I can’t pinpoint exactly when #Brasilipinas deu \u00e0 luz to this imagined community or vice versa. Through the hashtag it\u2019s about a couple of years old, its most pronounced expressions on X-dot-com during international competitions like the Miss Universe pageants or the Olympics where Brazilians and Filipinos stake their affinities and alliances: we\u2019re amigos, siblings, even cousins (\u201cFiliprimos\u201d). A tweet by a Brazilian user threaded points of identification, arguing on a Friday night that “brazil and the philippines are the same country.”1<\/a><\/sup> Included among many things, the “high speed data transfers” between tsismosas and fofoqueiras on the street, being “incredibly catholic countries with the best lgbt community,” and even the proficiency for virality after comparing two widely-viewed comedic videos shot during massive floods. Captioned in the Brazilian counterpart: “em Bel\u00e9m s\u00e3o os humans que passam leptospirose pros ratos kkkkkkkkkk” (In Bel\u00e9m, it’s the humans who pass leptospirosis to the rats hahahaha). Not to mention that people in both Brazil and the Philippines are some of the top social media users in the world, which could account for the rapid cross-contaminations in language birthing Jejemon and Bekinese, Migux\u00eas and Pajub\u00e1, also listed. On the world stage, these little monsters representing both countries like and share wins and resemblances, and combine when fighting against perceived enemies.2<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n Media artist Juan Pablo Garcia Sossa’s critical fabulation of a tropical perspective (“Tropics as a Region and Mindset”) summons the cosmology for these relational knowledges and “creolizing or hybridizing protocols” exhibited in #Brasilipinas3<\/a><\/sup>. As opposed to a dominant way of life, the tropics offer an inter-netting of zones (even “pantropic queer wormhole[s],”4<\/a><\/sup>) that Western universal ideals otherwise deem unnatural, savage, or developing. In writer Gary Zhexi Zhang’s framework, #Brasilipinas could likewise be thought of in egregorical terms: as a figure operating in already-there “ecologies of anthropomorphic entities,” within social media platforms and beyond. In one of his descriptions, “egregores are entities that grow, die, and move through the world by means of group identification, offering their human hosts a representational, narrative vessel to manifest their desires and beliefs.” Taken further, one can easily imagine a wormhole where the economic incentives for valuable attention and labor produced by those from the tropics (as domestic workers, virtual assistants, content creators, etc.) matched those from the West, upsetting a global hegemony. Of course, these are against the wishes of an imperial geography where #Brasilipinas could be turned into other subscription-based models within digital monocultures, from YouTube all the way to national citizenship5<\/a><\/sup>. However, I think of #Brasilipinas in theorist Neferti XM Tadiar’s terms of “vital platforms” of shared life, where our inventive capacities and kinship networks can creatively persist despite the contemporary moment shaped by racial capitalism and disaster6<\/a><\/sup>. What makes #Brasilipinas so beautiful is that it’s unfinished, unrestricted, and undefined, no matter how many words I exhaust and excavate, even if I dug all the way down to the time of the Spanish Empire, where the \u201cexplorer\u201d Ferdinand Magellan sailed in Rio de Janeiro and Cebu. It’s a beauty I not only see but feel, in an excess and in-betweenness that you wouldn’t find even if you dug into the center of the Earth. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Coming to Rio de Janeiro for the first time, I was struck by how the city felt like a mix of favorite provincial places in the Philippines: Bicol, Baguio, Baler. After introducing myself as a Filipino and an artist, I was offered a huge discount for a month-long stay in a single room in Santa Teresa, a place tourists\u2019 blogs and some locals describe as a bohemian neighborhood. Absent of whatever I could remember from “Rio” (2011) and the famous movie “Cidade de Deus” (2002), which I saw more than a decade ago, I had no real expectations of Rio; ever since the pandemic, I’ve lost my natural grip on images, that even a recent documentary I watched by German broadcaster DW on life in the