In the Philippines, we have this saying "lukso ng dugo." Lukso (jump/leap), Dugo (blood), the ethereal mesh of "leap of faith" and "blood is thicker than water." The things we do for things we can't explain, as if our blood is directing us, not our minds. In my historical novel, Bataan New Jersey , I created a fictitious matrilineal family saga. Four generations of strong women going back to an ancestor in southern Philippines. The story is partly based on my own search for blood connections on my mother's side. My mother is a Chavacano, which might not mean anything to people until I reveal a few more facts. It's the only Spanish creole in Asia, and it formed in Zamboanga, the last stronghold of Spain in the Philippines. While the history of Philippine colonization is one of evangelization and not native replacement (unlike in Latin America), something else happened in the South, in Zamboanga, around Fort Pilar. Where my mother has deep blood roots. Hispanic Wanna Bes But Filipinos, because of our Spanish last names, have always been confused by Mother History's little hand tricks. Many still think they have some blood connections to Spain, although there weren't enough Spaniards in the Philippines throughout its 333 colonial history to create that bloodline (again, unlike in Latin America). Filipino cinema is hometown to mestizaje, but if we really go into it, we will earn that many of these actors are mixed with American blood from the early 20th century (1900s) when Americans colonized the islands. Take Gloria Romero. Nida Blanca. None of them was Hispanic. The very few known Hispanic lineage was kept by the landowning Spanish clans like the Ayalas. And we can see it on their faces. Then there are the likes of my mother. Light-skinned. "Mestiza" type. Curly hair. A face that one could easily find in the mestizaje of Latin America. But she is a Chavacano from Zamboanga. One of mysterious ancestry. Suffice to say, I don't know much about my maternal ancestry. What I know about my lineage came from my father. There are tons of history there. A landowning family from Oas, Albay, the home of the last names that start with the letter R. All Rs in one place. Mother History's hand trick. Mostly the work of Governor General Claveria. Roa is one of my paternal last names. Former Pres. Duterte is a Roa. The association is horrifying enough. So my interest ended there. My DNA Check Ten years ago, when I did my DNA ancestral check, it showed a 5% European origin. It made me curious, but it was not significant enough to interrogate. I imagined the % to be coming from my maternal side. After all, and once again, my mother is from Zamboanga. Did most Filipinos have the same colonial %? Was this something worth pursuing? Lukso ng dugo. For me, there was a always a pull toward Latin America ever since we immigrated. I learned to be fluent in Spanish. I studied in South America and traveled every year to Spanish-speaking countries. Eventually, I would marry a Central American, and Spanish would be the language spoken at home. Lukso ng dugo. Even if my 5% wasn't thick enough. Spanish would be my third language. Portuguese would be my fourth.  I am according to my DNA 5% Spanish/Portuguese.   Blood can’t distinguish and break apart the Iberian peninsula.  As my 95% places me in Southeast Asia. If there was a pure blood Spaniard in my family lineage, he would be at least from 200 years ago—or so I thought.    The Claveria Decree I have Filipino friends who go to Spain and look for their Spanish last names there. The whole world is confused by the Spanish last names of the Filipino people, especially when their native-looking faces don't match what they wish to be. Colonial mentality is much embedded in the Filipino mind. Filipino cinema compounds such confusion, as much as the Filipino national sport, beauty contests. When in doubt, Google "The Claveria Decree." You will find the following: The Claveria Decree was a decree issued by Spanish Governor General Narciso Claveria on November 21, 1849. The decree required Filipinos to adopt Spanish surnames, and it had a lasting impact on Filipino identity.  What did the decree do?  Compiled a list of Spanish and indigenous surnames; Sent the list to provincial chiefs, who then sent it to towns; Gave the list to locals who didn't have surnames; Required families to systematically adopt Spanish surnames; Allowed families who had had surnames for four generations to keep them Case in point: My last name is Realuyo. Where my father was from--Oas, Albay, Philippines, everyone's last name starts with the letter R. A lot of Roas. These Filipino writers' last names are from there as well: Remoto and Ribay. We are not related by blood. Possibly by marriage, although in such a confined space, it really doesn't say much. Most like, related by street block. Studies Because of ancestry sites and a quicker and organized process to find one's DNA history, Filipinos are learning the truth the hard way. The reality that most Filipinos, despite their Hispanic last names, have no ancestral lineage to Spain could be a