S. Lily Mendoza
S. Lily Mendoza (Ph.D., Arizona State University) is a native of San Fernando, Pampanga in Central Luzon, Philippines. She grew up in the small barrio of Teopaco next door to calesa drivers with their handsome horses and their backyard stables. She shared with her five siblings duties feeding pigs and raising chickens and collecting horse manure for fertilizing the small family garden. Although she grew up colonized (tutored by American missionaries and Peace Corps Volunteers and Filipino teachers who taught strictly in English), she retains memories of sitting at her Lola’s feet listening to stories, making sampaguita leis, and watching her Apu Sinang prepare her betel nut chew with much fascination. Currently, she is a fourth year student at Martin Prechtel’s Bolad’s Kitchen School dedicated to “teaching forgotten things, endangered excellent knowledges, but above all a grand overview of human history…in the search for a comprehension regarding the survival of unique and unsuspected manifestations of the indigenous soul.”
Besides learning how to grow a small vegetable garden with her indigenous theologian hubby in the heart of Motown (Detroit), she is also a scholar and Associate Professor of Culture and Communication at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan, with research interests in critical intercultural communication; indigenous studies; communication and ecology, cultural studies; colonial and postcolonial discourse and theory; theories of identity and subjectivity; cultural politics in national, post- and trans- national contexts; race and ethnicity; and the politics of cross-cultural theorizing.
Lily is especially known in the Philippines and beyond for her pathbreaking work on indigenization and indigenous studies. Her first book publication, Between the Homeland and the Diaspora: Theorizing Filipino and Filipino American Identities (Routledge, 2002; Philippine revised edition by UST Publishing, 2006) is the first comprehensive articulation of the movement for indigenization in the Philippine academy and is referenced widely in the fields of history, Philippine Studies, Asian American Studies, Southeast Asian Studies, and postcolonial and cultural studies. She is the recipient of several distinguished scholarship and top paper awards in intercultural communication and was elected Vice Chair (2011-2012), and consequently, Chair (2012-2013) of the International and Intercultural Communication Division, a division of the National Communication Association in the United States.
Prior to her current position at Oakland University, Lily also served as Associate Professor and Graduate Director at the University of Denver where she headed the doctoral program in Culture and Communication for many years. Currently, she is part of the Core Group of the Center for Babaylan Studies (CfBS) headquartered in Sonoma County, California (the term “babaylan” referring to an indigenous healing tradition in many parts of the Philippines). CfBS is a Filipino and Filipino American movement dedicated to keeping alive the indigenous wisdom and healing traditions of the ancestors. Her current (co-edited) book publication, Back from the Crocodile’s Belly: Philippine Babaylan Studies and the Struggle for Indigenous Memory (2013) is especially dedicated to this work.
Besides learning how to grow a small vegetable garden with her indigenous theologian hubby in the heart of Motown (Detroit), she is also a scholar and Associate Professor of Culture and Communication at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan, with research interests in critical intercultural communication; indigenous studies; communication and ecology, cultural studies; colonial and postcolonial discourse and theory; theories of identity and subjectivity; cultural politics in national, post- and trans- national contexts; race and ethnicity; and the politics of cross-cultural theorizing.
Lily is especially known in the Philippines and beyond for her pathbreaking work on indigenization and indigenous studies. Her first book publication, Between the Homeland and the Diaspora: Theorizing Filipino and Filipino American Identities (Routledge, 2002; Philippine revised edition by UST Publishing, 2006) is the first comprehensive articulation of the movement for indigenization in the Philippine academy and is referenced widely in the fields of history, Philippine Studies, Asian American Studies, Southeast Asian Studies, and postcolonial and cultural studies. She is the recipient of several distinguished scholarship and top paper awards in intercultural communication and was elected Vice Chair (2011-2012), and consequently, Chair (2012-2013) of the International and Intercultural Communication Division, a division of the National Communication Association in the United States.
Prior to her current position at Oakland University, Lily also served as Associate Professor and Graduate Director at the University of Denver where she headed the doctoral program in Culture and Communication for many years. Currently, she is part of the Core Group of the Center for Babaylan Studies (CfBS) headquartered in Sonoma County, California (the term “babaylan” referring to an indigenous healing tradition in many parts of the Philippines). CfBS is a Filipino and Filipino American movement dedicated to keeping alive the indigenous wisdom and healing traditions of the ancestors. Her current (co-edited) book publication, Back from the Crocodile’s Belly: Philippine Babaylan Studies and the Struggle for Indigenous Memory (2013) is especially dedicated to this work.