city already escaped my memory. Nonetheless, I was very excited to be there. What has stayed with me for a few months was meeting a Carioca in Paris in the spring before who, in the morning after sharing a bed together, opened his phone’s Google Maps to tell me how he couldn’t believe that we’d met, despite being in opposite hemispheres. He would bring up hemispheres several times in our meetings. But, not enough to match the number of times I’d rewatch a music video by his old band where he sings in refrain: “Our Rio de Janeiro, who would want to leave here? \/ To go where, my friend? \/ Our Rio de Janeiro, why leave this place? \/ Let\u2019s live, let\u2019s love, let\u2019s enjoy,” sprinkled with rhythmic, almost nonsense chants (his words, not mine). <\/p>\n\n\n\n I made a Paulistano best friend who warned me: It’s hard to leave Rio. Rio swallows you for real. I’d spent a month in S\u00e3o Paulo before coming, and he was the main reason why I met so many people and saw so much of his hometown. We’d first linked up online because of a common friend from the Philippines, and they were members of NFT communities who actively minted on the Tezos blockchain. #Brasilipinas was always on our mind, present even in the caption of the Instagram story of my first feijoada. Without his company, I wouldn’t have been confident to go to my first ever baile funk in Santo Amaro when we reunited in Rio. Despite being the so-called most friendly party for tourists, it seemed that many locals (especially those from the middle and upper class) had never set foot in a favela. Santo Amaro was one such place, just 15 minutes uphill by foot from where I was staying, that had DJs playing every Saturday \u2018til Sunday morning. Typical of elastic Brazilian timing, we arrived too early at 1 AM for a party that on Instagram said would start at 10 PM (we made the effort to arrive late, too). Speakers were high, colorful lights swirled the scene, and the sonic atmosphere was more than dense. I was with two Paulistanos, one Londoner, and an Italian, all first-timers experiencing different psychic reactions. One of my friends left early because she said, \u201cit doesn’t feel very joyful, it’s not really my thing\u201d. My Brazilian friend seemed dissociated while his girlfriend was grinding her ass against him. As for myself, I like Carioca funk so much that I can’t stop smiling when I’m dancing to it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n One key difference between Brazil and the Philippines is that in major cities, you’re less likely in Brazil to get away with pulling up your cellphone in public places. I’ve had strangers shout at me, warning me to keep my phone in my pockets otherwise it could get stolen. In Brazil, I’ve developed this habit of holding my phone with my two hands, even when I’ve strategically positioned myself to stand in an isolated corner. 6AM in the baile, it was just me and my Italian friend left, a guy who from the start of the night told me that he deliberately left his phone in his apartment. At the back of the party venue, where drugs were being sold openly and you could see the crowd mixed with dancing armed men holding up their pistolas and AK-47s, I was swelling in a mix of exhaustion and awe. He asked if I wanted to take a picture of the energetic mass that grew in size even as the sun started rising. Initially I said no. But when we walked closer to the exit after deciding to call it a night, I quietly gave in and passed him my phone with the sly idea that if it was in his hands, I wouldn’t get in trouble. Without my consent, what was supposed to be just a landscape shot turned into two selfies where in one of them I got caught in an automatic pout and peace sign combo. Within seconds after sliding the phone back to my pocket, a short man in shorts and flip-flops came up to me and asked for my cellular. He was holding my phone when we looked up close, my face serving actually, as a background for a traficante caught in the shot with his assault rifle. In their terms of governance, the deleted images I would recover from my outmoded android a while later would effectively become bandidos. <\/p>\n\n\n\n My bus ride from Rio to S\u00e3o Paulo was cancelled on the night I was supposed to leave. Around noon, I was on a hike alone in P\u00e3o de A\u00e7ucar when someone told me the news about Opera\u00e7\u00e3o Conten\u00e7\u00e3o. It