blow to our long standing romance with colonial mentality. Studies have grown about Filipino ancestry, one study after another debunking the Spanish ancestry myth. From "Multiple migrations to the Philippines during the last 50,000 years. The Philippines was a Spanish Colony for 333 y from 1565 until 1898. However, we only observe significant population-level signals of European admixture in some urbanized lowlanders, Bicolanos, and Spanish Creole-speaking Chavacanos ( SI Appendix , Table S7 Y ). Some individuals from Bolinao, Cebuano, Ibaloi, Itabayaten, Ilocano, Ivatan, Kapampangan, Pangasinan, and Yogad groups also presented low levels of European admixture ( SI Appendix , Table S7 Y ). This admixture is estimated to have taken place 100 to 450 y ago, which falls within the Spanish Colonial Period ( SI Appendix , Table S7 Z ). In contrast to several other Spanish-colonized regions, Philippine demography appears to have remained largely unaffected by admixture with Europeans. More here . 15% Mysterious Blood My mother is getting older, and I also couldn't wait much longer to find out a little bit more from my maternal heritage that I know next to nothing about. Early this year, I finally convinced my mother to do her DNA. What will be added to my own mysterious 5% European DNA? My mother and I are connected in mysterious ways. I find that most of my illnesses are also my mother's, not paternal, like those of my siblings. On my father side, cancer seems to be the killer and they all seem to cross the plane of life and death once in their 80s. My father passed when he was in his 80s and so did his identical twin. Will the same happen to me? Or will I take the path my mother is about to cross, our similarities in blood leading us the same way? My mother always claimed that her father was a Spaniard. By that, she probably meant a "mestizo." Unfortunately, we don't have any surviving photographs of her father. I have never met him, and her own mother passed when she was. only seven. In the Philippines, we have historical terms for such mixtures, although most of us were not educated to call label them correctly. The fact that Filipino/Chinese mix were also called "mestizos" complicated it more. My mother's DNA would reveal a 15% European ancestry (Mostly Spanish/Portuguese like mine, and 3% of which -- Italian). Since my mother and I did the same DNA test, my 5% European ancestry was moved to her side of my lineage as soon as her DNA results appeared. None on my father's side. For me, 15% is huge. The full-blooded Spaniard in her ancestral line was closer than I imagined. It further proves that her face was not an anomaly, and it reveals a story of Spanish colonization that many Filipinos do not share--a blood lineage. As a Chavacano, she could have easily descended from a Spanish soldier that was sent to Fort Pilar. But I can only assume so much. The fact is, given the country's faulty records, we may never know. We are not Ayalas or other landed families who connected with their Spanish ancestors by blood and inheritance. I descended from people whose story was always missing in the annals of oral interpretation handed down the generations. When I wrote Bataan New Jersey, I ended the historical novel in Zamboanga. Before learning my mother's 15%, I wanted to explore what mestizaje meant to me, if that were even true. And now that it is indeed true and undeniable, my interest in the matter has grown. There is a story in the 15%, one that we can and may only learn from writers who are willing to go inside and explore it, albeit in the imagination. Lukso ng Dugo may sound like a hyperbolic use of a Filipino saying, but it still defines much of my own personal history. Latin America has always been close to my heart. And Spain, as much as Wokeness dictates that it be erased and questioned for its dark colonial history, is also inside my artery. That Spanish would become my third language, and I would eventually speak it at home means that Lukso ng Dugo could very well dictate Fate itself. Fort Pilar, Zamboangra. Zamboanga was a trade route for hundreds of years, even before Spain. However, Chavacano was the language born to the mixing of native Subanons and the Spaniards who found themelves in the Spanish Fort. Read more: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8020671/ https://zamboangagirl.blogspot.com/2012/10/a-citys-abiding-devotion.html https://www.nature.com/articles/ejhg2013122 https://www.youtube.com/shorts/y0trF8pipBs http://www.filipinogenealogy.com/2012/02/claveria-and-myth-of-spanish-ancestors.html#google_vignette

An offering for today, a Rebel Sonnet "Dear Blood" I came of age in the 1990s in New York City during the AIDS crisis. The era created what I am today. Survival was very personal. Information was critical. Anger was necessary. And death often around the corner. Dear Blood on Missouri Review, with an introduction: https://missourireview.com/bino-realuyo-dear-blood/ And thank you to Savage Mind's Himati for featuring Dear Blood and creating this moving visual rendition. Here it is beautifully read by Broadway actor Marc De la Cruz: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJwFTeSOIOA

