The Fuller the Rice Stalk, the Lower it Bends: Community in Progress
November 10, 2025
People
Jaclyn Reyes
ERI/PS2 Public Research Fellow
Jaclyn Reyes is an interdisciplinary artist and PhD student in Social Welfare at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her work explores diaspora, community care, and environmental justice through participatory and arts-based methods. Jaclyn is a 2025 ERI/PS2 Summer Public Research Fellow.
I.
At the start of this fellowship, I carried both hope and caution—unsure whether my participatory arts-based project, Pahina, could find its place. I sought to test ideas of transnational solidarity in the Filipino diaspora. The project was conceived as a way to see how Filipino psychology frameworks might shape approaches to diaspora engagement. Concepts like kapwa (“shared self”) and bayanihan (“mutual aid”) describe how the self is formed in relation to others—an orientation that, in some regions, extends into pakikipagkapwa-tawo, linking the individual to community, culture, and history.
The name Pahina was chosen to reflect this ethos. Derived from the Spanish página (“page”), it signifies both a place in a larger story and, in certain regions, refers to volunteer labor for the collective and the tending of shared space. More broadly, I used it as a lens for my doctoral research on diaspora engagement and its entanglements with disaster and development. Through image-making, I imagined it as public scholarship—holding climate vulnerability while articulating new visions of care and renewal.
II.
Pahina began with promise—partnerships in the Philippines and New York, meetings, announcements, project plans, reassurances, even plane tickets. But just before my departure, the messages stopped. It was like a brown-out, and other familiar inconveniences in the Philippines: abrupt, inevitable, endured with resignation.
Back in New York, I adapted. At a Family Festival, Pahina became a kind of art greenhouse: families added paper leaves to a collective garden, while children colored hand-drawn Philippine foliage printed on seed paper to take home and plant. The aim was to share not only culture, but the values of kapwa and bayanihan: reciprocity, care, the sense of giving more than one takes. Yet the effort revealed ironies and inconsistencies: pages were produced in excess, the habit of consumption echoing the very imbalance the project sought to resist—the way care is often unevenly asked for, unevenly returned.
In both places, the project was reshaped by forces beyond my design. Each opened possibilities, but also exposed the misalignments beneath: the prevailing habits of each site asserted themselves, leaving little room for solidarity to take hold.
III.
When I returned to the Philippines at the end of summer and asked new partners about kapwa, the reply was quick, edged with sarcasm: “I wish I had kapwa.” In that moment, I recognized my own exasperation mirrored in theirs. It echoed the cynicism that greets invocations of “resilience”—a word that dignifies survival for those forced to endure it, while offering comfort to those privileged enough to celebrate it. As with kapwa and bayanihan, these concepts often circulate in diaspora as cherished emblems of belonging, their symbolic weight magnified by distance. In this inflation, aspiration can slide into myth, their force displaced by projection. And yet, I have seen them quicken into practice under conditions that demanded nothing less. I keep them, then, with critical aspiration—attentive to their limits and potential, but grounded.