was a large-scale security operation in the communidades of Zona Norte that, later, would be determined the deadliest police massacre in the history of Brazil7<\/a><\/sup>. At the top of the so-called Sugarloaf Mountain from where I was standing, things appeared business-as-usual with tourists circling shops holding their gelatos and cameras, picture-perfect with crews of little macacos running around and a panoramic view crossing out to the Atlantic Ocean. When I think about Brazil, I cry. It jolts me to a psychic presence activating a singularity of intimacies of life and devastation I\u2019ve been witnessing and carrying in my body\u2014the trauma of the pandemic lockdowns, leaving the Philippines to study in Europe, the brutal war led by the US and its allies, all markers of time and space where I felt I couldn\u2019t feel, that everything and everyone had become so distant. This jolt: almost simultaneously in deep cuts, neither quick nor slow, always curious, never the same as the endless stream of visions crystallized in picture-numbing views; a wormhole. It\u2019s when I tell you what Brazilians have been saying, that they have their own Gaza in their own backyard: with the drones and the smoke and the bombs and the bullets. Or how the Philippines and Brazil had its biggest protests in recent memory on the same day in September, where in Manila more than 200 people, including children, were tear-gassed or arrested or injured or killed in protests against corruption8<\/a><\/sup>. That the two countries suffered military dictatorships almost at the same time, and how our countries buy their murderous weapons from Israel, and how our fruits taste so delicate and sweet. How the rugby boys of budots in Davao City and the funkeiros from the bailes in Rio were stigmatized, if not criminalized, again and again and again before their soundscapes looped into Tiktok celebrity. That the Mexicans and the Indonesians, they tell me we\u2019re cousins too. How in a matter of 24 hours from the airport, I\u2019d been invited to the Whatsapp groupchat of Pinoys in Liberdade, and that my Brazilian Portuguese-language tutor goes overtime and over the top just to teach me his language. I will tell you how I\u2019ve walked stretches of Avenida Paulista chanting \u201cChega de chacina \/ Policia militar na favela e Israel na Palestina\u201d with complete strangers kind enough to translate, wishing I held up a #Brasilipinas sign with calls for justice. That instead I organized a film screening composed of works by Brazilian and Filipino artists at a Pinoy restaurant in SP in less than a week; to tell my friends and kababayans hailing from far-away islands, that under Duterte and Bolsonaro, so many have suffered and died, how I scoff at the Washington Post journalist who once tweeted that under those two violent regimes, \u201clife simply continues to happen.\u201d9<\/a><\/sup> I read this as a statement that affirms this rectilinear, universal life of never-ending war that denies the wayward, pluriversal lives that are put aside, killed, and thrown into the distance. Lives deemed disposable by a \u201clife without end\u201d that denies grief, the kind of grief that when felt, all life itself stops. This life that \u201csimply continues,\u201d picture-perfectly pronounced as in the stark contrasts between Copacana Beach and Zona Norte, the Metro Manila skyway and those beneath it, the North and Global South. If we insist on this continuity, echoed in stock expressions like \u201cbusiness-as-usual\u201d or \u201cthe show must go on,\u201d we miss the other things happening, as if they were mere #ornaments to a subject or production line. To feel all at once is to realize how nothing is as distant as it was designed, and when we begin to make the connections, it opens up new possibilities. <\/p>\n\n\n\n There are several moments that, when I think about Brazil, I cry. It\u2019s been many years since my first visit, a few days in 2023 at the end of January and fresh from Lula’s re-inauguration. I arrived there on a work-related trip\u2014I got to see and dance to samba for the first time, overindulging in the fusion of sounds from twelve different instruments and a joyful, singing crowd. It was summer in S\u00e3o Paulo, and I’d just spent a few weeks in the mountains and beaches in my home country in the Philippines, lucky enough to come back only after my first