Raising Love in A Time of Lovelessness: Kuwentos of Pinayist Motherscholars Resisting COVID-19’s Anti-Asian Racism

ABSTRACT This proposal begins with a critical race commentary on how the current day anti-Asian racism is nothing more than a similar playing out of the United States’s handbook on anti-Asian sentiment. Then the paper takes a narrative turn employing Pinay methodologies such as kuwentos. Each kuwento illuminates how Pinay Motherscholars navigate the hate found in a patriarchal and whitesupremacist academy and the white supremacy in their own communities under anti-Asian COVID-19, while still raising their Filipino children with love and in love. Though Motherscholars writ large are experiencing a similar exhaustion of working while rearing children, Pinay Motherscholars are experiencing a deeper exhaustion from working while not only rearing but also protecting, debunking, and saving our children’s identities, souls, and hearts in the face of anti-Asian racism. To illuminate this compounded exhaustion, interspersed throughout the paper is a poetic assemblage that serves as a forever literary metaphor of what it is like to raise love in a time of lovelessness.