I am writing this blog a block from where my father passed in 2003. When I go home every day, I walk past the Veteran's Hospital in Manhattan on 23rd Street. I would look up and acknowledge, although I no longer remember which floor was the ICU. I can't go inside anymore, no reason to. Although I have been going to veteran's hospitals both in MetroManila and in New York City since I was nine. I tell people I grew up in the VA, amongst the aging veterans, my father's generation and beyond, at least 40 years older than I. Veterans, on whose faces, a record of history, each one different. My father had his own, "survivor" written all over it. War, to this day and to my future, is everlasting. When I was born, my father was pushing 50. I didn't watch him age. He was always old, while the rest of us, including my mother, generations behind him. I don't remember seeing him with black hair. It was alway gray, thick and full. Bataan, that memory, was part of our daily breath and bread. It had a life of its own, like a member of our family who only cared to show up whenever it wanted. Our house (a rented apartment) in Manila was full of traces of World War II. He had a baul full of helmets and army paraphernalia. His name written on the side with his title: Arch. Engr. Augusto Roa Realuyo . There was a bolo on the wall. Everyone on our street knew he was a Bataan surivor, a guerilla, and therefore scared of him. My family never really knew what any of it meant, the war, Bataan, Death March. Just history's whispers. We would grow into its legacy, in America of all places. I was protected by that world. By that Bataan that even in the seventies three decades later, people still remembered and knew. Manila was a violent place. Martial Law made sure of that. Police was enabled, protected. No due process. Authoritarian. Dark clutch. We were raised in a bubble. My mother kept us inside. No politics. No activism. My father made sure of that. He had seen it all. After his release from the Japanese concentration camp in 1942, he would become a guerilla, as if it wasn't enough to survive both the Death March and the camp. He was fact. Marcos' WWII medals were fiction. But both would create the Philippine history I grew up to know. The first time I wrote an essay about my father was in 1999, published both in the U.S. and in the Philippines. It was the year my first novel came out. In the Philippines, its publication in the Sunday Inquirer magazine, would coincide with an interview about my first novel, adding context to the writer none of them knew existed until then. It was the first time I engaged with war remembrance. When I tackled Manila as memory in my first novel and Philippine history in my first poetry collection, the doors to history would open a bit. I avoided Bataan all my life. It was hard to enter it, too personal. I collected books instead, for the day I was ready to return and brave enough to understand. My father would be hospitalized many times before he left us in 2003. We got to go back to the Philippines in 2000 for the Roa-Realuyo family reunion, our last. I got to see Manila through his eyes for the first time. I would get to see Oas, Albay, his hometown, from that experience. Very little of it pleasant. The baggage I brought back was heavier than the one I carried to Manila. I would learn that I was never really wrong about the country I grew up in. It was always complex, and I had no reason to regret my feelings about it. History would revisit in 2022. After the pandemic and after my husband's open heart surgery in 2021. Months of watching k-drama about Korea and Japan during Covid, after reading Pachinko and other historical novels like The Glass Palace. I would take apart my short story collection and take out the two Bataan stories, its emotional bookends. I decided to develop them into a novel. I would receive a grant for it. Every day then, at dawn, I would walk to a coffee shop in Jackson Heights, Queens, while its dark outside and write #BataanNewJersey. For the first time in my life, I was allowed to enter the narrative. I wasn't afraid of it any longer. The characters let me in. Bataan let me stay. And in three years, I finished the novel one block from the VA. Today, in the morning, the same time when I got a call from the VA doctor that my father had already passed, I sit in a cafe blogging, across from a WWII memorial, a block from where my father was exactly 22 years ago. When my father was my current age, his son, who would become a poet-novelist, was watching his father in the Veteran's Hospital in MetroManila (Diliman, QC). The boy didn't know anything about Bataan or World War II, although he had heard so much about them. He was already marked by a legacy he would one day had to face. My father survived Bataan to tell. I am alive now to tell. My father, the son of Bataan, and I, its legacy, in America, the other country he fought for. Such is war. Such is war. In memoriam, Augusto Roa Realuyo, 1921-2003.