semester living in Europe. As a graduate student and living abroad and independently for the first time, I’d been going through this crisis of what it actually means to live in Europe, of all places, a place where I was far from family, friends, and food I love; a place I never dreamed of living, and a place where the everyday tiny racisms and fascisms I experience and witness aren’t what I know. Coming from the tropics I felt like living in Europe was never excessive, always exacting. Brazil though, the moment I exited the airport on that first visit I was already bombarded by tall billboards of shirtless models, a minor detail which prompted me to post an Instagram story captioned \u201c10 reasons why brazil is a filipino country.\u201d It was a poetic time to think about my sticky situation, having the knowledge that I still had almost two years left in my European study program and the existential anxiety to it\u2014while a girl I had a short fling with just before leaving Manila was bugging me to send her photos she took of me using my phone. I couldn\u2019t bear to tell her that I didn\u2019t want to send anything anymore, that we\u2019re now literally on opposite sides of the world, and it wouldn\u2019t make sense to have a long-distance thing. @nigokii_ (2021). X. Accessed 16 March 2026. https:\/\/x.com\/niigoki_\/status\/1395924193674420224<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n @softangrygirl (2026). X. Accessed 16 March 2026. https:\/\/x.com\/softangrygirl\/status\/2021943913482006593<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n @Vinncent (2018). X. Accessed 16 March 2026. https:\/\/x.com\/Vinncent\/status\/1049242739387387904<\/a> <\/p>\n\n\n\n Andreia Verd\u00e9lio (2025). \u201cLula wants Brazil to join the Association of Southeast Asian Nations.\u201d Ag\u00eancia Brasil. Accessed 16 March 2026. https:\/\/agenciabrasil.ebc.com.br\/en\/internacional\/noticia\/2025-10\/lula-wants-brazil-join-association-southeast-asian-nations<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n Dominic Gutoman (2025). \u201cREALITY CHECK: Government lies about the violence in Mendiola protest.\u201d Bulatlat. Accessed 16 March 2026. https:\/\/www.bulatlat.com\/2025\/09\/28\/reality-check-government-lies-about-the-violence-in-mendiola-protest\/<\/a> <\/p>\n\n\n\n Christian Jil R. Benitez, Gregory Luke Chwala, and Anita Lundberg (2024). \u201cQueering tropically: Sexuality, indigeneity, decoloniality, spatiality.\u201d eTropic: Electronic Journal of Studies in the Tropics, 23(2), 3. https:\/\/doi.org\/10.25120\/etropic.23.2.2024.4108<\/a> <\/p>\n\n\n\n Filho de S. Paulo (2025). \u201cRio de Janeiro Governor Calls Operation with 121 Deaths a ‘Success’; Families Describe It as a Massacre.\u201d Accessed 16 March 2026. https:\/\/www1.folha.uol.com.br\/internacional\/en\/brazil\/2025\/10\/rio-de-janeiro-governor-calls-operation-with-119-deaths-a-success-families-describe-it-as-a-massacre.shtml<\/a> <\/p>\n\n\n\n Indiolitoraneo1500 (2009). \u201cPerebah e Jair “CARACANTA na CENTRAL” – clipe oficial.\u201d YouTube. Accessed 16 March 2026. https:\/\/youtu.be\/R0I7RQhPIh8?si=w-MF7tSlFcNNLZft<\/a> https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=R0I7RQhPIh8&list=RDR0I7RQhPIh8&start_radio=1 <\/p>\n\n\n\n Juan Pablo Garc\u00eda Sossa (2024). Counter-N, 2023. https:\/\/doi.org\/10.18452\/28182<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n Neferti XM Tadiar (2021). \u201cThresholds.\u201d Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 39(6), 1124. https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1177\/02637758211046959<\/a> <\/p>\n\n\n\n Wiktionary, s.v. \u201cantipodes\u201d. Accessed 25 March 2026. https:\/\/en.wiktionary.org\/wiki\/antipodes<\/a> <\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\nII. <\/h2>\n\n\n\n
III. <\/h2>\n\n\n\n
IV. <\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Fast forward to today, when I daydream about the word antipodes it\u2019s not much about defining distance but for sensing that things and places and people are much closer than we think; as in the Ancient Greek word from which it derives, literally meaning \u201copposite foot.\u201d It\u2019s about combing together details we\u2019re told are small, something Brazilians and Filipinos can proudly do well: make a song and dance about it.<\/p>\n\n\nReferences<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n