A Feminist Constellation Led Me Home: Reflections on Ate Perla Paredes Daly’s Work
By Lisa Factora-Borchers
Presented at the Pagsuyo Collective Gathering April 27, 2025. The Pagsuyo book study circle is an offering of the Center for Babaylan Studies to decolonizing and re-Indigenizing kapwa. Monthly virtual gatherings create space for reflections centered on courting the Indigenous soul, and focusing on works that illuminate our shared journeys in the diaspora.
I want to introduce myself with a spirit of gratitude and intention.
Thank you to the coordinators of Pagsuyo! Thank you to Ate Lily, Ate Leny, and the volunteers at the Institute for Babaylan Studies for facilitating the logistics of our community gatherings.
What I love about introductions in diasporic communities is that introductions have a different effect. Growing up in predominantly white spaces, group facilitation dynamics often use introductions as ways to find common ground to promote a sense of ease and familiarity. What I have found is that in Filipinx American dialogues, introductions illustrate the nature of our diaspora by highlighting our distinctions and differences while trusting the community to practice inclusion. So, in that trust here, is my diasporic introduction.
My father is from Naga near Legazpi City, and my mother from Baguio. They came to the States independent from one another, but met again in New York City before deciding to get married and start a family. I am the youngest of four, the Bunso. From birth to 8 years old, I lived in Jersey, New York, and California. When I was eight years old, we relocated to Massillon, Ohio; a town in northeast Ohio. From ages 8-18, I lived in northeast Ohio, the longest I have ever stayed in my 46 years. From the ages 18-46, I have left and returned to Ohio four times. I like to say I’m Ohio’s favorite fleeing daughter; diasporic first by force and then by choice. I share this because understanding my relationship to place and the midwest diaspora is key to understanding why Ate Perla’s work, especially around cyberPinay feminism, is essential to my own work, identity-formation, narrative theorizing, community building, and creative practice.
While the physical body’s location is limited to singularity (meaning, it can only be in one place), everything else about my life relies on bi-location or the practice of multi-locality. In other words: my preference as an alchemist with a developing ability to be in many places at the same time accepts that at any given time, while my body is in one place, my mind, heart, thoughts, memories, emotions, prayers – they are usually in another location and time periods. This is how my somaticism and memory-work are in relationship. This is what defines my diasporic superpower - I’ve come to share that my multiple experiences of exodus, exiles, and homecomings are part of my Filipinx identity. Movement and place, to me, are sacred.
Thank you for holding space for my introduction.
~
This chapter “Pagbabalikloob, Cyberactivism, and Art” by Perla Paredes Daly to me, was like a portal. Through the timeline of Ate Perla‘s work and life, this chapter invited me to reflect upon my own journey of cyber feminism, and all of the constellatory stars it took to define who I am today and hold the clarity I now have in my identity.
In 1995, when Ate Perla decided to create a digital shift to bring attention to a new Filipina online identity and shift the focus away from mail order brides, it’s important to note the timeline to understand how transformative activism works. I would not find Ata Perla‘s work for another 10 years. In 1995, I was a Filipina teenager in Ohio, fetishized and sexualized in a white dominated Catholic highschool.
The six years that Ate Perla was writing bagongpinay @ https://bagongpinay.org/blog/ paved the way for a massive shift that I experienced in 2005.
In 2005 I had just moved back to Ohio after finishing a joint masters degree in psychology and theology and working in the women’s resource center at Boston College. In 2005, I was living in the racially tense city of Cincinnati and commuting to a job I accepted at the women’s resource center at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. At the time the Princeton review had scored Miami University close to the worst rating a university can receive for its homogeneity and heteronormativity. But I wanted to be immersed in the work of feminism, and I wanted to keep learning. I was also newly married and I wanted to try to be closer to my family of origin and my spouse’s family. When at work or driving around southern Ohio, I couldn’t escape the feeling that I couldn’t breathe.
