Pinoy-Culture started out through my growing passion of learning about our culture, history, & identity.My first steps in my passion and simultaneously my decolonization (though I didn’t know at the time yet) was learning about our myths, legends, and our Gods and Goddesses that were worshiped before the arrival of Christianity in the islands. Being a Pagan I was curious about our own deities and myths and found we had our own mythology and pantheon. From my couple months of research and growing spirituality to go back to worshiping those deities and practicing our indigenous beliefs, those months led me to finding and learning about baybayin, a writing script from the Philippines that was used prior to the Spaniards along with other native scripts from the archipelago. Then I learned about arnis, eskrima, kali, or Pilipinx Martial Arts (FMA) to finding William Henry Scott’s works which opened my eyes to learning about our precolonial past.
I did make another blog prior to Pinoy-Culture which was called , but I dropped that after awhile. Then a year later as I picked up on where I left off on my learning and did more research my thoughts and actions became consumed in doing just that, research, research, research, to the point where every waking second of the day this is what I did and thought of. Even today this still goes on.
After being inspired by a on Tumblr, seeing them post pictures and info on Hawai’ian culture, history, and their people, it inspired me to make a blog again but only this time I was intent on not letting this one go. It would be not only my own way of sharing my journey of learning about myself as a Pilipinx living the U.S. and my decolonization, but helping others do the same as well. From that day on March 22, 2012, the Pinoy-Culture blog was born, using Tumblr as its home.
From then on out for the next year I posted and reblogged pictures, information on cultural dances, music, marital arts, our writing systems, and our history from precolonial to colonial. Whenever I learned something knew I shared it on the blog. Eventually the blog grew and grew, attracting followers from around the world both Pilipinx and non-Pilipinx, who were just as interested in learning about our culture and history as I was.
Today I am still learning, growing, and decolonizing. However unlike before, I have found myself, my identity, as a Pilipinx-American of Tagalog and Akeanon descent. I have dedicated myself to the motherland, our inang bayan, the beautiful Philippines and her children. Through this blog it has helped me understand who I am and where my ancestors come from, where I come from, & through this blog I am proud and happy that it has come a long way and has done the same thing with those who have come across the blog over the several years.
Now almost reaching its fourth year since its birth, I have moved the blog to its own space and domain. Is it a new blog? Not necessarily. It’s the very same blog as it was when I first made that first post on Tumblr. However while the blog on Tumblr mostly has photo’s, this blog focuses on just providing information along with more written content through personal research and my own thoughts and comments than I ever did before on Tumblr.
Through this blog on its new domain I hope to continue to motivate other Pilipinxs to learn about our heritage and history and to find themselves as a people with a rich culture and identity passed down from our ancestors. That we can be proud to say we are Pilipinx not just because so and so is a celebrity, a singer, a boxer, an actor or actress, etc. but because this is who we are. Our heritage and history is what makes us, us. We are that legacy, our fights, hardships, runs through all our veins and as a people once divided by our communities prior to the Spaniards, who didn’t see each other as one people, though we are still all different today, speaking different tongues and having different faiths, we are now all children of this nation.