Poker Realuyo 2010-2025 For over a decade, I took a month off from my FT job and wrote in the Caribbean.  In my 20s, I was trying to independently study the colonization and mental conditioning of the Philippines, without having to return to Asia. I would find answers in countries with parallel history. Before the Caribbean, I traveled quite a bit looking for a writing "colony," not the package artists applied to, but one I created on my own. I went to Mexico a few times, as the Philippines was managed through Nueva Espan~a/Modern Mexico. But I would the find inspiration not in Acapulco or Mexico D.F., but in Puerto Rico, another island conjoined with the Philippines in 1898. I always used to say, I grew up on an island but I never saw the sea. As an adult, I cherished the communion with the ocean. In fact, after my father passed in 2003, I moved to Puerto Rico. But my romance wouldn't last very long after that. I noticed the climate changing. It had become more fanatical that every Friday, there was a cultish procession on the streets of San Juan. When my family came to bring me back, I never went back to Puerto Rico again. Most of my works after my first two books were written there. Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic became my next sojourn. I made an annual pilgrimage to La Zona Colonial, so excited to find myself in the seat of Hispaniola. But even that would end, as if these island obsession was to turn a leaf. Indeed, my voyage to the Caribben would come to a halt, but not without a gift in 2011, for my birthday. A dog named Poker, named after Lady Gaga's famous song at that time. A friend gave him to me so I would have a companion in Manhattan. I traveled with months old Poker on the plane (he was in a dog carry-on under the front seat) to Miami and eventually to New York. I never had a pet. My family was dog averse. We had seen enough dog-butchering in Manila to understand the peril of having a dog in our lives. Poker would change that. At first, he lived with me on the Upper East Side, so fearful, he had to sleep between my thighs every night. When I left for work, he would go hysterical. And I would come back to a puppy spinning around in endless anxiety and chaos. But such was my life, and there was no choice but to leave him alone if I had to keep him. I would bring him to our house in Jersey City. My mother and my brother would fall in love with the tiny Poker. When I asked they if they wanted him to stay, they said, Yes. Our house was a palace for tiny Poker. There were three floors, a stairs where he could run up and down, and a backyard, an open air to play in. More than that, no one would leave him alone at home. He always had company. That's where he would end up for the rest of his life. And that's also how he became my mother's best friend. Our dog-averse family would turn around on pet-hood, thanks to Poker's character, a loving, caring, and lovable sunlight of a dog. Soon, he was a Realuyo. For fourteen years, he kept my mother company. I wouldn't text my mother without mentioning Poker. We panicked when he got sick. We worried. We celebrated his milestones. We calmed him whenever he trembled in the animal hospital waiting room. I never really understood until then why dogs were called "a man's best friend." My mother texted me his picture every single day for the past 14 years. I would always text back: "Goodnight/morning, Mommy and Poker. Love you." Poker kept her company all these years. Whatever makes my mother happy makes all of us happy. That was always Poker and his uncanny ability to center Grace. Poker had been very weak for the past few weeks. We knew he had aged. 14 human years was simply a very long time for him. Even if we knew somehow that he might leave us soon, we would still be unprepared for his passing. But he saved my mother from the trauma of witnessing his death. My mother went downstairs to prepare his puree of food, and when she returned to her bedroom, Poker was gone. I was about to get on the train when my mother called. I knew he had passed. My mother didn't know that I had answered her call and I could hear her wailing from where I stood on the train station. A paralyzing moment to hear my mother's pain. She had lost her dearest baby, as she would refer to Poker. But we are grateful to Poker. He had changed our lives. Gave us balance. Showed us love in his most special way. He came as an Angel and left as Sunlight. Thank you, Poker. We will miss you and we love you.

