maganda magazine

In 2006, the San Francisco Giants started an annual Heritage Week to celebrate diversity in baseball and in the San Francisco Bay Area in general.  This year, we will find ourselves immersed in ballpark diversity the week of May 12th, with the first-ever Filipino Heritage night taking place on Wednesday, May 14th.

According to the official SF Giants website, tickets are being sold at a discount of $20 to sit in the special Filipino Heritage section.  The night will consists of Filipino entertainment and a customized item themed after Filipino heritage.  Overall, the night will appreciate Filipino-owned businesses and families.

I don’t know about everyone else, but I think it’s pretty cool that the Filipino culture is being recognized and celebrated at a national baseball game that will hopefully be televised.  (Let’s hope that if it is televised, they actually express that it is Filipino Heritage night.)  I actually haven’t heard about Heritage Week until my parents told me last night that they bought tickets for it. I’m not going because they only bought tickets for themselves (lame), but it would be interesting to see how this pans out, and what they mean by “Filipino entertainment.”  Is there going to be a dance team that goes out to the field during half time to perform the tinikling?  And what exactly is this special item that they speak of?

In all honesty, although it sounds pretty cool, I also question the validity of reducing the celebration of Filipino heritage to one night.  But then again, look at Pilipino Culture Night (PCN).  Even though people have their criticisms about whether or not it is entirely feasible to truly celebrate culture in one night, it still happens and participants work really hard to put it on.  I have been fairly satisfied with all the PCNs I have seen in my past (minus one that is a different story entirely) and it takes a lot to make me happy with stage productions and like events.

Let’s hope that the Giants have a consultant of Filipino heritage helping them out with this so that it is less commodified and wrapped in a pretty $20 discount package than it currently sounds like on the website.

- C. Fiel (the pessimist)

Image Source: http://www.springtrainingtours.com/images/giantslogo.jpg

Note: This is not a post about Bob the Builder or Barack Obama.

In this fast-at-you technological age that allows one to come into contact with a distant relative across the world within a millisecond flat, we here at Maganda wonder:

Is it possible for us to keep up with the times?  Can we actually achieve the status of a well-read, well-researched blog that puts out entries at least twice a week?  A blog that goes beyond being a website for event announcements with (sometimes) quirky one-liners to add a bit more detail than what is already stated on a flier?  Can we be what we say we are on our about page?

We’ll be the first to admit that in the past six months since our new site has been up and running, we haven’t been the blog that we said we were.  And we are a little ashamed, yes.  But as our co-editor in chief, Patrici Flores, has previously stated, “students are wholly responsible for running Maganda Magazine.”  Amidst studying for school, attending weekly Maganda meetings, producing a magazine, event planning, and all that good stuff that you have to be involved with during college (like protests and rallies and other avenues of civil disobedience), maintaining a blog is probably at the back of every one’s mind.  Our apologies for being busy college students.

That said, we are hesitant to promise that this blog will be any less sporadic than it has been, but we are going to try our darnedest to update it more often.  Maganda is just coming into blogging, so we still have a lot of fine-tuning to work out.  We still remember the days of Xanga and talking about school like it was interesting to anyone else.  The funny thing is that that wasn’t so long ago.  Now blogs have turned into an arena of professionality and the Maganda blog is meant to be professional work. 

So whilst we transition from the Xanga realm of he-said she-said into what a professional blog should look like and speak like, we are going to do the event announcement thing just so you know that we still exist.  And hopefully, that is enough for you all, good readers.

Here, we leave you with a quote we found in a post that was never published.  In response to why he does photography, Rick Rocamora stated at our Artist Dialogue event back in October:

“We have to be the ones to define ourselves [through art/writing/photography/our actions] or it will be others who reflect our history.”

Let that marinade.

- C. Fiel

That’s right friends. It’s that time of the year again. Lovers may know it as Valentine’s Day, while the more cynical folk refer to it as Singles’ Awareness Day a.k.a. SAD. Whichever your preference, our annual open mic to celebrate the Hallmark holiday is next Wednesday, February 13th at 7pm in 126 Barrows Hall (UC Berkeley campus). Join {m}aganda and other lovers and haters as we partake in a mind orgy of words, music, and maybe even dancing (if that one dance breaker comes from last year, that would be awesome).

Also, remember to dress in your Sunday best (or clubby best) because we may have a schmancy PHOTO BOOTH this year prior to the open mic. If you’re a hopeless romantic, odds are you may meet your soulmate at the open mic so you should be looking good anyway (as we’re sure you always do).