So in 2005 I started blogging under a pseudonym. “Sudy” was my name, and the title of my blog was “A Woman’s Ecdysis.” ECDYSIS is a biology term to refer to the molting or the shedding of the outer integument. Like a snake shedding its skin. For three years I blogged about racism, feminism, and being newly married. I wrote about the intersection of being a feminist, Catholic, and what it was like being married to a white man. At the time, the internet was a place where I found other bloggers of color who are also using the feminist blogosphere as a place to paradoxically hide their real name in order to be their true selves. It was here, in the constellation of finding other writers, thinkers, and women of color that I was introduced to the work of Gloria Anzaldua and the transformative text, This Bridge Called My Back that changed my life. It was in the feminist blogosphere that I was introduced to Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Black feminism, mujerista feminism, disability justice, and a community of like-hearted activists who used language and technology to create space for themselves. It was the place where I began to actually practice relational feminism.
For three years, I blogged under as “Sudy,” but eventually began to meet real people in real time offline and began to organize. This is where I organized for the first time with women of color across the country for the Allied Media Conference (AMC) in Detroit, Michigan in the summer of 2008. It began on the internet but changed into something more. These were no longer pseudonymed intellectuals, academics, and activists behind a screen. We became a real and relational collective. We called ourselves, “Speak,” and fundraised to help fund single mothers to attend the AMC conference. It was through this experience that I began writing outside my blog and publishing in different venues both on and offline.
Ate Delia wrote to me with encouragement and months later, I somehow found myself across the world in the Philippines. In the summer of 2008, I bought my plane ticket despite my parents worrying about my safety, “Ano! What will people think? Leaving your husband for two months? Jusko!”
I went anyway. I joined a group of other Filipino Americans I’d never met and traveled halfway across the world to visit the Philippines for the first time. My Tagalog was embarrassing. My body oversized. My ability to withstand the heat made me question my true DNA. But, I immersed myself in courses at University of the Philippines, took language classes, and visited communities that could attest to what life in the Philippines was like. It was upon my return to the States that a deeper process of decolonization began. Without Pinay Power, I would never have experienced that shift in consciousness.
Pinay Power introduced me to Ata Perla’s work which affirmed my cyberPinay feminism:
Filipinos reclaiming and embracing their identity are experiencing a form of healing and colonization. Moreover, when Filipinos consciously produce web content to reclaim their identity, they’re expressing a form of Filipina feminism, a cyberPinay feminism. (page 276)
It’s important to highlight the timeline here to illustrate how digital feminism works. This specific quote from Ate Perla theory-building is dated in 2005, just as I was beginning my online presence. Although my beginning was writing under a pseudonym, it marked the beginning of my public voice.
Beginning in 2005, over the next five years, bolstered by the freedoms and invitations from the feminist blogosphere, my confidence grew. I quietly began using my full name and presenting at conferences about being a Pinay in the midwest, exploring feminism identity, and the energy I found in new media. As more Filipino/a/x literary and creative communities formed and circulated their work, I found Eileen Tabios, Ninotchka Rosca, Evelina Galang, Barbara Jane Reyes, and other Filipino decolonizing writers whose art blazed my own creativity, their art energized my drive to continue to develop my voice. Over the next six years, I formed new constellations with Filipina writers from all over the world.
After holding various nonprofit jobs, publishing an anthology, and attending my first writing residency, I decided to follow the voice within me and center my creative work. In 2014, I followed my childhood dream and committed to building a writing life. It took me to my graduate work at Columbia University, the same school my mother attended when she first came to the United States. So, at the age of 35, my life partner and I packed up our four year old son and sold our house in Cleveland with most of our belongings and headed to a small apartment in New York City. The program lasted two years, and in the last semester, decided to venture to see what classes Barnard offered. Imagine my delight to apply and be accepted in my last semester to enroll in my first postcolonial theory course. The significance of this needs to be highlighted because at this point in my life, I had gone through three graduate programs and it wasn’t until I was 36 years old, a mother of two, that I had my first academic experience of learning from a Filipina professor. Coming full circle, the professor was Dr. Neferti Tadiar, who wrote “Filipinas Living in a time of War,” the last essay in Pinay Power.
