May is AAPI Heritage Month, a time meant to celebrate the richness, resilience, and range of Asian American and Pacific Islander identities. And yet, for those of us who live in the liminal spaces between categories, who carry blended lineages and complex migrations, this month often arrives with both pride and a quiet ache.
As an Afro-Filipino scholar, I exist in what feels like an intentional blind spot, too often rendered invisible in both Black and AAPI discourses. I am not a bridge between communities; I am the community. I am what it looks like when the maps are redrawn and the memory refuses to separate. My body is a geography of empire, survival, and cultural convergence.
I carry my father’s melanin and my mother’s Tagalog lullabies. I grew up with lumpia on the plate and Marvin Gaye in the background. I have watched Filipino elder’s light candles for their ancestors, and I have danced at cookouts to Frankie Beverly featuring Maze, and The Electric Slide, while uncles told stories about Malcolm, Martin, and Motown. I have been called “other” in both Asian and Black spaces, and I have learned to name myself when others refuse to.
The Philippines is often treated as an outlier in the AAPI narrative, tropical, colonized, Catholic, too American to be Asian, too Asian to be seen. And when you’re Black and Filipino? That tension doubles. You become something people want to admire but not engage. Curiosity without conversation. Celebration without understanding.
And yet… we are not new.
We are the legacy of migration and militarization.
We are the children of nurses and navymen.
We are the kids who knew José Rizal and James Baldwin in the same breath.
We are the spiritual descendants of both baybayin scripts and hip-hop cipher circles.
We are the in-between, and that in-between is sacred.
Reclaiming a Heritage That Remembers
To understand Afro-Filipino identity is to contend with colonial scars and spiritual survival. It is to carry Spain, America, and the Pacific in your bloodstream while searching for stories that look like your own.
That’s why I honor José Rizal, not just as a Filipino hero, but as a model for what it means to be dangerous with a pen. Rizal was a scholar, doctor, poet, and revolutionary whose words helped ignite a nation’s fight for freedom. He did not wage war with weapons, he used stories. His novel Noli Me Tangere pulled back the curtain on Spanish colonial violence in the Philippines. His follow-up, El Filibusterismo, was a slow-burn call for justice written by a man who knew he might die for telling the truth. And he did.
As a writer and scholar today, I hold Rizal’s legacy close, not as someone who lived in a time far removed from mine, but as someone who walked a similar terrain: empire, expectation, erasure. Rizal dared to imagine a freer world for his people. And I, too, write toward that imagining, not just for Filipinos, but for every blended Black and Brown child who has been told to pick a side when their soul knows it is whole.
What This Month Means to Me
AAPI Heritage Month should include us not as footnotes but as full chapters. We are not just here to add complexity to demographic data. We are here because our lives offer insight into how colonization, racialization, and diaspora have always been intertwined.
To be Afro-Filipino is to understand that identity is not static. It is not a box to be checked on a form it is a narrative you are constantly rewriting against silence. It is hearing your grandmother say “anak” and feeling your mother braid your hair while Stevie Wonder plays on the radio. It is knowing the smell of sinigang and soul food and understanding both are rituals.
As a scholar, I bring this duality into the classroom and into my research. My students don’t just get curriculum, they get culture, reflection, and refusal. I want them to see that knowledge is not neutral. That Blackness and Asianness are not binaries but rhythms that shape how we survive and how we speak. I want my students, especially those who exist at the intersections, to know that they do not have to shrink or fragment themselves to be legible. They already belong.
This month, I honor my Filipino lineage not as an accessory to my Blackness, but as part of the divine complexity that makes me whole. I celebrate not because the world has made space for me, but because I have learned to take up space anyway.
And I write this for every Afro-Asian student still searching for mirrors. For every child of two worlds who was told they had to choose. For every scholar who had to defend their existence before they could even begin their research.
We Are the Continuation, Not the Disruption
Afro-Filipino identity is not a deviation. It is a continuation of centuries of migration, love, resistance, and memory. We are what happens when colonization fails to erase, and when global Blackness reclaims what empire tried to divide.
We are not fragments.
We are full stories.
And this month, we remember that we belong, not because someone included us,
but because we have always been here.
A Final Word for the In-Between
I am the ocean between islands, the bridge between names. What they tried to divide, I carry as one.
They told me to choose a side. I chose to belong to myself.
My blood speaks in blended tongues, history, harmony, and the hush of what survived. This is not confusion. It is convergence.
I am the echo of a mother’s prayer and a grandfather’s fight. I am their unfinished sentence, still writing.
Curtis Ladrillo Chamblee M.A. is an Afro-Filipino scholar and doctoral candidate in Communication & Film at the University of Memphis. His work explores Black masculinity, media representation, and the power of place, bridging ancestral memory with cultural critique. As a co-editor of UpRooted: Autoethnographies of Belonging and Place and co-author on rhetorical fractals and examined Tupac Lyrics using an Afrocentric Lens, Curtis elevates voices across diaspora, legacy, and liberation.
