This essay was originally published in Inheritance Magazine on May 30, 2023
I come from a mestizo Filipino family. My surname, Melo, is a signifier of my racially mixed ancestry that points to Portuguese ancestors. After a curious Google search, I discovered that “Melo” means “one who hailed from Merlo, Portugal.” Paradoxically, however, I have never set foot in Portugal, or even known anyone there. How did I, then, get my last name? How did someone like me, who grew up in Cagayan de Oro City, Philippines, inherit a last name that suggests an ancestral origin that is oceans and continents away? Reading Sony Corañez Bolton’s Crip Colony: Mestizaje, US Imperialism, and the Queer Politics of Disability in the Philippines, I was reminded that my last name is a result of my family’s mixed heritage — that “Melo” is the remnant of a powerful colonial empire that colonized my people.
In Crip Colony, Corañez Bolton reveals that he is mestizo. Now a Spanish studies professor at Amherst College, Corañez Bolton writes from his particular experience as someone whose family is a result of his white American father and Filipina mother’s intermixing. He notes that this mixedness is not a rare occurrence, but common among many Filipinos who “can tell a similar story of mixed heritage.” But what concerns Corañez Bolton is how this mixed heritage, which he terms “mestizaje,” has been used as an ableist and masculinist class hierarchy through which Filipinos were segregated along the lines of perceived dis/ability.