While my academic worlds and theoretical studies felt sprinkled with Pinay magic, my feminist praxis was far from clear. Inwardly, I wanted to work and publish at the intersection of political consciousness and decolonizing spirituality but didn’t know where to do this work. My career decisions map my efforts to try and find my professional home. I tried many ways and different institutions to try to do this work. I became the first editorial director of color for Bitch Media, a legacy white feminist organization. I worked as a publisher for Guernica magazine, a widely known literary magazine hailed for its international appeal and political bent. I edited books on disability justice, healing justice, transformation justice, sexual violence. I mentored BIPOC queer writers of color. I transitioned into movement building and worked as a director for OPAWL: Building AAPI Feminist Leadership, a statewide nonprofit community organization for political engagement. In all of these professional choices, my vision was always the same: I wanted to develop and express my feminist and political voice. Regardless of mission statements and visions of changing the world, administrative or executive leadership roles positioned me differently than what I envisioned my life’s purpose to be. For a while I told myself that doing “good work” in an oppressed and oppressive world was what I should be doing. But following the “should” comes with consequences.
No matter how I tried to diversify my work hours, build boundaries, and attend “professional development” sessions, it always ended the same: burnout. Each job ended with exhaustion, anxiety, and a deep need—almost crisis level—for a reset. More than that, though, being at odds with my inner Knowing was adding to the friction and exhaustion.
After countless meditations, journaling sessions, and asking for the strength to be honest with myself, I made the move I’ve wanted to make for years: I quit working for institutions and formal nonprofit organizations. In May 2024, I resigned from my full-time employment titles and job seeking. With much planning with my life partner, I decided to pursue creative writing on my own terms and in my own way. I completed a nine month program to become a spiritual director and to study decolonizing healing work from the Liberated Together school, a program made specifically for BIPOC women, nonbinary, and gender expansive practitioners. This training bolstered my new era to fuse my feminism and political consciousness. And then, in the summer of 2024, a friend sent me a link telling me about a retreat called Kapwa Nilalong. I was delighted it was being held in the midwest and only a few hours drive. I took it as a sign and leapt. I attended the transformative retreat Kapwa Nilalong and left in full relationship with myself, knowing I was on the right path to coming home to myself.
If it hadn’t been for Kapwa Nilalong and the Pagsuyo community, I wouldn’t have the depth of relational understanding that I have now. One one of the most powerful symbols of my evolution has been the serpent. As a child growing up in conservative Filipino Catholicism, I was shaped by the story that the serpent is a symbol of the devil, of an ever present evil. Nothing could penetrate my fear of snakes. That is, until one warm morning, I decided to take a walk in a park. Shortly after I started down the path, I saw a snake about ten feet in front of me, an enormous snake slithering slowly across the walkway. I froze once I saw it, needles pricking my skin as the first imprint of fearing snakes was activated. Later that evening, I attended Lane Wilkin’s lecture for the Pagsuyo book discussion. At one point, while discussing the symbolism of animals and our relationship to them, someone came off mute to share a comment and said, “If you ever see a snake, know that it’s probably the ancestors communicating with you.”
Something registered deep within me. That moment affirmed a deeper knowing and undid 45 years worth of fear. Now reading through a decolonizing gaze, I unlocked the sanctity and relational power of different animals I once feared, including the crocodile and the serpent. Once I understood the colonial version I had been told, the snake, the serpent image became my spiritual symbol, adorning images around my home, on my altar, and even on my person. Remarkably, as someone who previously didn’t wear jewelry, I suddenly experienced deep desire to wear gold jewelry, including gold depictions of the snake. I can’t explain it. It just felt right to begin wearing it. Somehow, it symbolized that I was moving through the deconstruction of institutional feminisms and religion, and into the era of REconstruction of my true belief system, of my actual whole self.
It was through Ate Leny and her work that I have been more deeply immersed in my own practice of ethnoautobiography as I continue revision work on my longfrom book, a spiritual autobiography about my political-spiritual consciousness and diasporic identity. Her life’s work has helped pave the way for my life, literally. It was like there was a voice within the voice of her work that spoke simultaneously as I read. The voice within the pages kept reassuring me: “You see? You are not alone. You CAN be you in this world. The path has been laid.”
