The Politics of Beautification in Indigenous Representation
The Politics of Beautification in Indigenous Representation
by Lara Bautista
peer reviewed by Ellie or bua paul
Preface
I grew up in and around San Francisco, California—a city renowned worldwide for its diversity, plurality, and progressiveness—in a first-generation Filipino-American household where I was taught never to diminish my strength, value, or beauty, inside and out. Despite this, I spent too much of my adolescence wishing I was White, feeling like I wasn’t enough because I wasn’t.
I spent my early years deeply entrenched in the Filipino community—an identity and affiliation I wore with pride. So I’m not sure when it changed. My guess would trace it back to the convergence of social media gradually, then entirely, taking over my life—my social reality and my sense of self—alongside an increasing alienation from my mother culture as I grew older and found myself feeling different, weird, lonely, in more and more predominantly White institutions and contexts. But even within the Filipino community, I found that both media and day-to-day life had always been deeply saturated with ideotypes of Whiteness: a bar of papaya-scented ‘skin whitening’ soap on the bathroom sink in almost every household; childhood friends discouraged from going out into the sun for fear they would get darker.
Naturally lighter-skinned than most, I found myself holding a certain privilege, even being told on multiple occasions, “you’re so pretty, you don’t look Filipino at all!” This was something I leaned into, going so far as to claim Spanish ancestry, wielding the Philippines’ 333 brutal years of colonisation as a cosmetic enhancement, social currency, even a point of pride. And reminiscing on the insecurity and ignorance that comes with being a teenage girl, compounded by the vulnerability of negotiating my relationship to my background, culture, and self-image within a context that seemed to devalue them, I can see now how primed I was for the internalised racism, colourism, and coloniality that took hold. Even now, having dedicated much of my adult life to understanding and deconstructing these very structures of power, and trying to trace how they have shaped who I am, I am in—and will remain in—a constant process of unlearning.
It’s hard not to think about this time of my life without a deep sense of guilt, shame, and an intense longing to shake my past self by the shoulders, screaming “snap out of it!” But recently, there has been a humming deep in my gut, extending beyond internal reflection and evolution, towards a sense of possibility surging through my blood, my genes, down to my very bones that runs wider, deeper. I don’t know what it means or where it’s heading, and I do know that transformation always comes with the tension of being dialectically defined. But I also know that I hold a profound sense of hope, and of pride—not despite where I come from or what I look like, but precisely because of these.
In August 2022, I had this sentiment immortalised in the form of three little black dots sitting pretty on my shoulder—something that will never be ignored, taken away, or forgotten. Every time I look in the mirror, I see, I remember; and then I smile. It is out of this shifting relationship to beauty, identity, and inheritance that this work takes shape, and from within this tension that I began to see representations of Filipina beauty differently—not as distant images, but as reflections of histories I had long internalised.