less
InterestsView All (50)
Uploads
Videos by S. Lily Mendoza
Plenary talk delivered at the The Virtual Global Forum on Migration 2020 hosted by Tearfund UK
Papers by S. Lily Mendoza
with themselves. One form of domination in colonial contexts is the totalising claim to a monopoly of ‘the’ truth that effectively delegitimises and demonises all other ways of seeing the world. This essay grapples with the question: What happens when the ‘One True Story’ encounters other faith stories? Riffing off my (coedited) anthology, Back from the Crocodile’s Belly: Philippine Babaylan Studies and the Struggle for Indigenous Memory (dedicated to the memory of the Filipino indigenous women and men healers impaled on stakes by early Spanish missionaries and left on river banks for crocodiles to feast on), I narrate my personal journey growing up as a Filipina Methodist pastor’s kid, becoming a born-again believer and an aspiring Christian missionary trained by Philippine Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship and the Navigators, and belatedly coming to grips with my relationship to my country’s colonial history and its consequences for me and my people’s struggle for wholeness and authenticity. What happens
when my wholly formed Christian subjectivity becomes challenged by the resurrecting call of spirit to indigenous and earth well-being? Informed by a multilayered cultural memory, I trace my faith learnings from an encounter with deep ancestry in the ‘belly of the beast’ and its larger significance for today’s social movement struggles for sustainability and global coexistence.
communication that re-examines modern culture’s values, beliefs,
and assumptions about human being in the world and the role of
such in fomenting today’s ongoing planetary-wide ecological crises.
To conduct this re-examination, we turn to ethnoautobiography, a
framework rooted in story and in the indigenous paradigm. We raise
deep questions regarding the default assumptions of a discipline
ensconced almost exclusively within the monocultural logic of
modern culture and civilization. We end by posing key problematics
that we deem crucial for renewing the discipline toward
contemporary relevance, ecological awareness, and responsibility.
Plenary talk delivered at the The Virtual Global Forum on Migration 2020 hosted by Tearfund UK
with themselves. One form of domination in colonial contexts is the totalising claim to a monopoly of ‘the’ truth that effectively delegitimises and demonises all other ways of seeing the world. This essay grapples with the question: What happens when the ‘One True Story’ encounters other faith stories? Riffing off my (coedited) anthology, Back from the Crocodile’s Belly: Philippine Babaylan Studies and the Struggle for Indigenous Memory (dedicated to the memory of the Filipino indigenous women and men healers impaled on stakes by early Spanish missionaries and left on river banks for crocodiles to feast on), I narrate my personal journey growing up as a Filipina Methodist pastor’s kid, becoming a born-again believer and an aspiring Christian missionary trained by Philippine Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship and the Navigators, and belatedly coming to grips with my relationship to my country’s colonial history and its consequences for me and my people’s struggle for wholeness and authenticity. What happens
when my wholly formed Christian subjectivity becomes challenged by the resurrecting call of spirit to indigenous and earth well-being? Informed by a multilayered cultural memory, I trace my faith learnings from an encounter with deep ancestry in the ‘belly of the beast’ and its larger significance for today’s social movement struggles for sustainability and global coexistence.
communication that re-examines modern culture’s values, beliefs,
and assumptions about human being in the world and the role of
such in fomenting today’s ongoing planetary-wide ecological crises.
To conduct this re-examination, we turn to ethnoautobiography, a
framework rooted in story and in the indigenous paradigm. We raise
deep questions regarding the default assumptions of a discipline
ensconced almost exclusively within the monocultural logic of
modern culture and civilization. We end by posing key problematics
that we deem crucial for renewing the discipline toward
contemporary relevance, ecological awareness, and responsibility.
—Jurgen W. Kremer, PhD. in Clinical Psychology
and co-author of Ethnoautobiography:
Stories and Practices of Unlearning Whiteness,
Decolonization, Uncovering Ethnicities
"Back from the Crocodile’s Belly: is a book of power – a record of severe struggle to hang on to our soul and its unbroken link to the womb of our ancestral world wherever the Filipino may be. Dedicated to the babaylanes—our shamanic ancestors, many fed to crocodiles by the Spanish conquistador in the attempt to wipe out their world—this book offers a harvest of homecoming. Here the lived experiences of our kababayan carving expatriate lives in “the belly of the beast” links arms with the continuing struggle in the motherland to keep alive what it still remembers of that ancestral world. With passion, wit and grace, racial memory propels us to evolve as we meet ourselves and link hands in that blessed moment “before the invention of violent hierarchies and the beauty-killing empires,
machines, markets, standing armies, corporations, and governments that now threaten life on the planet.”
--Sylvia Mayuga, Thrice Winner, Philippine
National Book Award, journalist, essayist,
poet, and documentary filmmaker
--Oscar V. Campomanes
Literaray Scholar & Critic