#P2PPIT flyer on BlueSky I just joined BlueSky. I was hesitant to start another social media platform that I can't manage on a regular basis. I didn't leave Twitter/X although I am hardly there too. For me Facebook is easiest as it is connected to my private accounts, and I can manage it well. It also is where I do a lot of my quick readings as I follow a lot of Facebook pages. But with 16,000 followers on my FB author page , I also understand the need to honor them. The other night, I ran into a book pitch campaign on BlueSky (apparently on X too), and I decided to take a bite. I have had many pitches for #BataanNewJersey and I am still not quite sure which one grabs attention. The one of this website is what I have sent in my literary agent queries. And it has gone through many iterations. On #P2PPIT event, we were allowed to post three pitches during the 12-hour event online. And so quickly, without giving it much thought, I put together pitches at different times of the day. I wanted the pitches to be visceral, not overplanned. Straight from the gut. Like I would my Facebook posts. For each of them, I attached an image that I had used before, with the original pitch on the post. The BlueSky word limit is definitely constraining (but hey, I wrote a book of Sonnets). First was this. Fall of Bataan: the biggest military surrender in American history.  So many books written.  None from Filipino POV.   A survivor’s son pens an epic 100-yr literary novel about 4 generations of a Queer family reshaping the aftermath of wars inflicted on Philippine soil.  BATAAN NEW JERSEY.   #P2Ppit #UW #PW Second, I thought, why not try to pitch in NUMBERS. The novel is 700 pages, already epic in scope and depth, but what makes the pages running are the numbers in the story. The first few pages of the novel includes a timeline and DATES! So here goes: 100 years 1921-2021 4 generations of a #QUEER Filipino family 3 successive wars inflicted by Spain U.S Japan 65 miles of #BataanDeathMarch 4 languages 4 countries  in 1 epic literary novel inspired by a survivor of Bataan Death March (my father) #BataanNewJersey  #P2PPit #UW #PW #amquerying #A And last, I thought about going personal, but really personal. My original pitch to Literary Agents begins with me being a son of a Death March survivor, and then it goes off to comps and a short description. But how about I bring my mother in. She after all inspired all the women in the book. Inspiration.  My father survived the #BataanDeath March.  My mother was born during #WWII.   Their stories made me curious about what happened before, during, and after.  The result was #BataanNewJersey. 100 years. 4 countries. 4 languages.  1 Epic novel. 4 generations of strong Filipino women. #QUEER #amquerying #P2Ppit #PW #BluePit #UW. Watching other writer's pitches, I learned about Mood Boards and Guides for Literary Agents, all visual. A relatively younger group. Fun to actually watch them. I am a GenX and a world a part from many of them. Here they are with a new strategy in getting Literary Agents to notice the novel. And Mood Boards? I put Canva to work. I posted the following on social media and it actually got a response. My first attempt at Mood Boarding. A story in pictures. Some elements of the novel are there. The women all look alike for a reason. Love these young writers! The women on this mood board are the A.I. versions of my mother. She is the inspiration for all of them. The landscape of finding an agent has changed since the last time I was represented by Harold Ober. But that was now 26 years ago. I have always been tech savvy, and I did win a pitch event at Harvard, not to mention I taught "How to Pitch" workshops in a leadership organization. People can only read or hear so much of a pitch, so even the few words (not too esoteric and gimmicky) may or may not land quickly. Keep it simple. Even if a literary agent doesn't say a Yay now, the goal is to be remembered--or brought up in a future conversation. In a query letter, the pitch has to blend in naturally but without compromising one's writing style. Personal style still needs to jump at the reader. This is writing after all. And so yes, the voyage continues. It's 2025, and I am #querying.

Virginia A. Realuyo ca. 1970s Today is my mother's birthday. The picture above is one of the few pictures we have when my mother was very young. It's the face that inspired the writing of Bataan New Jersey. While the heart of the novel is Bataan, it is about the impact of successive wars on Philippine soil on the characters, especially Lourdes. One cannot write a novel without seeing the faces of the characters. They have to move, talk, cry, scream, and appear in the writer's consciousness in all possible ways. They have to be real in that alternative world of fiction. Their gestures are the language of fiction, the quiet moments that are often better than dialogues. When I started writing Bataan New Jersey, I already knew what Lourdes, Dominica, and Eugenia looked like. They are three generations of women with the same face. My mother's face. My mother, Virginia Almonte Realuyo, is a Chavacana. She is a polyglot. I took that DNA from her. Because of her background, I studied in South America. I wanted to understand that colonial voyage from early on. I learned Spanish, but not the creole that my mother's family spoke for centuries. I headed to Argentina to study. Ferdinand Magellan landed in Patagonia, Argentina first before running into the "Philippine" islands. My mother is from Zamboanga, home to Fort Pilar, the Spanish stronghold in the south. Chavacano is the language and culture born to the interaction of the Spanish soldiers and the natives of the south. My mother is born out of that heritage. I created a whole world from my mother's face. The stories of her people, so un-acknowledged in a country that embraced Americanisms over Hispanidad, will hopefully be a part of a moving literature. It is my heritage too. I am a Chavacano just like her.