revisiting

Last week, Maiana Minahal invited me to a maganda meeting to talk about maganda's past. I feel like I've done this a dozen times before, each to a new staff, but I must admit I do enjoy talking with them. I'm the alum that has always been on campus, but no one knows I'm here, mostly because I deal with staff and not students.

I talked about what the world was like when maganda first started (no TFC, no Filipinas Magazine, no computers and scanners, no one coming out of the closet). They asked me how people did layout without computers and I described to them the old cut and paste method ala the old yearbook days. They were shocked. I forget that most of them were only toddlers when the first issue of maganda was published. How many of the topics maganda wrote about were "controversial" for the time, like the sex issue, but seem mundane today. Yet that is one of the freedoms of a college publication, the ability to push boundaries and tempt ire from the community.

Apparently there was some criticism they got for the last issue about a photo published about it being exploitative. I remember going through last year's maganzine and not recalling anything that would provoke a nasty email. We had our share of nasty emails from people who didn't like what we published or what was said. And I told them that well, if you're going to push bounds then you have to be willing to take the hit and stand by the work you did. This isn't PCN where it's one night and people forget, this is a publication that hangs around a few years and even after you've graduated.

It was fun thinking back on those days and the kinds of things that I took with me. It certainly created its own wonderful share of artists who are still writing books, performing, today. But it also created Filipinos who although they weren't artists or writers, were people who supported the arts. When people attend the maganda receptions, alot of them go to support a campus Filipino organization, but I wonder if they realize that they're also building something inside them, a love for the arts and the ability to be a supporter for the arts.

We always talk about well if we have Filipino writers, we need Filipino readers. One of the many beautiful things about maganda, is that for the past 17 years it's been creating that audience and starting at a young age.