My Undocumented Filipino Mother Didn't Cook Our Culture's Food. Now, I Understand the Complicated Reasons Why (Exclusive)

"In cooking Filipino food after self-deporting, I found comfort, a feeling of home and a newfound appreciation for mom’s efforts," writes Jill Damatac, author of 'Dirty Kitchen'

The first time the scent of garlic and onion sauteeing with goat meat filled our house, I was 16. I remember sliding into the kitchen on stockinged feet, drawn in by the rich, gamey aroma. There was my mother, all 5 feet, 2 inches of her, dwarfed by the extra-large wok on the stove. Slender arms straining to stir, blue flames leaping at her apron.

“You’re cooking?” I said, incredulous.

“It’s kalderetang kambing,” she said. Goat stew in a rich tomato sauce, a recipe from the Ilocanos, my dad’s people in the Philippine north. 

Mom had started cooking Filipino food that winter of 1999, when she had secured a foothold in her career. As a teenager, I thought that our previous years of mostly microwaveable frozen meals was because of our budget, or the difficulty of finding Filipino ingredients in the suburbs. Now, at 42, only recently cooking Filipino recipes myself, I think I understand why it took her so long.

Mom needed to make herself into a success, first. 

A career was not promised for someone like my mother, an undocumented immigrant and a woman of color. She came to the United States on a tourist visa at 34, eager to reunite with her husband, my father, who had left the Philippines two years earlier. With two small children under 10 in tow, mom braved our migration in 1992, driven only by her wish to be with dad. 

Growing up during the Marcos dictatorship, mom’s family struggled. Food was a luxury for them, one that they wouldn’t indulge in until decades later, after the regime’s fall allowed them to pull themselves out of poverty. mom was the first in the family to graduate from university, tuition paid for by her older brothers, who worked overseas on cargo ships. With a prestigious job at the Philippine National Bank – earned through her top university grades – mom had helped her family in return, giving half of her salary to her parents. 

And then, in 1983, when she was 24, I happened. She became my mom and a wife, marrying my dad, whom she loved deeply. While mom persevered with her job at the bank, moving up within its corporate division, she gave birth to my sister, raising us with the aid of nannies and household help, common in a deeply class-divided Philippines. But by 1990, dad was struggling with his own career, unhappy in a dead-end administrative job at Nestlé. Even with his university degree, it was the best job he could get given the struggling economy, a far cry from his dream of becoming a musician. He left before we did, working as a musician on a cruise ship before walking off the gangplank in 1991 to find a job in New York.

Reunited in America in 1992, we became just another immigrant family hoping for a chance to pursue dreams and self-fulfillment. 

In those early years, mom lost the self she knew, growing distant from me and my sister. She was unable to find a job at any bank, deemed unqualified simply because of her Filipino university credentials. mom took on any job she could: a counter girl at a bakery in New York; a checkout clerk at a grocery store in rural Pennsylvania. During those years, our meals consisted of microwaveable instant oatmeal at breakfast, canned Vienna sausages and ramen noodles, frozen pizzas and Hot Pockets and microwaveable TV dinners. Sometimes, she brought home treats from the bakery’s excesses, marked for the trash: chocolate babkas, banana muffins, black-and-white cookies, blueberry bagels. 

Mom rarely talks about how she felt about living undocumented. But as a woman raised in a dictatorship who had graduated from university with honors, landed a job in her country’s most prestigious bank and helped pull her family out of poverty, those early years in America must have been a struggle. Cooking — something she never did in Manila — had been the last thing on her mind. There was rent to pay, bills to stave off and an angry and depressed husband to keep happy. 

Then, in 1995, the Social Security Administration mistakenly issued my mother a number that allowed her to work, a blessing for our struggling family and a stroke of luck rarely granted to undocumented immigrants. She was hired as an assistant manager at a bank and by 1997, she had her own bank branch to manage, promoted over more experienced colleagues. In 1999, we moved to New Jersey for her job at a new bank, one with higher pay and a fast-track to regional promotion. It was only then, with a house bought on a mortgage and her career finally beginning to rise, that mom began to cook. Sometimes, Filipino classics like sinigang or dinuguan; sometimes, Italian linguine alle vongole, or American pot roast. 

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Like many middle-class girls of her generation raised in the Philippines with household help, my mother didn’t know how to cook. In learning recipes from home, she reconnected with her Filipino side, which we had all learned to repress,wishing to act as “American” as possible   as a form of survival. At the Filipino grocery store, mom made friends, learned recipes and the ingredients that went into them. I also like to think that maybe, cooking for us was my mom’s way of trying to make it up to us, to reconcile her ambivalence about motherhood – an unnatural fit for her, resulting in her inability to be an emotional support for my sister and me. Still, as the family breadwinner, she was a strong role model for us.

I left the U.S. after two decades of being undocumented, tired of the fear and struggle of that life. It is only now, after self-deporting from the U.S., becoming a British citizen and returning to the U.S. as a legal immigrant, that I can start to understand mom’s complexities and contradictions. Just like mom, I didn’t start cooking Filipino food until I felt materially secure and successful enough in my career, as if our cultural identity were a prized jewel that can only be unearthed in the safest of circumstances — a consequence of colonial and immigrant trauma. In cooking Filipino food after self-deporting, I found comfort, a feeling of home and a newfound appreciation for mom’s efforts at connection in that long-ago kitchen in New Jersey.

My relationship with my mother remains fractured by our family’s decades of struggle while undocumented, complicated by each of our still-healing wounds and dad’s recent death. We don’t always talk, a longtime habit from childhood that has waxed and waned over the years. But these days, now that she is safe and sound back home in the Philippines, eating well with family and friends, and now that I, too, am secure and able to nourish myself, it feels more and more like someday, she and I could be in the same kitchen, cooking a Filipino dish together, and sharing a meal at the same table.

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