How do you navigate two cultures—two homes—in your political, work, and family lives? This question did not cross Maya Butalid’s mind when the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) sent her to the Netherlands to continue her activism there in 1983 to 1993, instigating her journey of political education, self-discovery, and personal empowerment in a different society. Her stay in the European country was meant to be temporary—until the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos Sr. falls and the revolutionary movement wins.
But things took a different turn for Butalid after democracy was restored in the Philippines. When the split within the CPP happened on April 24, 1993, she felt that the party no longer represented how she wanted to live her life. Paradoxically, it was when she left her activist life that she was “fully confronted with having to find [her] place in Dutch society.” And so, she carried on with her journey, just on a different path.
Chasing Windmills is a memoir that allows us to see the complexity of the immigrant and activist experiences—from the processes of acculturation and political socialization to the ways home and belonging are negotiated. Butalid brings life to these in her stories with captivating scenes and details sprinkled with self-deprecating humor and at times poignant moments. But they are always filled with self-reflection. In her narratives, she makes us recognize her various social roles and identities—immigrant, activist, wife, mother, grandmother, daughter, friend, social worker, student etc.—in which her choices to fulfill responsibilities and obligations associated with these are often competing or overlapping.
As a sociologist of migration and social movements, I find Chasing Windmills as a book that can resonate with many immigrants and activists. Of course, not everyone has the privilege of legal status in their country of settlement like the author, thus facilitating her integration. Many overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) in Europe, for instance, are undocumented or, even with resident permits, they do not have a path to citizenship. They feel that they will always be in the margins of their societies, no matter how much they yearn or work towards integration.
But the organizing themes in Butalid’s memoir, particularly “Being Part of Dutch Society,” “Identity,” and “Roots,” touch on the universal principles of human rights for immigrants, with or without papers; the creativity and resilience of OFWs in the face of unfamiliar, precarious, and often risky conditions in foreign countries; and the desire and longing for the Philippines that remain strong even with the passage of time. I found particularly compelling the chapters on learning the Dutch language and parenting, where you can grasp how immigrants straddle two worlds that sometimes collide, especially in raising second-generation children. Butalid and her husband Carlo made sure that their daughters not only know but also appreciate and embody Philippine culture, teaching them Cebuano at home and visiting the Philippines regularly.
Through parenting Dutch-born children, her identity also changed, as her social networks expanded beyond the CPP circles, and she acquired the language and norms that facilitated her acculturation. She reflects in the introduction of Part 3 in the book, “One’s identity is not static, but dynamic. As you go through life you are constantly creating and recreating your identity. And as you go through this process, you do not lose yourself, but rather enrich yourself. Having said this, I know that an important part of me will always be Filipino, me being a Filipino immigrant.”
Chasing Windmills also has nuggets of wisdom for those involved in activism—whether on Philippine issues, on social problems that OFWs confront in their host societies, or both. In memoirs, authors are not only chronicling an event or describing the way they lived through a certain period; they hope can relate to and distill key messages in their stories. In her accounts, Butalid shows that personal is political and that activism is often messy, fluid, and volatile because the choices that she makes as part of a collective impact her individual life. Her decision to leave CPP was not made overnight. A good portion of her adolescence and young adulthood was spent in the movement, and she recognizes how it transformed her and contributed to who she is now in her life course.
Ironically, but also not surprisingly, it was through her solidarity work with liberation struggles in Chile, El Salvador, East Timor and others that she started questioning the political program of the CPP and recognized that her beliefs have changed. She knew that she would not be true to her ideals and values—who she has become as a person in and through her activism—if she remained in the party. Her statement at the end of Chapter 6 captures this realization, where the persistent coverage of the war in former Yugoslavia became a turning point: “Being in Europe also exposed me to what was happening in the rest of the world. In the 1990s for example, war was going on in the former Yugoslavia… There was so much destruction, misery and suffering. And I thought to myself, ‘Is armed struggle really the solution to the problems in the Philippines?’… I guess it was around this period when I stopped living according to dogmas, and simply acted based on my inner compass.”
Finally, and most of all, Chasing Windmills speaks to our common humanity, especially when confronted with inevitability of death. Butalid starts and ends her book with chapters on her breast cancer diagnosis and recovery respectively. When she found out about her illness, suddenly, nothing else seems to matter except her family, especially her daughters—how much time she has with them and how much sadness her suffering and death will bring them. It was because of this looming end—“that your life has a deadline”—that she was inspired to really write her book for her children and grandchildren (to whom she dedicates it) as a concrete expression of her continuous parenting based on the principles she lives by. Thus, while Chasing Windmills is about impermanence, unpredictability, and transformations, much of it is also about consistency and the immutability of our relationship with loved ones and, for Butalid, to God.
Sharon M. Quinsaat is an associate professor of Sociology at Grinnell College, in Grinnell, Iowa, USA.
This book review was published in Esquire Philippines magazine on July 12, 2023.