Ate Lily’s shining presence at Kapwa Nilalang and her essay, “Bearing the Babaylan Body Memory, Colonial Wounding, and the Return to Indigenous Wildness” in Back from the Crocodile’s Belly: Philippine Babaylan Studies and the Struggle for Indigenous Memory has served as something like meeting a pre-destined, prophetic poet whose words nourish my cognitive, emotional, and spiritual seeking for precise articulation, personal acceptance, and wild divine mystery.
There were other important parallels I discovered as I studied Ate Lily’s scholarship. Also based in the midwest with her husband, I found compelling accompaniment in her husband’s work, James Perkinson, who wrote “Seeking Spirit While Learning to Live with Blood on My Hands: One White Settler-Colonizer’s Continuing Journey to Face history Without Excuse” in Revision: A Journal of Consciousness and Transformation and nourished a different terrain as I continue to navigate the terrain of family life, creative praxis, and community-building in Ohio with my life partner, who identifies a cis white man.
Meeting Ate Lily and Ate Leny in person after studying their work for years was overwhelming and intimidating. I could barely find the courage to say hello. During Kapwa Nilalong, I hid and watched from afar. My library is a proud compilation of several hundred books, but Ate Leny’s and Ate Lily’s books sit on my desk, upright, closest to me when I write. They are the closest to me because their books are the ones I most often reach for for comfort. Sometimes I flip open to a page to see what inspiration I get from the random page I read. Sometime I sneak in just a few minutes of reading before a meeting begins. Sometimes I use their work to restart and set my afternoon or to energize me through writer’s block or to accompany me when I feel the isolation of creative writing. The transmuted presence offered by Ate Leny and Ate Lily is what cannot be defined by genre, literary skill, or any theory. It cannot even be adequately described on the page. It’s soul work and as I try to offer an adequate reflection on how their decolonizing work has helped shape me, I think of the words someone shared at the Kapwa Nilalong retreat, “There are some languages older than words.” That is the depth of healing Ate Lily and Ate Leny’s work has reached for me in my journey. It’s impossible for me to convey my connection to their work in words. I restlessly try, right now, to find the words, but I do have peace knowing that they, more than anyone, would understand that wordless exchange of kapwa, gratitude, and love.
To close my reflections and bring it back to Ate Perla’s work, when I look back over the past 20 years of feminism and spiritual development, I can see how the constellation of feminists were always there, but it took me years for me to draw the lines that mapped my own liberation. One star led me to the next one and it continues to this day. My experience and theory building of a diasporic feminism in Ohio could not have been built without other Pinays’ work, especially Ate Perla’s work in cyberPinay feminism.
My feminist constellation includes Filipino/a/x, Black, indigenous, and other people of color expanding and defying gender and sexuality. It was because of this constellatory map of writers, organizers, poets, artists, and thinkers that I was and am able to have a sense of peace, in accepting my relationship with place, especially as I now call Ohio one of my homes. While the internet continues to be a place of perilous mind numbing and escapism for many, but, for me, the use of technology for base building and community formation is as significant to my care routines as sleep, water, and food. These digital tools enable me to breathe, to continue to expand the constellatory map of my own decolonizing and healing.
It is here, now, 20 years after I found Ate Perla’s transformative work that I can say maraming, maraming salamat, thank you so much for your work. I’m so grateful to you and proud to tell you that I’m no longer writing under a pseudonym. I use my full name, and I know who I am as a Filipina. I am no longer editing others’ work, acting as a literary doula, but in using my power to create my own work in offering to the collective, diasporic, Filipinx communities that I am now a part of.
The constellation led me home.
*****
Lisa is also the book editor for Healing Justice Lineages: Dreaming at the Crossroads of Liberation, Collective Care, and Safety (North Atlantic Books 2023); The Future is Disabled: Prophecies, Love Notes, and Mourning Songs (Arsenal Press 2022); and Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice (Arsenal Press 2018).
Lisa received a BA in English from Xavier University, a joint masters degree in Counseling Psychology and Pastoral Ministry from Boston College, and an MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia University. Lisa also attended The Liberated Together school and completed a training development program for women, nonbinary, femmes of color spiritual directors. She calls many places home, and resides in Ohio with her families.
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