean?

Growing up in a mainly white neighborhood and school district, my mother’s classmates knew she was different. Not really by the color of her skin, as my mother was pretty light skinned, but because she looked different. Looked “not white.” She was different, not normal, and therefore unacceptable. As a relational analysis, this ties into whiteness, and how my mother was not considered white. She wasn’t born in America, but did have U.S. citizenship, which helped make her “more white,” but still not white enough. By looking different than the other children and teachers at her school, she was deemed not white, and was Asian. Back in the Philippines, it didn’t really matter than she was Filipina, because most everyone was was Filipinx, so it wasn’t something she thought about. It was the norm. But once in America, it wasn’t the norm anymore, it was what set her apart. She could assimilate a little bit, through citizenship and time, but she would always be looked at different because of how she looked and where she came from.

Link 1: Colonization of the Philippines

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My mother’s childhood house in Tanauan, Leyte, Philippines, December 1972. This was taken 2 or 3 years after she moved to the United States.

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Notebook 2

My mother is a Filipina woman, which means she has different life experiences from a Filipino man. She immigrated over to the U.S. from a small island in the Philippines during the 1970s, which is a different experience from a Filipina woman born later in the U.S. and never had to immigrate or deal with the experience of growing up in an earlier time period. My mother’s family was around middle class, maybe lower middle class. All of her identities, like where she was from, when she moved over, her gender, race, class status, all inform each other and give her a completely different life experience.

I’m keeping my theme of Im(migration) and Citizenship, but I want to change my object to my mother. I want to tell her story of immigration, and I feel like the best thing can can completely capture the experience she had would be herself. The things I would be focusing on with her is the language barrier, the media change she experienced, and the difference of being a Filipina girl in Tanauan, Leyte, and Chicago, Illinois in the 1970’s. I want to talk about the language barrier because it’s an experience immigrant families who doesn’t speak the country’s dominant language have to go through. The media change is from viewing Filipino media, where in race she is represented, but usually not in gender, and seeing American media, where she isn’t represented, and what representation that is out there usually is inaccurate or offensive. The biggest part of her immigration journey is the time she went over, and what it was like for her to live in Chicago in the 70’s as a Filipina girl.

The change from two countries is the transnational context I want to talk about, and how people’s perception of her and her identity changed from place to place. Two national binds from this transnational context are colonialism and whiteness. Colonialism is because of the Spanish-American War, and right after, the Philippine-American War. With the Spanish colonization of the Philippines, the country’s main religion was converted to catholicism, and the idea of public land and ownership was privatized. The U.S. took over and occupied the Philippines in the late 1890’s through warfare, and continues to hold military bases there. The attitude that many Americans had about the war were that the Filipinx citizens were savages, and that it was necessary for the U.S. to dominate and civilize them. Many Filipinx citizens were converted to Christianity at the time, yet a majority remained Catholic. Whiteness as a bind is how my mother and her sisters were seen as not white, therefore different, therefore not acceptable. Depending on the person, they would see her as Filipina, or just Asian, or even other races. My mom told me that the other kids at school would call her Chinese to insult her, and the teachers thought that her sisters were Mexican, and tried to put them in a Spanish speaking only class.

Link 1: Spanish & American occupation of the Philippines

Link 2: Spanish colonization of the Philippines

Link 3: American colonization’s impact on Filipina women

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Notebook 1

The object I’m thinking about for my zine is the plane that my mother and her family took from the Philippines to the U.S. My mom and her sisters first encountered the language barrier on that plane. My grandfather was the only one who knew english, so no one else knew how to communicate with the other passengers on board or the flight attendants. The few words that my mother and her sisters knew were “yes” and “no.” When the flight attendant approached them and asked them something in english, my mom replied “no” and her sister said “yes.” It was a system they had worked out where one of them would say no, and the other yes, and then see what would happen. When the flight attendant came back, she gave my aunt a cup of soda, and my mom nothing. The plane represents the first encounter of language barrier my mom had, as she only knew Tagalog, a little bit of Bisaya, and some Waray. My mother would continue to spend the next year of school not understanding her teacher or her classmates. Her parents would stop her from speaking Tagalog in the house and only let her speak if it was in English. Immersion helped her learn quickly, and in time, she learned English, but sadly, forgot most of the Tagalog she knew. 

The theme I want to connect my object to is (Im)migration and Citizenship. I want to tell the story of what my mother’s immigration to the U.S. was like, how she experienced it, and what it means to her today. She lived in Tanauan, Leyte, Philippines until she was 7, so she was young when she moved here, but she still remembers what it was like in the Philippines. Her family lived in Chicago while she and my sisters were growing up, and my mom moved to San Diego a while after she moved out of the house. It was around 1969 when she left, so she spent most of her childhood in the 1970’s and 1980’s in Chicago. The citizenship part of (im)migration and citizenship I want to tell is how her family was able to get citizenship pretty easily. My grandfather had a civil engineering degree he got at university in the Philippines, which he could use to work in the U.S., so my grandfather worked in the U.S. for a bit with citizenship, and after that, getting citizenship for his wife and children were fairly easy. They were very lucky to get citizenship that easily, because I know usually, it’s a lot harder for most families.