“We climbed these gates, the day Ferdinand Marcos was ousted,” my mother said as we entered the Malacañang Palace on a school field trip. I was around 10 years old, just learning about martial law in the Philippines under the Marcos dictatorship. As the voice of our tour guide faded, my mother vaguely recalled the final hours of the EDSA People Power Revolution that overthrew Marcos on February 25, 1986. A time when she, along with her siblings and many other Filipinos, occupied the streets and stormed the presidential palace, braving a sea of soldiers and military tanks.
My mother is my first teacher. Deciding to homeschool me and my siblings during our elementary school years, she ensured we learned of the dictatorship she lived through, and inherited our countrymen’s collective memory. In my young, naive mind though, this felt distant; a freedom revolution in past tense. In her words, they fought so we didn’t have to. We rested in her words that such a time would never happen again.
“In my young, naive mind though, this felt distant; a freedom revolution in past tense. In her words, they fought so we didn’t have to. We rested in her words that such a time would never happen again.”
Since that field trip, however, she, along with my father, not once recounted their personal experiences of life under military rule. They hoped to shield us from the trauma and fear of their youth.
But I’ve always wondered. As I watched the lead-up to the 2022 Philippine presidential elections from the guilty comfort of living abroad and merely through my screen, I thought of my parents’ anguish and anxiety seeing the son and namesake of the former dictator vying to govern our country. I quickly learned of Ferdinand Marcos Jr.’s propaganda machinery and disinformation schemes, but at the same time, was filled with hope from other candidates’ grassroots campaigns to mobilize the country towards a better future. In witnessing what feels like a deja vu election, my parents were filled with hope that the “people’s power” would prevail.
