From THE HALO-HALO REVIEW:
Whispers of hauntings always bring back stories of near-forgotten suffering, trauma buried deep into a community’s collective memory. Jean Vengua’s chapbook, Marcelina: A Meditation on the Murder of Cecilia “Celing” Navarro,” is the vessel of remembering for a new generation of Filipino-Americans to revisit an agonizing chapter in our history.
There is only one way to experience Vengua’s meditation, breathing in her words on the page, with utmost reverence to early Filipinos who struggled to assert their humanity in an inhospitable land. Belonging and inclusion remained elusive for a community welcomed in the United States to do one thing: to work. Filipinos were at the bottom rung of the labor hierarchy that paid Japanese and Whites significantly more for the same work. The poet’s meditation reveals the texture of Celina’s aspirations as a young woman who planned to send for her parents, even as she struggled to raise young children with little support. The poem offers a glimpse into the lives and hopes of a new community. They found comfort in place names that honored Catholic saints in their new home in California. The Filipino emigres’ affinity with remnants of California’s Spanish colonial history was afforded by three centuries of subjugation under Spanish colonization. Ironically, in Celine’s tragic death, the trauma of othering and torment manifested in the act of interring one of their own, subsumed in the heart of the empire, denied of the dignity of last rites.
